Home schooling has a new name, or at least a new variety: unschooling, notable for the absence of textbooks.
When the conference [about unschooling] is over, Ms. Laricchia will return to collaborating on building an online business with her son, Michael, 13. Her daughter, Lissy, 16, is a photographer who was recently invited to participate in a show in New York. The oldest child, Joseph, has turned 18 and is no longer being actively unschooled. His mom happily admits that the change has had almost no effect on his day-to-day life.
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
It started with John Holt, Summerhill, and the Sudbury schools. I’ve been in the unschooling community for near 20 years now, and my 14yo has been unschooled his whole life. It’s not news…and it’s good….and there’s quite a bit of room to do it badly.
This sounds great to me. I wish I had been deschooled. I’m still working on getting rid of school’s effects on me
I agree with aretae. The “unschooling” movement is older than the modern “homeschooling” movement.
I first heard about “unschooling” in the mid-1980s, when the hugely influential leader of the unschooling movement, John Holt, was still living and publishing the magazine he founded, “Growing without schooling.”
The Colfax family that put “homeschooling” on the national radar screen when three of their sons were admitted to Harvard in the mid 1980s were actually “unschoolers” and followers of John Holt.
To elaborate a bit on the doing things badly portion…
Unschooling, as originally conceived, relies on the natural curiosity of kids along with relatively supportive parents, in order to allow kids to learn what/when/how they want, rather than being force-fed mounds and mounds of junk that they will use precisely never, while being taught that learning is a chore, obedience is good, and whatever propaganda is in season this year.
Advantages for time available to live: HUGE.
Advantages for avoiding horrid school social world: HUGE.
Advantages for learning to be self-directed: HUGE.
However, there’s also a trap hidden in there.
Unschooling success relies on an environment wherein the social group finds learning interesting, useful, and common. I’m increasingly (Never 20 years ago, sometimes now) seeing folks who are “unschoolers” but not active in giving their kids opportunities to learn.
Our unschooled kids know every museum in the city of Chicago…every animal at the zoo, and most of the trees in the arboretum. They do photography, read regularly, and count butterflies for the botanical society. They cook, they enter robotics competitions and learn to program them, and they play sports.
They play online games (Shidonni, this week for the young ones, WoW and Modern Warfare 2 for the older one), they garden, they do puzzles. They visit the other unschoolers in the area frequently. They have, in short, been exposed to A LOT of options, and then largely left to pursue them. If you’re an unschooler, this is your job…especially while the kids are young. Make stuff available to them…so they can choose things they like. While it might not be the thing you like, it will almost certainly be something that they are into.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen families who call themselves “radical unschoolers” (not all radical unschoolers fit this model, but some clearly do)
who don’t aggressively pursue additional opportunities for the kids.
Their kids don’t sign up for classes…the parents don’t spend an hour a day looking for interesting/new things for the kids to do…they operate in what they conceive of as the “natural” state of being. Parents work, kids play however they like. But it doesn’t match natural mostly. Mostly, natural is that kids see how the parents work, not that parents leave to work and come back at night. Kids can participate when they’re ready, and the social unit and the work unit are highly interrelated.
Might it work? It might. In my experience, most of the time I see kids who have never found something they REALLY wanted to learn to do, and so they are highly angsty, unhappy kids who grow up not really knowing how to start learning something new…kids who want entertainment…and are almost as low on self-directed activity as the schooled kids are.
They’ve had too much time alone (or with JUST family) and not enough with other kids…they’ve had too much time with TV and video games…systems designed to play on your brain-addictions. And they’ve not DONE enough. Is it worse than schooling? Perhaps they haven’t learned the bad things school teach…but they haven’t learned the self-reliance and self-directedness that most unschooling teaches either.
Unschooling takes lots of work on the parents’ part to prime the kids to learn. Without that recognition, there’s a lot of room for failure.
Hey Seth,
We’ve been unschooling for the past 8 years now. John Holt was a great inspiration to us, as well as Sandra Dodd and John Taylor Gatto (read “The Underground History of American Education”).
It works well most of the time. Happy to chat more about it sometime
Alex
Unschooling is way more than an absence of textbooks. To Holt, unschooling was synonymous with homeschooling (and predated it and the Christian homeschooling movement by at least 10 years).
People who apply certain of Holt’s educational principles — like the importance of child-led learning and direct experience — have attempted to narrow unschooling to all child-led learning all the time, but unschooling is a lot more than that.
I’ve unschooled my four kids (22, 18, 15, and 11) all their lives. Sometimes they use textbooks and take classes. Other times, they take a more direct, hands-on approach. My two daughters are in college; the eldest works as a math and physics tutor in the learning centers at the college she attends.
I’m the product of a conventional education — public schools from kindergarten through my BS degree (and private schools thereafter for graduate work). Yeah, it was regimented, and some of the classes/teachers weren’t very good. But, overall, I liked it, and I don’t share the disdain that some people have towards conventional education. I don’t think that I would have done better in an unschooling program.
I agree with Aretae’s analysis. In the original unschooling literature there is too much stress on “innate” curiosity and not nearly enough emphasis on experience-rich environment and learning communities. People who doubt the importance of the social environment should re-read the (real) story of Mowgli kids.
A fellow unschooler and I recently wrote an essay about family educator commons: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/family-educator-commons/2010/08/09 Unschooling does take a village!
Off to help my unschooling 12yo to prepare her SparkCon presentation on children’s right to work…
We’ve been home schooling for 8 years. But, we do not believe unschooling is particularly beneficial for the child nor our nation.
In fact, we believe too many home schoolers put too much emphasis on the arts and not enough on math and science. For us, math comes first, English second, science third, and the rest a distant fourth.
I highly recommend watching (or at least listening to) Jesse Schell’s Long Now talk from July.
https://fora.tv/2010/07/27/Jesse_Schell_Visions_of_the_Gamepocalypse
One of his points is that the future will belong to the curious and he suggests there will be a ‘curiosity gap’ between those who are curious and those who are not. But he says the problem is that we really have very little idea how to foster curiosity. Which isn’t totally true as things like unschooling are obviously all about it.