There’s a new term that is getting some publicity lately. It’s “unschooling” which means learning that involves no formal schooling. There is no curriculum.  No lesson plans. No guidance about what to learn.  The children decide what they want to learn and how they will learn it. Â
There was an article on unschooling in The Tennessean last weekend:
Unschool parents: Kids can be own best teachers
educators fear free-form style leaves learning incomplete
It’s midday on a Friday, and 9-year-old Miyana flips through a book about dragons before her attention turns to making Valentine’s Day cards at the kitchen table.
Her sister, Aeyah, 7, across the table, expertly threads a needle and sews a tiny cape for a clothespin superhero.
While other children their age are quietly sitting in a classroom, the Fisher-Miller children have the freedom to pass the time without order and doing as they please in their pursuit of knowledge.
Younger brother Ocea, almost 2, drops marbles into the bell of a trumpet. “He’s using it as a funnel,” says their mother, Suzanne Fisher-Miller. Brother Khai, 5, plays noisily with two friends, the back door slamming shut as they run in and out.
What may look like bedlam is a radical style of home schooling that the Fisher-Miller parents think is best for their children: unschooling. It’s child-directed or child-led learning. Some call it relaxed home schooling. Topics aren’t learned until a child expresses curiosity, and they’re dropped as soon as the child is ready to move on.
Their curriculum is whatever interests them in life. There are no textbooks in their East Nashville home, nor lesson plans, schedules or tests.
The fact that topics are “dropped as soon as the child is ready to move on” is a little sad to me. Does that mean that children are never pushed to stick to something they’ve started?  I probably never would have learned anything about chemistry or biology in such an environment. I don’t think it is a bad thing to insist that children learn about topics they’re not particularly interested in. I’ve actually BECOME interested in things after being made to study something I had no interest in initially. My initial reaction is that unschooling limits a child’s learning. The unschooled child is limited to whatever experience he/she has gained thus far in life.
Their parents say this unconventional style of learning shows respect for their children as full human beings who can learn lessons from everyday life.
Children, they feel, don’t need to master reading or multiplication tables until they’re ready. These families reject the structure of formal schooling that, they say, crushes creativity and curiosity.
Yes, formal schooling CAN crush creativity and curiosity. However, it certainly isn’t a given, and in high quality schools with high quality teachers, it doesn’t happen. In fact, creativity, curiosity and individuality are encouraged and supported in good schools.
But some education experts — and even fellow home schoolers — feel this free-form style could lead to gaps in learning. They are afraid children do nothing all day or develop strengths but ignore their weaknesses.
‘Trusting your children’
When Miyana asked her mom where carrots came from, the family took a field trip to a farm. Learning often emerges in their childish games, like the time Miyana created play people from orange peels and started figuring out how many of them would have to share if she only had three forks.
Her mother, however, did not turn that moment into a structured math lesson about division. Rather, she let it unfold at Miyana’s pace.
Twenty-five Nashville-area families are on an unschooling list-serve group, but many more families in the area unschool, perhaps as many as 300, said Fisher-Miller, who established a Nashville unschoolers group last year.
“It’s trusting your children to learn for themselves,” the 33-year-old mother said.
“Learning comes from the inside. You cannot make a child want to learn,” she said. “In today’s school system, it’s not a love of learning but it’s ‘Let’s push facts down your throat and have you regurgitate it.’ The best thing I can give my child is to love to learn.”
I agree that there is way too much emphasis on learning facts for high stakes testing in formal schooling. You can’t FORCE a child to learn, and since our base of knowledge is growing by leaps and bounds daily, the best thing you can do is to foster a child’s natural love of learning. However, I don’t see how learning and a JOY for learning can be accomplished with no structure at all.
Author Resa Steindel Brown, an educator and national expert on child-directed learning, said now, more than ever, parents should explore alternative education styles to match the fast-paced world. Youngsters are children of the Information Age, a time of technology and fast media, she said.
“The way our children take in information is much faster and involves more of their sensory perception — think TV, the Internet and Podcasts,” Brown said. “The way they pursue information is different from sitting in a classroom with a book reading it from front to back.”
Is it best for children?
Some educators expressed concern that this free-form style of education isn’t good for children.
“If unschooling is curiosity-led, not all children are question-askers,” said Cindy Benefield, who oversees home schooling for the state Education Department. “If they’re focused on one area, the child may know everything about gardening but won’t know multiplication tables.”
“It’s risky to put all the eggs in the child’s basket,” said Mary Jane Moran, an assistant professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, where she instructs future teachers of pre-kindergarten to third-graders. She has not studied unschooling.
“If children are the only lead horses, then there is no educational map through which they are led in a purposeful way,” she said. “It’s random starts and stops. Therefore, there is less opportunity for deep learning.”
It may be better to have a negotiated partner ship between a child and and a parent who knows the child’s needs and abilities, Moran said.
“You can make curriculum come alive and make it more relevant and tie it in to real-world experiences without throwing out structure,” said Terry Weeks, 55, a professor of educational leadership at Middle Tennessee State University and the national teacher of the year in 1988 when he was at Central Middle School in Murfreesboro.
Retired Metro schoolteacher Clata Miller is a grandmother of unschoolers and feels torn over the learning philosophy.
“I would be doing things differently, but I can’t say what they’re doing is not going to be successful,” said Miller, the grandmother of Miyana, Aeyah, Ocea and Khai.
The Franklin woman would prefer a more planned and thought-out learning environment for her grandchildren but respects the hands-on approach their mother takes to tap into the children’s interests.
“But as an educator, I feel you have to use your knowledge and experience as an adult to bring to them the things they need,” Miller said.
What about gaps in learning, worries Tina Bean, a former Metro schoolteacher who home-schools her 7-, 9- and 11-year-olds.
“It’s fine to cater to their interests somewhat, but sometimes you have to say, ‘Sorry, you have to do this, too,’ ” said Bean, 39, who lives in Antioch. “My 11-year-old, given his druthers, would never do spelling and always do math.”
The leader of a Montessori school, which also follows a child-centered philosophy but with some structure and limits, explains society’s reluctance to accept unschooling this way:
“I think that’s because people ultimately do not value children or trust them,” said Sherry Knott, executive director of Abintra Montessori School in West Meade and an admirer of unschooling.
People don’t value children or trust them? That’s ridiculous.  Not valuing or trusting children has nothing to do with choosing more structured learning. Rather, it is an understanding that children need direction and guidance. We don’t emerge from the womb fully cognizant of what we want and need in life. Aimless and purposeless meandering around topics and skills doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests.
“They do not think children are capable, when in reality they are,” Knott said.
School systems rejected
Families often turn to unschooling in rejection of what they see as a one-size-fits-all school system they say crushes curiosity and creativity. Advanced children get bored waiting for classmates to catch up, while slower learners can fall between the cracks.
They also shun traditional home schooling because it follows the same mold of telling children what they need to be taught and how to learn it.
“The object of school is to make everyone come out the same. That whole concept offends me,” said Chelsea Gary of Franklin, who is unschooling an 18-year-old stepson, Chris, and her other two children, ages 3 and 5. There’s nothing a school system could do to persuade her to enroll them, she said.
Chris, nestled in an oversized red beanbag in his bedroom, said he hated reading until his parents pulled him out of school in California in December 2005 so he could direct his own education at home.
“I’ve learned more in the last year than I ever did in public school,” said Chris, who spent the first few months “deschooling,” getting used to his educational freedom.
A giant TV, shelves of CDs and a nearby computer loaded with video games are easy distractions in the typical teen-age bedroom. But Chris said he’s not tempted because he’s more interested in what he’s reading, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things.
“Topics I don’t like, I skim it,” he said. “It’s kind of a cool idea. I focus on things I want to use in life.”
Life, he hopes, will mean either being a rock star or chef — that’s why he spends the afternoons working at a Panera Bread cafe or rehearsing in a heavy metal band. He’s not sure if he’ll go to college.
“I want my children to grow up retaining all their creativity and interests they were born with,” his stepmother said. ” I can’t imagine someone crushing that out of them.”
It’s not a new idea
Unschooling, while still an underground movement, has been around as long as modern-day home-school education — and some say as long as humans.
Each family has its own approach. For the Fisher-Millers, there’s an emphasis on nutrition and money management.
“Honestly, what do children really need to know when they graduate from high school — to balance their checkbook, change the oil in the car and check the tire pressure, real-life things,” said Suzanne Fisher-Miller. “I think those things are just as important as history, math and reading.”
Today’s unschooling parents tend to have college educations. Fisher-Miller has a high-school diploma and started a math degree.
They are often two-parent households in which one parent stays home.
“I thought I would never be a stay-at-home mom. I’d been a photographer and artist,” Fisher-Miller said.
Her husband, Brian Miller, too, put his photography career — and its long hours — on hold and took a pay cut to work at a Wild Oats Marketplace so he could be home with the family by 3:30 p.m.
At home, they practice “strewing,” leaving books, games and other interesting items in their children’s path for them to discover.
Isn’t that just a roundabout way of directing” their children’s learning rather than letting the children determine their own “interesting items”? Plus, it is inherently dishonest. Instead of showing a child an interesting book and being upfront and saying, “I think this is a great book. Would you like to read it with me?” they’re “strewing” it in their path. I think it’s likely the kids see through such a ruse.
That’s not to say there is no parental involvement.
Rather, these parents said, they must be totally aware of the needs of their children and able to find resources to seek out information, whether that’s the local librarian, an entomologist at a nearby college or the grocer who can explain an exotic fruit.
To critics who say their children are missing out on socialization, they say there’s plenty of time to make friends outside the home, whether it’s visits to museums and the zoo with other home-schoolers, weekly gatherings of home-schoolers at a park or tae kwon do lessons, they said.
“Instead of being shoved into a class with people the same age, they can choose to be around all kinds of different people,” Gary said.
Unschooling parents talk about respect for their children, who in the outside world are often treated, wrongly they believe, as “lesser humans” without much say in things.
They trust their children to gain the knowledge they need within their own time frame.
“Elijah hates writing, coloring, and painting,” unschooling mother Amanda Slater, 30, of Hermitage said about her 5-year-old.
“It’s never a thing he chooses to do. I assume at some point, he’ll want to. I don’t like children being forced into something they’re not ready for,” she said.
“Elijah’s not writing now, and that would get him in trouble in school,” Slater said. “School wouldn’t wait for him to read or write until 8 or 9 or let him do multiplication and division in kindergarten, when he’s ready for it.”
Likes books, doesn’t read
Miyana loves books. The pile in the living room. The stacks they check out of the library. The hundreds of shelves full at the bookstore.
However, the 9½-year-old doesn’t read yet.
In an unschooling household, that’s no reason to sweat.
“What’s important to us is that she learn at her own pace,” her mother said. “We feel that the joy of reading is just as important as learning to read, and we don’t want to force anything.”
That kind of pace would not be tolerated in formal schooling, she said.
The brown-haired girl has an extensive vocabulary and can read some words but other times turns certain letters around — like “b” and “d” — because of dyslexia, her mother said.
“When she does start reading, she’ll be reading way above her grade level,” Fisher-Miller said. That’s been the case with other unschoolers who were delayed readers, she said.
Take the now-adult children of author Brown, a home-school program director in California who raised her children to learn at their pace at home.
Her oldest son did not start reading until he was 9, and by the time he was 11 he was taking electronics courses at a local college, Brown said. By 14, he was a computer system administrator for Warner Bros.
“The age of normalcy to read is between 3 and 9,” said Abintra Montessori Executive Director Sherry Knott. You’ll find 9-year-olds in public and private schools who aren’t reading yet either, she said.
But assistant professor Moran said a 9- or 10-year-old who is not reading yet could be at risk.
“There are sensitive periods of development when children are open to new kinds of information,” Moran said. “If a child is going on 12 and finally comes around to reading and everyone else has been reading for four or five years, she’s disadvantaged academically and socially.”
By the time the Fisher-Miller children reach high school age, their parents believe they’ll be learning completely on their own.
“A lot of parents would get nervous. ‘Are they learning enough or getting enough?’ I don’t have that anxiety,” Fisher-Miller said. “I really believe in my kids.”
I hope things work out well for both Fisher-Miller and her children. I have to admit, though, I have my doubts. I hurt for 9 1/2 -yer old Miyuna who “loves books” and yet doesn’t have someone who will show her how to read them. Her enjoyment of books lacks dimension and depth.
Unschoolers are fortunate that one of the parents can afford to stay home full time and provide the opportunities for their children to learn at their own pace and about their own interests. The vast majority of families don’t have that luxury.Â
To me, it seems like an enormously self-centered style of learning. The children are essentially being told that only the topics and subjects THEY are personally interested in are worthy of being studied. Their world is immediately narrowed.
Yes, there are some awful schools. There are some awful teachers. Some schools and teachers stifle children’s innate curiosity and enthusiasm. There are some absolutely wonderful schools and teachers, too. I’ve worked in public schools in several different states for over 25 years, and the truly awful schools and teachers are definitely in the minority. Don’t “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Just because there are bad schools and teachers, don’t give up on the enormous benefits that are available via formal and guided learning.
And finally, I think unschoolers sell their children short. Children enjoy being challenged in their learning.  Through reading about and learning about things that might not be of particular or immediate interest to them - or topics they were unaware of previously - children expand their schema and realize that they ARE treasured as capable learners - and that they are not so intellectually and emotionally fragile that they can’t accept guidance and direction from their parents and/or teachers. They also learn to value the abilities, knowledge and understanding of others. They recognize that others (students, teachers, parents) have insights that can be meaningful or helpful to them. This type of learning builds genuine self-esteem.
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February 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I think unschooling works because children are naturally inquisitive, and naturally want to learn. The unnatural structure of school - which is more concerned with creating obedient dog-like working-class drones - destroys children’s natural inquisitiveness.
Thanks,
Scott Hughes
Education Forums
TMS: Wow! All I can say, Scott, is you must’ve had some awful experiences with schooling. I agree that children ARE naturally inquisitive and naturally want to learn. However, I strongly disagree that school destroys that natural inquisitiveness and tries to create obedient dog-like drones. YIKES!
February 3rd, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Carol,
You bring up some really good points. As an unofficial unschooler myself, I felt that this article didn’t explain unschooling very well at all. The very things you question are the things that make it seem like unschooled kids just “do whatever” and the parents stay out of their way.
Sometimes it’s like that, but most of the time not. And unschooling looks different in every family, so it’s impossible to generalize what goes on.
I posted about this article on my blog, and I addressed many of the things that you pointed out.
http://justenough.wordpress.com/2007/02/02/unschooling-in-the-news-sort-of/
You said a couple of other things that I hadn’t thought of that I think are really insightful, and the Tennessee article did a very poor job of explaining.
You brought up strewing. The concept behind this is to just “leave things around the house” and cross your fingers that a kid will pick it up and learn about it. I, as an unschooler, think that’s a lame idea. And it defeats the whole concept of unschooling. Sure, keep things *in* the house that may not interest your kid now, and might later, but don’t stick them somewhere and hope and pray they pick it up. If I think on of the people in my family will like something, I show it to them. If they are interested, awesome. If they aren’t, awesome. They now know it’s there if they change their mind later. Basically, I’m not attached to the idea that my kids have to do something NOW, or ELSE. But on the other hand, I have a list of things I think are interesting and important in this world to learn, so I tell them. And show them. And bring things up. They take what they can when they are ready. I bring a LOT of things to their attention, I just don’t force them to learn it. Well, unless it’s something that is hurting someone else or themselves. Or an emergency. Or something like that. I mean, I’m an unschooler, so if life demands that the kiddos learn something, I’m not gonna sit back and just let them touch an outlet with a fork. Jeesh.
Back to strewing, there are some kids who really don’t like their parents trying to tell them what to learn and when - especially if they are really sick of school and are just starting out homeschooling. Strewing, or in other words filling the house with a bunch of interesting things without making a big deal about it, is one possible way to get a reluctant learner to pick something up when nobody’s looking. Then, as the kids get more comfortable with the idea that mom isn’t trying to FORCE them to learn, but rather wants to show them cool things and help them, then it becomes less of a strewing thing and more of a cooperative thing. And to some degree a habit - kid knows mom likes to fill the house with goodies. What could possibly be next?
As for unschoolers selling their children short - well, from how this article portrays unschoolers, I can see hwhy you’d think this. But, in the real world where unschoolers actually live, kids are pretty darn happy. So, I don’t know, seems to work from what I’ve seen. And the unschoolers I know, and who I know of, have gone to do amazing things, even if that amazing thing is simply doing what they love and enjoying life to its fullest.
Lastly, a question, how is unschooling any more self-centered than regular schooling? I’m not quite sure I understand that. Isn’t all learning self-centered and personal?
In any case, even if unschooling kids are totally screwed, there really aren’t that many of them. Far less than there are kids who are involved in gangs, and are otherwise destroying their lives. So, in my opinion, even if unschooled kids aren’t going to end up doing the 9-5 grind and don’t end up millionaires, as long as they grow up happy, and like who they are, really, how horrible can it be?
Anyway, hope this helps. Keep blogging!
February 7th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I don’t understand the fixation on unschoolers and homeschoolers from those in public education. We are only around 2 percent of the school age population. Why not ignore us altogether and work on fixing the horrendous problems at many public schools? And gangs. I liked that point. Why not dissect the lives of single parents who don’t give their children any kind of support through the school year. Why not write a piece about parents who choose work over spending time with their families. Many adults choose to watch television in the evenings rather than go over their children’s homework. They don’t attend teacher/parent meetings. They drink too much or do drugs. They choose not to work, or have too many children with several dads. Or they choose to not financially support their children with different moms. Are these problem parents fewer in number than the parents of unschoolers? If not, why not go after them instead?
My guess is because going after certain segments of society makes one look mean or insensitive or worse. And the worst parents, and I suspect more than 2 percent of parents in public schools are letting their children down, are unlikely to be moved by logical argument. Some people also want to strike out at those people who do not respect the public school system and have the resources to remove their children from them.
So you are arguing to people like yourselves, about a tiny fraction of parents different from yourselves, while avoiding the real problem of parents who don’t bother to give any thought to their children’s education.
TMS: You reinforced what I mentioned in the post. There appears to be a lot of hostility from unschoolers towards regular schooling, and I don’t understand that - unless you personally had an enormously negative experience with schooling. However, I did NOT show any hostility in my two posts about unschooling. What I wrote mostly dealt with trying to understand why someone would decide to unschool. Until a couple weeks ago I had never heard of “unschooling.” Once I learned about it, I was curious and so I read more about it. I write about what interests me. That, of course, is only a tiny fraction of the time that I spend working within public education on the issues that are there. As I wrote before, it’s the parents’ decision about how to raise their children. However, I think it mostly is an over-reaction to problems, and I think unschoolers do a disservice to their children. My opinion. I won’t lose sleep over it one way or the other.
You mentioned a “fixation” with unschoolers and homeschoolers. I sure wouldn’t describe it as a fixation. However, as a person who has invested my entire career in the field of education, I am certainly interested in all aspects of it.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Posting doesn’t easily allow for nuance, so maybe I sound harsh towards your original essay. I know you’re not saying we should do away with unschooling. But you do come down on the side suspicious of unschooling. My wayward point was that at least unschooling parents take an interest in their children’s education and health and in pretty much all areas of their lives. And because they are reasonably sane people, they are easier to dissect than say parents who aren’t involved in their children’s education at all. I’d say that uninvolved parents are a bigger threat to their children’s future than are the rare parents who “strew” classic books and car manuals around the house.
TMS: I would wholeheartedly agree with you on that point. Teaching in a public school, I see every single day the results of parents who are not involved enough in their children’s lives. I would be interested in learning more about unschooling from the children’s point of view ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Well-said. I don’t doubt that there are children for whom unschooling would work remarkably well for. I can say with certainty, though, that I would not have been one of them. I needed the structure of public school, and I’m grateful to have had my 12 years of public school. Regarding some of the comments, I think it makes sense for you to be concerned about unschooling–my guess is that you wouldn’t have gotten into education if you didn’t care about children, and your interest in homeschooling and unschooling likely reflects that care. I’m just speculating, of course, but hey…
TMS: I loved school. I would have hated not being able to go to school and learn with my friends. For some children, apparently, unschooling works.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
February 7th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I really do agree with Tammy that this article does not really get a lot of the nuances of unschooling. I can totally see why people who are not familiar with it and have not tried it would have some concerns. It is really hard to summarize an educational philosophy into a 1-2 page article!
I actually tend to write a bit about the issues that you bring up on the Life Without School blog as they are things that I am always questioning and reassessing and trying to figure out the answer to…
Who’s In Charge?
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2006/12/whos_in_charge.html
Knowing When to Push
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2006/09/knowing_when_to.html
I actually did really enjoy school too, which is one reason why I think that I enjoy unschooling…I love learning and it is so much fun to learn with my kids and see where it takes me. That for me is the main reason that I homeschool. It is fun.
Thanks for your take on unschooling…I agree that it can seem strange at first without seeing how it is done (of course also realizing that no two unschoolers are alike!)
February 8th, 2007 at 6:52 am
My family unschools our two children, who are 5 and 7. When I read articles and public-school oriented perspectives on unschooling, it makes me shake my head in frustration. Please find some unschooling families and actually get to know them before evaluating this method of raising children.
There are important thinkers in many fields that are all saying similar things–Alfie Kohn is railing against the reward/punishment system of raising children, Richard Louv speaks about nature defecit disorder, Ivan Illich, many years ago, spoke out about the institutionalization of our whole culture, psychologists are prescribing record levels of anti-depressants to children, and families are breaking up, overscheduling themselves and eating foods our great grandparents wouldn’t recognize. Children need to be in an environment that doesn’t dispense food, information and entertainment from machines. I believe that we will see all of these things come home to roost eventually.
If you pay attention to the most current research and thinking in areas of medicine, psychology, environmental awareness, nutrition and child development, you will be hard pressed to make the case that our public school system reflects any modern scientific thinking. I am simply not convinced that our school system is creating a healthy population of prepared and well-adjusted adults, and I’m not willing to take the risk that my children will miss reaching their potential.
Children need to have unstructured time to play outside. Their play is critical to their development of creative thought and healthy bodies. They need to be involved in their food choices and the preparation of food. They need to be nurtured by their family and by a secure social community that involves people of ALL AGES. They need to be able to sit and read a book uninterrupted, for an entire afternoon if they choose. They need to be able to delve deeply into their learning, rather than working according to arbitrary bells and schedules. They need to view learning as something that happens all the time, all year round, rather than something that is limited to a building or specific time. Children learn better when they actually do things, when they are actively discovering and experiencing the world first-hand. They need to be able to build upon their prior knowledge and work at a natural pace. When they are on fire in their pursuit of figuring out multiplication, they need to be allowed to go as far as they can. Children do not grow evenly in all directions–they ebb and flow in all areas of development. Any given group of children of the same age includes a wide range of abilities and talents. Howard Gardner delineates 7 different types of intelligences, yet most classrooms can only accomodate 2 to 3 of them.
As someone who ACTUALLY unschools, someone who knows other unschoolers, someone with a degree in Education and experience in the public schools, I feel completely content and blessed to be able to offer my children this experience. I understand how unlikely it might seem to schooled teachers that a child would be willing and even excited about learning, but my children have never been offered any other incentive to learn other than the complete joy of knowing something. Visit my blog to see some of the hands-on projects and activities that my kids are involved in.
Also, it is incorrect to state that unschoolers don’t provide any structure for their children. Granted, not all children need adults to structure their time, but all of the unschool parents that I know are aware of their children’s needs and are pretty good about providing structure for them. Our community is full of cooperative learning groups, our local science museum offers classes, I myself teach creative writing classes, opportunities abound for unschooled children to pursue stuctured learning, which they do.
As with any other new trend, I understand that it will take some time before folks actually understand unschooling. Enlightenment is slow in spreading. At one time people thought that the world was flat and that the sun circled the earth. Right now the mainstream culture believes that children need to spend their childhood at a desk. I think that with any other type of learning, learning about unschooling will take more research about ACTUAL unschool families. You’ve got to get some first-hand experience before you can draw any conclusions. And, even then, you are just drawing a conclusion about that particular family. No one is in any position right now to draw generalized conclusions about the unschool population in America, yet so many people are reading articles in the mainstream media and doing just that.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:26 am
The term ‘unschooling’ is not really used in the UK, as the term ‘autonomous education’ is preferred. My three children are autonomously educated, and, from what I can discern, the majority of home educators in the UK choose to educate autonomously. I posted recently on my blog about the strict curriculum which I believe is partially driving this trend. You can read it at http://textualtangents.blogspot.com/2007/02/shakespeare-in-education.html
It was in response to a BBC news article on curriculum changes concerning the teaching of Shakespeare.
I would agree with some of the other comments that the article you respond to doesn’t do a great job of describing either the ‘unschooling’ philosophy or its practice. A truly wonderful book called Free Range Education by Terri Dowty might give you a better idea of how autonomous education works, and how it varies from family to family. Each chapter is written by a different family basically describing how they spend their days and what their educational philosophy is. From what I can remember, one of the chapters is written by someone who was autonomously educated and is now an adult, as well as some short comments from children currently being educated autonomously.
Hope this is of interest!
February 8th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Hi again,
I forgot to leave a link to my blog: http://www.tortesianschoolmarm.blogspot.com
And to clarify why we are homeschooling, it is not necessarily a moving away from public schools as much as it is a moving TOWARDS a more healthy lifestyle. Learning, living and life go hand in hand for us.
Thanks for listening and sharing your thoughts. I’ve enjoyed reading the variety of perspectives.
February 8th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Hey, I just stumbled onto your site from the Education Carnival and I’d like to address some of your points.
As an unschooler who’s “all grown up” (mostly) I can tell you that there are definitely some children for whom this works amazingly well and for whom formal education was intrinsically distressfully constraining. I’m now pursuing my PhD (in molecular medicine), and I can tell you that, where I’m at now, there is nothing so valuable as those unschooling skills (e.g. acquiring new information with a minimum of outside help, or knowing how to find the correct person to teach if that is what the situation requires). Without being too obnoxiously cocky (I hope!), I can tell you that unschooling can build incredible self-esteem with respect to oneself as a learner.
I think you misunderstand unschooling as limiting. The most one can say impartially is that unschooling will tend to produce students learning what most interests them and that formal schooling will tend to produce students learning what most interests their instructor. You assume that the latter is greater than the former, and I do not agree. The foundation of unschooling philosophy (if I may be so bold) is that children have a natural insatiable desire for knowledge, and an amazing capacity for acquiring it. In general, any one teacher couldn’t hope to keep ahead of it enough to teach them everything they will want- the best we can do is help them acquire the skills to teach themselves (and assist where we can and our help is desired).
For the record, I do agree that it can be wise (occasionally) to encourage a child to finish what they start. As a kid I was *strongly encouraged* to finish any sort of class that I had signed up for… I think if I had been downright miserable with an activity my parents wouldn’t have hesitated to let me choose to leave, but I also knew my parents wouldn’t be too likely to pay for another class of that type (at least not anytime soon).
You say you would not have chosen to learn certain things you came to like… but I think that you may also be like most people I know, and that there are things you would have learned better and enjoyed more if you had come to them on your own terms. Frankly, I can’t see how learning, and a JOY for learning, can possibly be optimally encouraged in a setting that ignores what a child is interested in.
I think that feeling thrilled by delightful bits of knowledge or ways of thinking and wanting to share that with a child underlies the very best teaching. That can certainly occur in a structured setting, but it is not exactly the dominant MO for teachers in most schools.
To me, a large part of the difference between formal education and unschooling is how the parent/teacher/learning facilitator views their role and status relative to the child. If you view the child as a fellow learner, who you may be able to assist, you naturally tend toward the unschooling philosophy.
Incidentally, it does seem to me that what you suggest implies you *don’t* trust or value children’s thoughts on what is most important to them… I suspect this is not truly the case, however you are advocating a system whereby You The Educator are supposed to be determining What is Learned, How it is Learned, When it is Learned and (to a large degree) Why it is Learned. To an unschooler, this sounds completely, UTTERLY incompatible with trusting and valuing a child (we aren’t talking about trusting them not to eat too many cookies or valuing them as precious little dolls… we are talking about trusting them as individual persons, who have valid ideas about what they want to learn, and that we should respect their opinions, at least in as much as we do so for other adults).
For the record, if you do not intend to be hostile, I for one think
“I hurt for 9 1/2 -yer old Miyuna who “loves books†and yet doesn’t have someone who will show her how to read them.”
sounds… confused at best. If her house is like virtually every homeschooling house I’ve seen, OF COURSE Miyuna has someone who will show her how to read them- the very second she asks. Just because she will not have someone drill her endlessly in phonics does not mean someone would not show her how to read.
Miyuna may want to delay learning because she loves to be read aloud to, or she may simply want to read and still find she’s too easily distracted for it right now. The point, from an unschooling perspective, is that she undoubtedly *is* (or *will be*) capable of learning when she so desires, and she has her reasons and we should respect them.
I do tend to suffer from the delusion that everyone would be better off given more freedom. This probably isn’t as true as my intuition says, but I will maintain that unschooling is intrinsically more broadly adaptable than modern classroom education. My thinking is that you can always ask for more structure. Just try asking for more freedom in most of today’s classrooms. Unschooling isn’t about throwing out formal, structured education. Unschooling is about providing additional options to formal, structured education. The fact that young children don’t often choose those routes should maybe tell you something important.
February 18th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
April 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm