Don't Make These Mistakes When Home-Schooling Your Child

The Seven Barriers to Comprehension
that Impede Learning

This is a discovery that is of immense importance to every child, every student, every teacher, and to every parent who has any concerns about their child doing well and living up to its true potential.

Sad to say, in the current educational system, our educators are routinely violating these barriers and thus causing our children unnecessary difficulty in school.

Put another way, certain routine current educational practices are themselves the barriers to the comprehension of what students are attempting to learn.

It is not the students’ fault!

The issue is not “dumb,” “inattentive,” “unmotivated,” “learning disabled” or “lazy” students.

These are erroneous and unfortunate labels put on students by educators who, themselves have caused these apparent conditions or manifestations of student behavior, due to their not knowing there are seven barriers to comprehension and who, by their well-meaning though erroneous teaching practices, inflict these barriers to comprehension into the teaching activity.

This we know, is a contentious statement and one that will earn a testy retort from some. But it is not the teachers’ fault either. They are generally a very committed and truly caring group.

The “fault” lies with the fact that these seven barriers to comprehension had not been discovered and made known till now, and it is an omitted piece of knowledge within our educational establishment.

So, what are these magic silver bullets for student success?

• Knowing the purpose and value of a subject and your intention in studying it. (Unless students see the purpose and value of the subject, they will not pay attention to it, and will become bored, distracted and even destructive to the learning environment if forced to do so.)
• Not having precepts and false or preconceived notions of what is correct or should be. (Ever tried to tell something to someone who thinks they already know all about it?)
• Not suffering absent definitions and misunderstood words, symbols, terms and actions. (When definitions are absent or misunderstood a person is unable to perform, and if forced to do so will likely do so incorrectly.)
• Not suffering by-passed or skipped gradients. (Throwing a child in the deep end of the pool is not the best way to help them learn to swim.)
• Not suffering an imbalance of action and theory or of mass and significance. (Do you know why a ski turns? If you know that piece of theory, learning the action of how to do it is much easier.)
• Lack of appreciation. (Do you know what’s of value and relevance in the subject you are learning or teaching?)
• Failure to recognize and assign correct and relative orders of importance. (So, everything equals everything in importance, eh?)

In our book How to Learn—How to Teach: Overcoming the Seven Barriers to Comprehension we go into these seven subjects in depth. There is a chapter devoted to each barrier.

Plus, there are also a number of exercises for you to do so you get a full and clear understanding of each barrier.

You learn how to recognize them—yes, there are easy ways to recognize when one has occurred on you or you have inflicted one on your child or student.

And we teach you what they are and how to handle them.

Don’t make these mistakes when home-schooling your child!