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What is Unschooling?
Earl Stevens
This article appeared in "At Home In New
England," (#28) reprinted by permission.
copyright © 1994
"What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge,
not knowledge in pursuit of the child."
-- George Bernard Shaw
It is very satisfying for parents to see their children in
pursuit of knowledge. It is natural and healthy for the children,
and in the first few years of life the pursuit goes on during
every waking hour. Bur after a few short years most kids go
to school. The schools also want to see children in pursuit
of knowledge, but the schools want them to pursue mainly the
school's knowledge and devote 12 years of life to doing so.
In his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the
Year award, John Gatto said, "Schools were designed by
Horace Mann. . .and others to be instruments of the scientific
management of a mass population." In the interests of managing
each generation of children, the public school curriculum has
become hopelessly flawed attempt to define education and to
find a way of delivering that definition to vast numbers of
children.
The traditional curriculum assumes that children must be pursued
by knowledge because they will never pursue it themselves. It
was no doubt noticed that, when given a choice, most children
prefer not to do schoolwork. Since, in a school, knowledge is
defined as schoolwork, it is easy for educators to conclude
that children don't like to acquire knowledge. Thus schooling
came to be a method of controlling children and forcing them
to do whatever educators decided was beneficial for them. Most
children don't like textbooks, workbooks, quizzes, rote memorization,
and subject schedules. One can discover this, even with polite
and devoted children, by asking them if they would like to add
more time to their daily schedule. I feel certain that most
will decline the offer.
The work of a school teacher is not the same as that of a homeschooling
parent. In most places a teacher is hired to deliver a ready-made,
standardized, year-long curriculum to 25-30 age-segregated children
who are confined in a building all day. The teacher must use
a standard curriculum, not because it is the best approach for
encouraging any individual child to learn the things that need
to be known, but because it is a convenient way to handle and
track large numbers of kids. The school curriculum is understandable
only in context of bringing administrative order out of daily
chaos, of giving direction to unruly children and to unpredictable
teachers. It is a system that staggers ever onward but never
upward, and every morning we read about the results in our newspapers.
But despite the differences between the school environment
and the home, many parents begin homeschooling under the impression
that homeschooling can be pursued only by following some variant
of the traditional public school curriculum in the home. Preoccupied
with the idea of 'equivalent education,' state and local education
officials assume that we must share their educational goals
and that we homeschool simply because we don't want our children
our kids to be inside their buildings. Textbook and curriculum
publishing companies go to great lengths to assure us that we
must buy their products if we expect our children to be properly
educated. As if this is not enough, there are national, state,
and local support organizations which have practically adopted
the use of the traditional curriculum and the school-in-the-home
image of homeschooling as a de facto membership requirement.
In the midst of all this, it is very difficult for a new homeschooling
family to think that an alternative approach is possible.
One alternative approach in 'unschooling,' also known as 'natural
learning' or 'experienced-based learning.' Several weeks ago
when our Southern Maine Home Education Support Networks announced
a gathering to discuss unschooling we thought a dozen or so
people might attend, but more than 100 adults and children showed
up. For three hours parents took turns talking about their homeschooling
experiences and about unschooling. Many people said afterward
that they left the meeting feeling reinforced and exhilarated,
not because anybody told them what to do or gave them a magic
formula, but because they grew more secure in deciding for themselves
what to do. Sharing ideas about this topic left them feeling
empowered.
Before I talk about what I think unschooling is, I must talk
about what it isn't. Unschooling isn't a recipe, and therefore
it can't be explained in recipe terms. It is impossible to give
unschooling directions for people to follow so that it can be
tried for a week or so to see if it works. Unschooling isn't
a method, it is a way of looking at children and at life. It
encourages trust in both parents and children to find the paths
that work the best for them without depending on educational
institutions, publishing companies, or experts to tell them
what to do.
Unschooling does not mean that parents can never teach anything
to their children, or that children should learn about life
entirely on their own without the help and guidance of their
parents. Unschooling does not mean that parents give up active
participation in the education and development of their children
and simply hope that something good will happen. Finally, since
many unschooling families have definite plans for college, unschooling
does not even mean that kids should never take a course in any
kind of a school.
Then what is unschooling? I can't speak for every person who
uses the term, but I can talk about my own experiences. Our
son Jamie who was 11 at the time of this writing, has never
had an academic lesson, has never been told to read or to learn
mathematics, science, or history. Nobody has told him about
phonics. He has never taken a test or has been asked to study
or memorize anything. When people ask "What do you do?"
My answer is that we follow our interests, and our interests
inevitably lead to science, literature, history, mathematics,
music all the things that have interested people before anybody
thought of them as 'subjects.'
To me a large component of unschooling is grounded in doing
real things, not because we hope they will be good for us, but
because they are intrinsically fascinating. There is an energy
that comes from this that you can't buy with a curriculum. Kids
do real things all day long, and in a supportive home environment
those things invariably tend toward healthy development and
valuable knowledge. It is natural for children to read, write,
play with numbers, learn about society, find out about the pat,
think, wonder and do all those things that we so unsuccessfully
attempt to force upon them in the context of schooling.
While few of us get out of bed in the morning in the mood for
a "learning experience," I hope that all of us get
up feeling in the mood for life. Children always do so unless
they are ill or unless life is made so overly tedious and confusing
for them. children don't love to learn, they love to do, and
in the act of doing they learn. Sometimes the problem for the
parent is that it is rather difficult to determine if anything
important is actually going on. It is a little bit watching
a garden grow. No matter how closely we examine the garden it
is difficult to verify that anything is happening at that particular
moment. But as the season progresses we can see that much has
happened, quietly and naturally. children pursue life, and,
in doing so, pursue knowledge. They need adults to trust in
the inevitability of this very natural phenomenon and to offer
what assistance they can.
Parents come to our unschooling discussions with many questions
bout fulfilling state requirements. The ask: "How do unschoolers
explain themselves to the state when they fill our the paperwork
every year?" "If you don't use a curriculum, what
do you say?" "What about required record keeping?"
To my knowledge unschoolers have had no problems with the Maine
Department of Education over matter of this kind. This is a
time when even many public school educators are trying to get
away from the traditional curriculum, seeking alternatives to
fragmented learning and drudgery.
When I fill out the required paperwork for homeschooling under
Maine's Chapter 130, I briefly describe in the space provided,
what we are currently doing and the general intent of what we
plan to do for the coming year. I don't include long lists of
books or describe any of the step-by-step skills associated
with a curriculum. For example, under English/Language Arts,
I mentioned that Jamie's best 'subject' is the English Language.
I said a few words about our family library. I mentioned that
Jamie reads a great deal and uses our Macintosh computer for
whatever writing he happens to do. finally I said, "Since
he already does so well on his own we have decided not to introduce
language skills as a subject to be studied. It seems to make
more sense for us to leave him to his own continuing success."
Homeschooling is a unique opportunity for each family to do
whatever makes sense for the growth and development of their
children. If we have a reason for using a curriculum and traditional
school materials, we are free to use them. They are not a universally
necessary or required component of our homeschooling programs,
either educational or legally.
I don't mean to suggest, with everything I have said here,
that using a curriculum or a textbook or taking an examination
is some kind of horrible educational error. But I do believe
that allowing these things to dominate and to be the defining,
driving force behind the education of a child is a mistake both
in the school and in the home. As I have mentioned, even educators
are beginning to question the preplanned, year-long-curriculum
as an outdated, 19th century educational tool. There is no reason
that families should be less flexible and innovative than schools.
Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's mentor and friend, said, "I
am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of
education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition
that every child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think.
Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more
and better, if less slowly. Let him come and go freely, let
him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself,
instead of sitting indoors at a little round table while a sweet-voiced
teacher suggest that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks,
or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw
trees in flower pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial
associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop
independent ideas out of actual experiences. " Homeschooling
uniquely affords children an opportunity to step away from systems
and methods and to develop independent idea out of actual experiences,
where the child is truly in pursuit of knowledge, not the other
way around.
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