Why Can't You Just Unschool Part Time?

In every collection of unschooling skeptics I’ve come across--such as that found in the comments section any time unschooling is covered in a major outlet--you’ll always find the question of why people can’t just unschool part time. Why does it have to be a full-time gig? Can’t children just go to REAL school to get a REAL education and do that self-directed nonsense in their downtime?

I’ve found myself explaining, over and over, with as much patience as I can muster, that they’re missing the point. Here’s why…

Time

Between school, and homework, and extracurricular activities, and things like sleeping and eating, your average child has very little actual free time. And in what little free time they have? They’re tired. They need to relax, to unwind, to veg out. That time can certainly be an important part of learning, as I’ve discussed before. But to suggest that all the richness of a self-directed education can be squeezed into what little free time a child has leftover is completely absurd.

Values

The way education is approached in school, the fundamental ideas underpinning it, are antithetical to unschooling. Children in school are being taught that learning is something done to them; that learning can only be imparted by experts; that other people know what’s best for them and hey get no say in how their education unfolds; that children are not capable of making any decisions about their learning; that learning is always difficult and complicated. Unschoolers, on the other hand, know--and live the knowledge--that learning is ever-present, and happens with all different people in all different places; that play should form the basis of childhood (and of learning!); and that children are perfectly capable of directing their own education. Ideas about what education is and how people are educated differs dramatically between conventional schooling and unschooling, and without making a conscious effort to reject strict school-based ideas of how education works, you can’t really unschool.

Lifestyle

Unschooling is a way of life. It’s a full-time commitment to living a rich life with children, providing a safe and resource-filled environment, building respectful relationships, seeking out opportunities in the community, and trusting that children are incredibly capable learners. Unschooling is a philosophy that trickles into every aspect of your life, colouring all your relationships with a greater understanding of everyday consent and principles of non-hierarchical living.

While families unable to unschool can certainly take inspiration from unschooling in the ways they parent, talk about learning, live together as a family, or treat the children in their communities, that alone is not unschooling. There is no way to simply squeeze unschooling into the bits of life left over after school and on weekends. It’s too big to just fit into six weeks of summer vacation.

You can’t unschool part time, and those who ask why this self-directed learning thing can’t just be supplemental are showing a profound ignorance of what unschoolers are attempting to do.

*A note that sometimes unschooled kids/teens go to school by choice, and that is most definitely practicing self-directed learning. I think the most important part about unschooling is the bit about respecting children’s rights to make their own decisions as much as possible, which means fully supporting them if they decide they want to go to school. I hope it’s clear that what I’m talking about in this post is not that, but rather the skeptics who don’t believe in young people’s right to truly direct their own learning.

20 Ways to Make Kids Hate Learning

This post originally appeared on my Patreon in March '17. Occasionally I'll share an older Patreon post on the main blog, but most of them remain accessible only to patrons. Join me there to see all of them!

I talk a lot about ways that self-directed learning works, and how to embrace and encourage it... But now I’d like to take a moment to talk about the opposite, the anti-unschooling, what could more readily be referred to as--dare I say it--schooling (whether it actually happens in a school building or not). If you were to sit down, as I did, and say, how could I best discourage self-directed, delight driven learning? this is the type of list you’d come up with (or at least, it’s the list I came up with). What do you do? This is what you do:

1. Tell them learning--or at least important learning--only happens in a specific place.
2. Only allow them to learn about certain topics, in a certain order, and from a select few people.
3. Make sure that they have very little--or even no--free time in which to pursue their own interests (unless, of course, they’re happy to forgo eating and sleeping).
4. Discourage collaboration by deeming kids interacting with each other to be goofing off, being disrespectful, or even cheating.
5. Ban or severely limit the use of modern technology (aka “screens”), thus cutting children off from their social groups, and effectively eliminating the easiest way in which to look up information.
6. Tell them (or imply with your attitude) that their interests are silly, unimportant, immature, and worthless.
7. Call them lazy and unmotivated when they appear to be doing “nothing,” or doing something deemed, as aforementioned, to be worthless.
8. Constantly test their learning, compare them to their peers, and create hierarchies of best to worst students based on those tests and comparisons.
9. Attach strong emotional reactions/acceptance/love to grades.
10. Strip all real world authenticity out of learning in favour of teaching to the test.
11. Convince them that learning has to have an obvious purpose.
12. Focus only on major accomplishments in lieu of recognizing simple progress, no matter how big.
13. Create an environment that feels critical, unsafe, stressful, or otherwise unpleasant, and mandate that children spend a majority of their time in that environment.
14. Separate everyone into either “student” or “teacher”--those who have useful knowledge, and those who don’t.
15. Focus on (potential) future problems instead of current reality.
16. Turn every pleasurable moment into a “learning activity,” or somehow attach work to everything that could potentially be fun (i. e. book reports). 
17. Force them to take on responsibility that they express clearly they are not ready for. Alternatively, refuse to allow them to take on more responsibility even when they clearly express that they’re ready to do so.
18. Hammer in the point that learning has no personal relation to what they actually want and plan to do.
19. Tell them you always know more about their needs/goals then they do.
20. Make sure they feel incompetent and incapable of making their own decisions. Bonus: act surprised and disappointed when they reach early adulthood and struggle with feeling competent and making their own decisions.

Authentic, Personalized, Flexible Learning: Why Curriculum Will Never Be Good Enough

I've always been against the use of any type of curriculum that isn't chosen expressly by the learner themselves, but I found myself wanting to explain why I felt that way. What was so irredeemable about externally mandated educational plans? This is the answer I came up with.

A curriculum is stagnant. It's created as a solid, linear plan, detailing what facts, theories, and formulas an individual should know and in what order they should learn them. It's designed by people other than the learners themselves, it's based on the idea that there is one core body of knowledge and set of skills that hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of children should all have, and that they should all learn it at the same age. It doesn't grow with the individual, it doesn't bend or adapt. It exists as a series of check marks, a string of benchmarks and numbers that have little to do with what's actually best for the learner, what they care about, their unique strengths and quirks and ways of being in the world.

True, deep, and meaningful learning can never be contained in something so stifling as a standardized curriculum.

There are some words and phrases I go back to again and again to describe my own life learning experience. My learning was always authentic, I say, because it was always learning that felt relevant and interesting. It was personalized, unique to me and what I wanted and needed at any given point. It was flexible, because I could always choose to learn different things in different ways with different people.

This kind of learning is pretty much the exact opposite of a pre-packaged curriculum. It's learning that is constantly evolving and changing as the learners themselves evolve and change, alongside their family and communities. It's the ultimate in authentic, personalized and flexible learning, better in my mind than any faddish new curriculum or teaching methodology that's taken those terms as handy buzzwords.

Reading selfie!

If the learners themselves aren't deeply involved in the shaping of their own education, if they aren't able to make important choices about what and how they learn (with supportive adults there to give a helping hand, find resources, play games, and otherwise enjoy the ride), then I don't think learning really can be any of those things. It becomes, instead, a pale shadow of what learning should be, as it's strangled by adults' desire for control over a process they can never truly own, a bureaucratic need for measurable educational progress, and a deep-set distrust of children and their innate abilities.

In this desperate attempt to make learning into something controllable and measurable, not only do we miss out on the richness that comes of learning for the sake of learning, but learning also becomes something that's complicated in really unnecessary ways. The more talk of methodologies and new teaching practices, or the latest curricular advancements and improvements, the more education--and by extension learning--starts to sound like something arcane and difficult, something that must be left in the hands of well-trained experts lest ordinary folks mess it up by not knowing the correct approaches or methods.

This has always bothered me since in my own life, learning has never been complicated. Difficult sometimes, confusing on occasion, but never complicated. You go where you need to go to get the knowledge and skills you want, which means that sometimes turning to an expert for a specific topic or trade is what will serve you best. But the actual process of learning isn't nearly as complex and hard to understand as so many educational experts seem to think (or at least seem to want other people to think).

If you believe that learning is complicated, then you believe that it has to be carefully designed and constructed, which means curriculum. But when you realize how unnecessary and actively harmful a standardized curriculum can be, the whole world opens up. Suddenly there are so many different things you can learn about and explore and do. There's no rush, so it doesn't all need to be packed into a certain time frame; you can learn from many different people, not just teachers.

It's exciting, fun, difficult, sometimes overwhelming, but it is always rewarding. Outside the confines of a curriculum, I've been able to focus on what's interesting and important to me, the things I feel genuinely matter. I feel very good about my "education," because it's mine. It's not the education someone else thought I should have.

That owning of your learning, the authenticity and joy it can bring into your life, can never be replicated by outside forces with big plans. It has to come from you, and your own exploration of the amazing world around you.

A big thanks to Sol, Chantal, and Lua for their editing assistance on this post! 

Learning Happens When it's Relevant and Relatable: the Case for Learning in the Real World

Learning happens best when it feels relevant to the learner, and when it relates to their own interests and life.

This is no secret, and is well recognized in the wider education world. On the popular education blog MindShift, there are articles talking about how to connect school learning to a bigger purpose in an attempt to make students actually care about it, and in a list of ways to "motivate" students on the same blog "connect abstract learning to concrete situations" is number four.

As much as I try to care about some abstract collection of knowledge or skills, if I can't see the relevance in my own life, or how it relates to the things I find interesting and important, I just can't make myself focus enough to truly learn it. 

This is true of almost everyone, and is the reason so many people remember so little of what they supposedly learned in school. Once the test is over, the knowledge, if it doesn't feel relevant to the learner, will be forgotten quickly.

Though many educators might disagree about just how much knowledge is lost, as the above MindShift articles show, they know that learning works best when it feels relevant to the student, which is why attempts to increase relevance are regularly made by progressive educators. However, what strikes me about many of those attempts is just how artificial they feel. It's a desperate attempt to relate the material being taught to students' lives, in much the way that a lot of material is dressed up in bright colours and "fun" games in the lower grades. I doubt either the supposed fun or attempted relevance fools many students, because ultimately much of what's on your normal school curriculum won't be used in your life and isn't important to your community, and most of the work you do or the content you create doesn't have any real impact or wider audience than a single teacher or possibly a whole class. It's not real work, it's just busywork, which is about as far from relevant as you can get.

Stuck in a very narrow mindset that sees schools (in roughly the form they currently exist in) as the only option, most approaches don't truly seek to re-imagine what education can look like and be. Even the data educators are working off of is based on such a narrow segment of humans, that of children in a very rigid and coercive school environment, that it's not necessarily an accurate sampling of children. As Carol Black, director of the film Schooling the World,  has said, "collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World."

When a teacher is coming from a place that sees compulsory schooling as a given, attempts at bringing the real world into the classroom too often look like pale copies of the real thing--learning about wildlife from books instead of the wild, and solving problems for a test, not to fill a real need in your community.

Some initiatives in some schools do actually make a difference in students' lives, and do manage to bring some learning and work that really matters into schools. I don't want to erase or downplay the ones that get it right.

However, as far as I'm concerned, school can never do as good a job at teaching children about the real world (complete with real world problems and diversity and work), as participating in the real world itself.

It seems somewhat ironic that one of the biggest criticisms school free learners face is that they're somehow avoiding the "real world," when in reality life learners are embedded in it.

Everything we do has meaning in our lives. I've never written a book report or an essay because I was required to do so, I've only ever written for an actual audience, or because I was driven by inspiration. I've only ever taken classes I chose to or agreed to participate in. I've only ever learned about things I felt a real need to learn about, whether that was because of a personal interest or because that learning was needed to further a goal. Every part of my education has been driven by real need, real interest, and actual relevance in my life.

Contrary to what some believe, that doesn't mean I've never done anything hard, or that I've never had to deal with difficult people or situations. Living in the real world, you encounter a whole lot of different people and situations, some more pleasant than others, and you're confronted with a range of problems and difficulties. Far from sheltering children from anything challenging or hard, learning through living means learning (with the help of supportive adult figures) how to navigate difficult situations, handle unpleasant people, and make the choices that are best for you and those around you.

Life learning is all about authenticity, because nothing is constructed or designed in an attempt at engineering specific outcomes or learning. Instead, everything is an experience to be learned from, and at the same time, everything is just living. The world ceases to be broken down into what's educational or not, what can be learned from and what can't. Unschoolers seek to recognize that learning is always happening, no engineering needed, and instead just seek to build rich lives, full of resources and fun, interesting people and activities, and trust that that's all you need for equally rich learning to occur.

When you structure your life in such an open way, with an outlook that's so receptive to whatever learning might occur, you create situations where everything feels relevant to the learner, and where everything that's done is done for a reason, whether that reason is fun, fascination, getting into a program you really want to be in, or helping out a friend.

To me, that's what the real world looks like, not the artificial constraints of a school building, school timeline, and school curriculum.

Unschooling is learning in the real world. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm Not Bill Gates. I'm Still An Autodidact (and So Are You).

There was an article published last week in Slate titled Bill Gates Is an Autodidact. You’re Probably Not., and when I read it yesterday, it was pretty eye-roll inducing. So I decided that it was time to write a rebuttal on the blog. The article starts by talking about Bill Gates:

At a young age, Gates was already an autodidact, someone compelled to learn for himself what he needed to know. Over the course of his life, Gates has maintained this habit: He dropped out of college after two years, but he has continued his education through incessant reading and conversing. Michael Specter, a New Yorker writer who profiled Gates for the magazine, has said that the Microsoft founder “is one of these autodidacts who reads, reads, reads. He reads hundreds of books about immunology and biochemistry and biology, and asks a lot of questions, and because he’s Bill Gates [he] can get to talk to whoever he wants.”

Many of Gates’ fellow leaders in the ed tech world are also members of the autodidact club. Computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics—they are a self-selected group of individuals who have schooled themselves in a fast-changing field for which there is no settled syllabus, no well-established curriculum.

This seems to be a pretty clear case of someone seeing autodidacts as "special." The geniuses, those destined for greatness, no matter what they face. The "autodidact club" is thus considered to be something pretty exclusive.

Though that particular club might be exclusive, I think it's pretty misleading to think that the fact they're autodidacts is the main thing that sets them apart. I'd argue that what sets them apart is that they're business people, corporatists, very wealthy, and largely male (also almost certainly largely white. Statistically, the richest and most "successful" people in America tend to be both a. white and b. male, so I figure it's a pretty good guess). No, these people are not your every-man, but I don't think being an autodidact or not has all that much to do with it.

(Source)

The author continues with what is their main point of the article:

Most people are not autodidacts. In order to learn effectively, they need guidance provided by teachers. They need support provided by peers. And they need structure provided by institutions. 

...Do they now. I know a whole lot of unschoolers who would disagree.

Productive learning without guidance and support from others is rare.

It seems that the author suffers from the misconception that self directed learning means learning entirely and completely on your own, alone, with no help, ever. While I disagree in a major way that learners need "guidance provided by teachers" and "structure provided by institutions," self-directed learners do need other people. Peers, mentors, parents, and yes, sometimes even teachers. The thing is, self directed means just that: the individual is making the decisions about their own lives and learning. These decisions can include a large amount of other people, and even a large amount of structure. It all depends on the individual learner and what they want and need.

A pair of eminent researchers has gone so far as to call the very notion of self-directed learning “an urban legend in education.”

I... Well. I told my sister, Emilie, about the "urban legend" thing and she laughed. "Hi, I'm Bigfoot!" was her response.

Emilie's life and my own life are proof against this supposed truth. But lest anyone quickly jump to the "then you must be special!" conclusion, I'd like to point out that every single unschooler I've met is proof against this absurd idea. Lifelong unschoolers and unschoolers who left school in elementary, middle, or high school; unschoolers who left school because they were struggling, and unschoolers who left because they didn't feel challenged; unschoolers whose parents made the choice to unschool, and those individuals who chose themselves. We're all managing to learn just fine, in the most self-directed way you can find!

So, who are these apparently "eminent" researchers and what are their conclusions?

In a paper published in Educational Psychologist last year, Paul A. Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands and Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer of Maastricht University challenge the popular assumption “that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning.” 

There are three problems with this premise, van Merriënboer and Kirschner write. The first is that novices, by definition, don’t yet know much about the subject they’re learning, and so are ill-equipped to make effective choices about what and how to learn next. The second problem is that learners “often choose what they prefer, but what they prefer is not always what is best for them”—that is, they practice tasks that they enjoy or are already proficient at, instead of tackling the more difficult tasks that would actually enhance their expertise. And third, although learners like having some options, unlimited choices quickly become frustrating—as well as mentally taxing, constraining the very learning such freedom was supposed to liberate.

Again, I find myself re-reading to make sure I actually read it properly the first time. This reads like just the regular criticisms everyone has about self directed learning. "Children don't know what's best for themselves, you can't trust children," people say, and "if no one's making them do hard things, they'll never do anything difficult!"

Though to be honest, I've never heard the researchers last assertion, that choices are bad. Wow. Okay. I think I am a very different person from those researchers, who are apparently pretty overwhelmed with the vast variety of choices life represents. I loved how my sister put it, in discussion about this article. She said that while in theory there might be "unlimited choices," there aren't actually, because life doesn't work that way. You want to go out to eat, so theoretically you could go to any single restaurant in the city, but in reality your choices are going to be based on what's close to you, what's within your price range, what type of cuisine you like, what you're in the mood for, what any friends or family you're going to dinner with like... In practice, you'll be able to pare down your theoretical choices to a few actual options pretty quickly. That's how all choices, including about your learning, work. As Emilie said: "I could try and go into engineering school tomorrow. That's a choice I could make. But it wouldn't make any sense based on my interests or goals or the past choices I've made." This 'too many choices are bad' thing seems pretty detached from the reality of how people make choices.

When it comes to needing experienced teachers to steer a novice learner, that's why, as I mentioned before, unschoolers often choose to make other people part of their learning. Emilie has been taking Ninjutsu classes since she was 16. That's because she can't learn Ninjitsu on her own. Her choice to start classes and her choice to continue them are all her own. Self-directed, yes, but not something she's pursuing alone.

I wondered if these researchers were being quoted out of context. It seemed, to me, that their paper sounded more like an an attempt at legitimizing what educators want to believe in regards to why self-directed learning can't possibly work (even though it obviously does) than anything else. But was that really the case? Sadly, it seems so. The summary of their paper is this:

This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning. The first legend is one of learners as digital natives who form a generation of students knowing by nature how to learn from new media, and for whom “old” media and methods used in teaching/learning no longer work. The second legend is the widespread belief that learners have specific learning styles and that education should be individualized to the extent that the pedagogy of teaching/learning is matched to the preferred style of the learner. The final legend is that learners ought to be seen as self-educators who should be given maximum control over what they are learning and their learning trajectory. It concludes with a possible reason why these legends have taken hold, are so pervasive, and are so difficult to eradicate.

I disagree that these are common notions. It's only very recently that self-directed education has become trendy again, and the vast majority of people still feel strongly that the way people learn is by being taught, by a teacher, in a school. The authors of the above paper provide no new research, and simply quote research done by others, pulled specifically to make their points which are pretty clearly stated in the above summary. I will point out that the Slate article obscures the fact they're talking specifically about the idea of self-directed learning online, but then again, though that's what the authors of the paper claim they're looking at, they seem to lump all self-directed learning together, whether online or not. So I'd say the Slate article is a pretty accurate representation of what these authors are saying (basically that they're pissed that teachers might be losing power, and students gaining some, and they want it to stop, because they claim science isn't behind these changes, which is bad).

But back to the Slate article. According to the bio on the article, "This story was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University." I think that really puts it all in perspective. While they might be nonpartisan, I'd hardly consider a teacher's college to be unbiased when it comes to the role of teachers and schools in society. Their very livelihood depends on teachers retaining power, and students staying in school, listening to the teachers.

So that's the reason this is a subject that seems so important to the author. And the central point that the author seems to be attempting to drive home in protection of their livelihood is that self-directed learning isn't for everyone. Most people can't do it. Only special people learn that way.

I grew up a life learner. An autodidact, if you will. I called the important shots in my own education, and still do today. I didn't sneak out of my house as Gates did to work on supercomputers, I don't read texts on immunology and biochemistry, and I'm not a scientist, engineer, or academic. By all accounts I'm not part of an exclusive "autodidact club" made up of the rich and influential. What I am is a plain old run-of-the-mill self-directed learner. The type who learned to read because I loved Harry Potter, who memorized old poems, wrote books reviews, studied World War II, played for hours with my sister, and learned alongside my family as a child. I'm the type of autodidact who spends hours in the kitchen working on a new dish, and tons of time writing about self-directed education. The type who reads books about living on less money and re-imagining domesticity (Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest Man in the World and Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture), and on unschooling and alternative education (I finished Challenging Assumptions in Education recently, and am now in the middle of The Unschooling Unmanual). I go to workshops and talks and conferences on my favourite subjects, such as unschooling and alternative education and preserving food...

How my life and education looks is intimately shaped by my own passions and interests and goals. That's how being a self-directed learner works. Sometimes what you're doing will look impressive, and sometimes it won't. That's perfectly fine. We don't have to be impressive. And autodidacts as a whole are certainly not part of a special club.

I also think it's important to recognize the role school and forced teaching play in killing motivation. As unschoolers we end up repeating, time and time again, that humans are innate learners, that babies learn to walk and talk because they have a burning desire to learn, grow, and become a part of the culture they find themselves in. Humans are perhaps best defined by our ability to learn, our ability to adapt, our flexibility and busy minds. So why does it seem so hard for so many people to grasp that learning isn't something that must be induced in someone? It's not something you have to make people do. Learning is something you need to support, to encourage, and sometimes just to keep out of the way of. If supportive environments are provided, and people stop putting blocks in front of learners in the form of curriculum that must be followed, times in which learning must occur, tests and assessments and grading, then learning will happen enthusiastically and well.

We WANT to learn. It's in our nature.

Which is why I'm an autodidact. Or life learner, as I sometimes prefer to call myself. And you know what? So are you. Embrace it, and enjoy your own uniquely individual self directed learning journey.

Unschooling Isn't More Risky, It's Just Less Conventional

"Part of me would like to unschool, but it just seems so risky."

"I can't believe parents would do that! Why are they risking their children's education like that??"

"These kids will just end up working at McDonalds."

People seem convinced that unschooling is a risky choice. A risky lifestyle. Who know if kids will succeed if they're unschooled!

This puzzles me more than a little, because it seems to assume that schooling is a guarantee. That if a child goes to school, they'll become emotionally well-adjusted, learn all they need to function in life, get a job, and become successful.

If you ask any person if going to school is a guarantee of success, they'll say of course not. The majority of the people working in low-paying jobs went to school. There are people who went to school who suffer from addiction and mental illness, face unemployment and homelessness, and otherwise struggle in life.

All going to school means is that you've gone to school. It doesn't come with any guarantees.

Neither does unschooling. Unschoolers, too, can struggle with addiction, struggle to find a job, struggle in life.

It's almost as if we live in a world where it's not easy to "succeed," whether you go to school or are unschooled. Almost as if, in everyone's life, shit happens. See what I'm getting at?

Yes, for some people unschooling is riskier than others. People may be less likely to respect an unschooling education from people who face discrimination already, for whom anything can be pulled out as an excuse to continue that discrimination. But at the same time, the people for whom unschooling may be a "riskier" choice, often find that school is ALSO riskier: marginalized communities often have access only to  poorer schools, which have a lot less resources, face higher rates of bullying and violence in school, and higher drop-out rates. Marginalized people face more difficulty and discrimination no matter what.

On the other hand, unschooling can also make things less risky: removing children from a space they face violence is removing them from risk (in reverse, for children who face violence at home, school can be the less risky environment: that's why I'm not against schools entirely, just schools as they currently exist and function). Outside of school, children and teens can have the opportunity to learn a whole bunch of things not learned in school, tailored to their own personal interests, skills, situation, and community. For unschoolers with a good home life and supportive parents, they can have more of a chance to grow in ways that feel emotionally healthy, in a safe environment, at their own pace. Thus perhaps making it easier for them to deal with the shit life inevitably throws at them.

What's more or less risky will depend entirely on the individual, the family, and their unique circumstances. Only they'll be able to make the choices that they feel are best for themselves.

But sometimes, when people talk about wanting to unschool but fearing doing so because of the potential riskiness, I wonder if it's less about risk and more about fear. Fear that, because of actively making a choice against conventional wisdom, if things don't work out it will be your fault, more than if school had just done a bad job. Furthermore, that you'll be blamed, by society at large (if unschoolers struggle with literally anything, there will likely be a whole bunch of people ready to say it's all your fault for unschooling), and even worse, perhaps by your kids. I believe the fear of being the one responsible for your child's education is a very present thing, and something that makes unschooling feel more risky, even if it isn't actually.

Parents generally want desperately to give their children the best they can in life: they want their children to do well and be happy. Not being a parent, I can't imagine how terrifying the responsibility of making choices for your children, big choices like whether to send them to school, or homeschool, or unschool, can be. As unschooling gains in popularity, I just hope that more and more parents (and more and more teenagers looking to leave school) can find the support networks needed to feel confident enough to make the choices that really feel best to them, instead of basing their decisions on fear of choosing a lifestyle that's just less conventional.

Quizzing is For School, Not Life

Ah, quizzing. People in any type of formal education are probably familiar with the official kind, the test kind, but for the crowds of homeschoolers and unschoolers especially, we learn early on to dread the questions coming as soon someone finds out you don't go to school. "What's 8 times 8?" "What's the capital of China?"

There's an easy way to separate quizzing from plain old asking of questions, and it's this:

Questions asked in curiosity, asked because you want to know the answer for yourself, is the way a question is generally best asked. When you instead quiz someone, ask them a question you know the answer to just to see if they know it, too, it becomes something entirely different. It becomes an attempt to assert yourself as smarter, more accomplished, superior. An attempt to bump yourself up higher on the perceived knowledge hierarchy. Anyone who, as a child, has had another child ask "do YOU know what that means?" or had an adult bend down and with the greatest of condescension ask them a question that adult most certainly already know the answer to, knows just what that looks and feels like.

You'd think that it would end as an adult, though, wouldn't you? That adults would at the very least treat other adults with enough courtesy to not quiz each other unless invited to. Yet that obviously isn't the case, as I've learned. It happens sometimes still because of unschooling, such as when, a year or two ago, someone tried to ask me a math question upon finding out I hadn't gone to school. And at an unschooling conference a couple of years ago, my sister (then 18) got in a conversation with a family staying in the same hotel who weren't part of our group, where as soon as they discovered what type of conference was going on one promptly asked her a question about physics. She doesn't tend to let herself be pushed around, so responded simply "I don't think that's usually how you introduce yourself to someone you've just met." The quizzer was embarrassed, and his family apologized, commenting that "he's a teacher!" which I suppose was supposed to convey that he just couldn't help himself. Yet more frequently than that rude quizzing from complete strangers, I think it often happens among people who do know each other, by individuals who just don't think about how condescending their queries are likely to sound.

Last spring, I was happily telling a friend who's very into wild edibles and wild skills about how I'd been harvesting and eating fiddleheads, and the first thing he said was "how did you know they were the right species?" taken aback, I explained that they had the correct groove in them. "Other non-edible ferns have that too." still feeling rather off balanced, I added that they also had the correct papery bits, at which point he nodded, satisfied.

I was left feeling angry and hurt though. The lack of respect for my judgement shown with that question, to think I'd eat a wild food without feeling confident in my identification, was insulting, and that someone I considered a friend thought nothing of quizzing me was rather hurtful. I recognize it was likely coming from a place of concern, and when friends do this I'm sure there's no bad intention behind it. Yet it still ends up coming out badly!

There are appropriate times to quiz people, of course. Times when you've entered into a relationship where you expect that from someone: you've accepted someone as a teacher or mentor for a specific subject, you're attending a workshop or class, or you've asked a friend to quiz you on a particular set of knowledge you're trying to get to stick. That's the type of quizzing that's actually helpful and beneficial.

But if someone hasn't asked for it, that's it. Just don't, no matter the age of the person you're tempted to quiz. Instead, save questions for when you don't know something, and want to know more. Ask questions out of curiosity and fascination and excitement and a desire to learn more. That's what questions are meant to be all about.

Uncollege, Hackschooling, and When Success and Profit Hijack the Message

I've been grumbling and grumping periodically (on the blog Facebook page, Twitter, and other online haunts) about the problems I have with the uncollege/education hacking movements for over a year now. People have reacted differently, some saying I'm being overly critical, some agreeing, and some just saying then WRITE something already explaining your stance instead of just complaining! Those latter people are probably right, in that perhaps it would have been a good idea to write about that ages ago, but at the same time, I don't think the timing was right. I haven't been in quite the right head-space.

I finally got the push I needed when I read a post a few days ago by Jessica over at College Rebellion. Several things came together: that post, the post she links (When "Life Hacking" is Really White Privilege, which I read a month or two ago and which has really stuck with me), and a quote I remembered posting many months ago. Suddenly it wasn't just that I felt vaguely uncomfortable almost every time I read something about uncollege or education hacking, now I had an actual post in my head. A place to start.

"Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, [is] jumping on the 'self-directed learning' bandwagon these days.

And they are bringing to it all the same old bullshit - children who are 'more'. More curious, more motivated, more more more.

So let me put my position out there. For me this lifestyle is about a principle and that alone - offering as free a life as possible to my children and myself. It's not about making a little super genius, super diverse interest, super engaged human. These children are not circus performers. So stop showcasing who did what at the youngest age, who gives the best TED teen presentations and not think that to me it will look no different except now the child is at home.

Unschooling, self-directed lives, natural learning, call it what you want. If it's 'about' results then it's not my cup of tea. Into flow or no expectations? Then I can engage even if the flow includes results." -Gillian Goddard

I think expecting that once grown someone has the skills to support themselves  is reasonable (if there are jobs to be had, and if disability, mental illness, or other serious things don't impede someone's ability to do that... So even that expectation isn't cut and dried). Nevertheless this perfectly highlights, to me, one of the biggest problems I feel there is with the uncollege type movement.

People have taken a philosophy about learning more freely, a philosophy that should be exciting and comforting at the same time (following what interests you, combined with the comfort of choosing how much or little you feel able to do, free from the stress of a heavy college course load), and turned it into just the newest way to claw your way up the corporate ladder, become a wealthy entrepreneur, or otherwise become "successful" by the most capitalistic measures out there.

Who are they speaking to?

I say "movements," plural, in this post because it isn't necessarily one movement, but a collection of trends moving in generally the same direction, that share a lot of commonalities in attitudes and views.

Generally, there's lots of talks about how college is a waste of time and money; college is conventional and makes someone boring, and to truly stand out from the crowd you should do impressive things instead (like travel the world or start a business); corporations prefer people who are involved with business from a young age instead of going to college; you'll learn more than your peers in college; the way of the future is technology, and schools are outdated and lacking in technology...

A couple of those I agree with (like the fact that college is really ridiculously expensive in some parts of the world, and most definitely in the US, for instance, though it's not as bad where I live), but many other seem like pretty bad points, to be honest, and points that only seem especially relevant to a select group of people.

While not going to college is cheaper than going, for many people doing anything but directly entering the job market is a struggle. Many people don't come from families where parents can support either college or expensive travel adventures, for instance.

Underpinning at least my understanding of unschooling has always been life learning as a, perhaps, liberatory approach to education. An unschooling influenced by Wendy Priesnitz' talk of life learning as an important part of saving our planet and re-imagining ways of living together, and unschooling as an important part of decolonization. The uncollege-and-hacking-your-education movements don't even seem to realize social inequalities exist, or if they do they don't seem to care. Ignoring the existence of institutionalized inequalities doesn't erase them, it just means that those considered the default, those already most privileged in our society, continue to be those best served by an oblivious or uncaring movement: white, male, straight, middle and upper class. No, not everyone involved falls into those categories. But everything I've seen seems to show that many people involved fall into at least a couple of those, and that there's very little to no representation from those most marginalized.

In prioritizing corporate and business ideas of success above any type of societal shift for a more just, more egalitarian, more sustainable world, I think it's clear that this movement isn't and has never been for everyone. It's just a new way for those already in the lead (of a race that was rigged to start with) to pull even further ahead.

Money talks

With the surge in popularity for unschooling, uncollege, hacking your education, edupunking, the whole learning-more-independently-outside-of-educational-institutions thing, there's been a corresponding surge in people trying to make money off of this trend. A "trend-spotting firm" (something that, until very recently, I did not know existed) even predicted recently that unschooling counselor will be one of "8 new jobs people have in 2025." I think it's fair to say that job already exists, with numerous people offering unschooling and uncollege coaching over phone, Skype, and through online programs. New events and alternative programs claiming to support this type of education are popping up all over the place.

I don't think this is necessarily bad in and of itself. In fact, in plenty of cases this is a good thing! But it does point to a worrying trend of both turning unschooling into yet another specialty held by experts, and something you need to pay for to receive, instead of something everyone can do without any type of expert intervention (finances to have the time to pursue education permitting).

It also leads to some people misrepresenting their credentials, their success, and their experience in order to take advantage of a new market. I often feel like those claiming to want to help the unschooling or uncollege community--for a fee, of course--are far less concerned with helping and far ore concerned with that fee. Who's genuine and reasonable when it comes to the numerous books, programs, and coaching available is, of course, something each individual can only decide for themselves. If you trust someone, can afford their services, and gain positive things from it, that's great! And if you love something you're knowledgeable about and want to help support yourself through the sharing of that knowledge, I also don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'd just like to see maybe a bit more accountability to the community, and more openness about an individual's experience and troubles. If someone's life seems too good to be true, it might be because it isn't true.

Either way, I find it alarming that unschooling is being turned into a commodity, information and expertise to be bought and sold, instead of a free-form philosophy about living and learning.

I've never felt like there's much room for me

I'm not attending college or university, and I never have attended any type of educational institution. So initially, I got excited about all this new stuff. I joined groups on Facebook, followed blogs, read articles. And quickly started feeling disillusioned. Nowhere was I seeing the concern for humanity as a whole I was more used to seeing in unschooling circles. I was just seeing a lot of Success! And tech! And success in tech! And entrepreneurship! Business is good! I saw posts suggesting pursuing learning in ways that didn't appeal to me at all, grand adventures that I'd never want to go on (and in fact with my struggles with anxiety probably couldn't go on without suffering a breakdown) and couldn't afford. I didn't feel like my anxious queer hippie feminist self had a place in that movement at all, and I still don't.

Not a condemnation

All that said, I think the college-free movements have helped popularize some important ideas. I think popular advocates have said plenty of good and helpful things. I think plenty of people have gotten a lot of good out of being a part of these movements. I don't think they should cease to exist. I just think there are a lot of largely unacknowledged problems, big blind spots, and goals I can never get behind. I want to like seeing unschooling ideas for college aged people getting so much attention and support, but I just feel uneasy and uncomfortable by so much of it that I see and read. And I really just hope to see more awareness in the future of social realities, and goals more closely aligned with the true success of all people, not just the wealthiest, whitest, most male of the lot.

[Edited March 19th] The note about comments that was originally posted here was taken by some as an attempt to dissuade criticism or disagreement with this post, which was not my intent at all. So instead I'd just like to remind people, when discussing this potentially loaded topic, to please remain respectful in the comment section, and to note that I will be moderating it and deleting hostile/disrespectful comments. Thank you for your understanding!

Occupy Education Conference Talk

I wrote a fairly short introductory talk on unschooling for an event that happened last weekend, the Occupy Education conference. The attendees were a mix of homeschooling and unschooling parents, striking university students (there's a pretty incredible social movement going on here in Quebec. Google "Quebec student strike" and you'll find lots of info!), and educators. It went really well. Lots of interesting group and one-on-one discussions! And since most readers couldn't be there, I wanted to at least share the talk I wrote. It's nothing I haven't said before, but I hope you'll enjoy reading it nonetheless.

My name is Idzie, and I'm a kindergarten drop-out.

The early years

When my parents first took me out of school, they had the idea that they'd homeschool me. And most people have at least a vague idea of what homeschooling is (though they usually also have a whole bunch of misconceptions). Instead of being taught by teachers, kids are taught by their parents. Usually at least some curriculum, bought or put together by the parents, is used, and, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the family, you do school at home. That's the idea that we started with. But my mother always trusted a lot in the innate ability of children to learn, so from the beginning we were very relaxed homeschoolers, and by that I mean that there wasn't a curriculum that my sister (who also didn't go to school) and I were expected to, but my parents still expected us to work on certain "school" subjects, namely math.

As we grew older, those expectations started to dissapear, and I finally said no, I'm no longer going to use those math textbooks, which is when I'd say we truly became unschoolers. I was probably around 10 or 11.

What is unschooling?

Unschooling, on the other hand, is something that people know less about.  It can be described in several different ways, all accurate, just different. I've decided to share this passage from my blog, slightly changed from the original, because I think it's the most thorough description of unschooling that I've ever written.

Version #1: Unschooling, which is considered a type of homeschooling, is student directed learning, which means the child or teen learns whatever they want, whenever they want. Learning is entirely interest driven, not dictated or directed by an external curriculum, by teachers, or by parents. For an unschooler, life is their classroom.

Version #2: Unschooling requires a paradigm shift, one in which you must stop looking at the world as a series of occurrences/resources/experiences etc. that can be learned from, and a series that can’t.  The world doesn’t divide neatly into different subjects, and you can’t tell right from the outset what a seemingly unimportant question, interest, or TV show obsession will lead to.  I learn from every aspect of my life, every activity I do, be it discussing politics with a friend, gardening, reading a novel, or simply daydreaming. Unschooling, at its heart, is nothing more complicated or simple than the realization that life and learning are not two separate things.  And when you realize that living and learning are inseparable, it all starts to truly make sense.

A rise in popularity

Unschooling, or life learning, as some prefer to call it, is the oldest type of learning there is. It existed long before anyone came up with the idea of putting everyone under a certain age into a single building, deciding that they'd best learn how to function in the rest of the world by staying in that building for a number of years. Even the modern unschooling movement has been around since the 70s (when the term "unschooling" was coined by John Holt), yet I've seen a marked increase in interest in this philosophy in my lifetime, and especially in the last few years. There's been a lot more media attention, with a myriad of TV spots and articles from sources across North America. More unschooling conferences are popping up, and people are even starting to recognize the term, even if they're still not sure what it means! I feel this increased interest is a very positive thing, and shows how dissatisfied so many people are with the current system.

Misconceptions and important questions

With the added exposure to unschooling--usually exposure that's presented in a very misleading and sensationalized way--comes a lot of misconceptions about the concept, and it gives rise to a ton of different questions. I'd like to address a few of the ones I've encountered most frequently, just to get them out of the way right from the beginning!

Many people think because unschooling parents or caregivers don't enforce an educational structure on their children, that unschooling automatically means there is no structure, which isn't true at all. Since unschooling puts learning into the hands of the learners themselves, they can and do choose as much or as little structure as they personally want. Thus, from the outside, it might even look like what some unschoolers are doing is school: with a curriculum, a schedule, and classes they take through their homeschool co-op. The difference is that that structure is freely chosen by the learner. They've decided that's the way they learn best, and the way they feel happiest learning. By the same token, unschooling parents may suggest various classes or structured activities, and the learner is free to say yes or no. Unschooling doesn't mean no textbooks or classes, it just means no textbooks or classes unless you want them!

It's also common to believe that, because unschooling parents don't usually "teach" their children (though they may if their children ask them to), that they're uninvolved in their lives and in their learning, which couldn't be further from the truth! Unschooling parents are generally extremely involved, helping their children navigate the world, exposing them to interesting things, helping them access various resources from books to classes to mentors, and in many cases simply sharing in the discovery and wonder their children experience in their daily lives.

And sometimes, people like to say that unschooling would only work with motivated individuals. That only a few especially intelligent or special people could "succeed" with unschooling. And I really couldn't disagree more! I'm not especially motivated or especially special (though I suppose it's flattering that so many people seem to think so). What people fail to realize is that, if nothing gets in the way of the joy, people really love learning. Humans are good at learning, and, empowered by how trusted they are with their own education, unschoolers are motivated to learn. So it's not that motivated people are particularly suited to unschooling, but that unschooling creates motivated people. That learning may not always, or even often, look like the education you'd find in school, but it's most definitely learning.

"If kids get to choose what they do, all they'll ever do is play video games and read comics!", people say, which doesn't take several things into account. First, that those activities have worth, and much can be learned from them. I've heard of some kids who learned to read by reading video game manuals, and my sister has spent quite a bit of time in the past studying Japanese, thanks to an interest in Japanese culture sparked by Manga (so, basically, comic books). The second is that no one wants to do only one thing forever. Unschoolers may go through stages where it seems ALL that they're doing is one thing and one thing only. For a couple of years most of what I did was read novels. Eventually, I started wanting to do other things as well, and, in large part, I credit that time of intense and voracious devouring of books with the skills in writing I have now. It was all-consuming, but it was okay. It was good. Sometimes, people learn best by focusing on one thing for a while.

People also sometimes tell me that learning is hard, and kids don't like to do hard things. Yet babies learn to walk and talk without any forcing, something I'm sure is incredibly difficult. We're driven to be part of the world we find ourselves in, and are drawn to learning the skills we need to function in it. Sometimes learning feels easy, and sometimes it feels hard. Sometimes learning, whether it's harder or easier, is fun, and sometimes it's less fun. But if it seems important and relevant in our lives, and if we have the confidence and support needed to do so, we will learn what we need to learn. Though, again, it may not be on the timeline expected from those in school. I learned to read at age 8 or 9, "late" by many peoples' count, but it hasn't harmed my ability to read or write at all.

Where I am now

Now, as a grown unschooler, freedom-based education and unschooling in particular has become quite important to me. I write a blog about unschooling, I speak at conferences and similar events, and I try to share what knowledge I have on the subject in hopes it'll help others searching for an entirely different way of looking at learning and education. I'm also extremely passionate about food, growing it and cooking it and sharing it with others. Next year I plan to leave home and spend the year living in various rural areas, and working on organic farms. Eventually, I want to be involved in building a radically sustainable intentional community. I'm interested in feminism, non-hierarchal organizing and collective decision making, travel, and writing. There's still a fairly big gap between where I am now in my life and where I want to be, but I feel I'm heading in the right direction. Contrary to what some believe when they hear of unschooling, I do not and never have hated my parents for not sending me to school, or not "making" me learn. Instead, I'm incredibly grateful to them for the freedom I was given, and feel that because of that freedom, I had the time and space to figure out a lot of important things about myself, about the world, and about where I fit (and want to fit) in that world. And that's an important thing to know!

In conclusion   

If there's something from the philosophy of unschooling that I most want people to get, it's a realization of how capable humans are: children of learning, and parents and caregivers of assisting their children in learning. We don't need large institutions to teach us, or corporations to sell us "educational material," or governments, institutions, or corporations to tell us what we need to be learning. We're capable, as individuals, as families, and as communities, of controlling our own learning and our own lives. In empowering us with this knowledge, I truly believe unschooling as a philosophy has great potential in helping us to really change the world and how we live in it.

Breaking News: Unschoolers Not as Good at School as Schooled People

Seems there was a study that came out a few weeks ago, which came to the conclusion that unschooling does not "work" as well as either schooling or structured homeschooling.

I realize I'm a little late on addressing this one, considering it's a study that was published in early September, so has already been blogged about pretty extensively, but with how little time I've spent at home (or at the very least in my home city--my family is currently staying in an apartment while some major repairs/renovations are going on at our house) in the last month (I've been in Ontario, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine) this is the first time I've been able to get around to it!

I'd suggest reading the whole press release, though I find these parts especially relevant:

"The investigation compared 74 children living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick: 37 who were homeschooled versus 37 who attended public schools. Participants were between 5 and 10 years old and each child was asked to complete standardized tests, under supervision of the research team, to assess their reading, writing, arithmetic skills, etc."


"The study included a subgroup of 12 homeschooled children taught in an unstructured manner. Otherwise known as unschooling, such education is free of teachers, textbooks and formal assessment.

'Compared with structured homeschooled group, children in the unstructured group had lower scores on all seven academic measures,' says Martin-Chang. 'Differences between the two groups were pronounced, ranging from one to four grade levels in certain tests.'
Children taught in a structured home environment scored significantly higher than children receiving unstructured homeschooling. 'While children in public school also had a higher average grade level in all seven tests compared with unstructured homeschoolers,' says Martin-Chang." 

Upon reading that, a couple of things immediately come to mind:

1. The method of judging "success" that was chosen was standardized tests.  Schooled kids and schooled-at-home kids practice tests all the time.  They get good at taking tests, because they take tests.  Young, unschooled children who are not used to tests obviously will not be as good at taking tests, regardless of how much knowledge they have in the areas they're being tested on.  Unschoolers don't generally aim to be "successful" by being good at tests: they aim to be successful by being good at living life!
2. Unschoolers learn on their own timeline.  The children in this study were between 5 and 10, and were being tested on the things the educational system has decided should be known at age 5 or age 7.  I couldn't even read until age 8 or 9, so if I had been tested at age 7 or 8, I would have been way below "grade level." However, that doesn't seem to have harmed my ability to read now...  I don't really agree with using standardized testing as a way to judge achievement and success at all, but even just going with those by-grade-level tests as a way to meassure such things, I feel that were the study to instead look at teenagers, say, between 14 and 18, the results likely would have been quite different...
3. The definition of unschooling that was used seems less than accurate.  No teachers or textbooks?  As I've said before, unschooling doesn't have to mean unstructured.  It just means that unschoolers have the freedom to choose more or less structure.  So if (rather unsurprisingly) the authors of the study--the ones separating the children involved into different categories--don't even know what unschooling is, it doesn't seem that that separation will be very accurate. 

I also take issue with the fact that one of the professors overseeing the study notes that this is one of the first "nonpartisan" studies to compare school, homeschooling, and unschooling, when as Wendy Priesnitz points out, an academic institution, using the tools and criteria of an academic institution, is reviewing academic institutions (like schools), it's hardly nonpartisan.

Of course, the author of the study also had to throw in a little comment about how structured homeschooling may provide academic success, but that school is an important place for socialization.  I don't think I even need to add any comments to that one.

This study joins the many other studies showing that homeschoolers do better on standardized tests than do schooled kids, which isn't really surprising.  And I don't personally feel that yet another study saying so adds anything to the home education movement as a whole.  We already know that, and personally, I'm just tired of standardized tests being held up as the one and only sign of success for children and teens.  Instead, I worry that, as flawed as the methods in this study are, it will add fuel to the fire of disapproval directed at unschoolers, both from society at large and from within the home education community.


And all of this just brings me back to a question that seems to keep coming up in my life lately: what, exactly, constitutes success?  If you're using test scores as your criteria, then those 12 young unschoolers who participated in the study are failures.  But if your criteria are different, if instead you're looking--actually looking, not just marking tests and studying at a distance--for things like passion, joy, involvement, curiosity, excitement, learning, then I'm quite sure your results are going to look very different.

And really, which one would you prefer?

The Hidden Curriculum and the Truth About Schooling

"We don't need no education. We Don't need no thought control. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone." Pink Floyd, in their iconic song Another Brick in the Wall 

(Source)

Sometimes, I wonder if it would have made what I have to say about school more credible if I was a dropout (rise-out, opt-out...) myself, instead of a lifelong unschooler.

Because as such, it's assumed quite often that I must have no clue what I'm talking about.  School doesn't really teach obedience to authority, conformity, and all that jazz.  I just think it does, because I've never been to school to see how nice it is, and instead have been turned against this fine institution by my prejudiced parents.  Or so the idea goes, at least.

It's true that I can't ever know from personal experience what elementary or high school is like (besides kindergarten, of course), but I feel very confident making the statements I do about school.  Why?  Because all the research I've done shows not only that school really does teach obedience and conformity, but that the educators in the schooling system are well aware of that fact.

Open any mainstream/used in university classes sociology or education text, and I can almost guarantee that it mentions something called "the hidden curriculum."

I found this description of the hidden curriculum in a book called Sociology of Education: An Introductory View From Canada that we picked up a while ago secondhand (I posted briefly about it when I first discovered the passage): 

"The fundamental patterns in any society are held together by tacit ideological assumptions.  In schools, some rules are not overt, but they serve to organize and legitimate the activities of teachers and students.  Much of what the school teaches and the students learn does not appear in the formal curriculum.  Successful school performance requires that the student learn what are considered important and useful skills and knowledge.  But students must also have the skills to uncover the hidden rules and expectations that affect their dispositions, identities, and personalities.  For example, schools emphasize conformity, deferred gratification, achievement, competitiveness, and obedience to authority [emphasis is mine].  Students must understand the social and other dimensions of this hidden curriculum.  The hidden curriculum refers to the tacit teaching of norms, values, and dispositions that occurs through student's social experiences in routine school activities."

In another book, Society: The Basics (Canadian edition), it's noted that:

"...the school's so-called hidden curriculum, subtle presentations of political or cultural ideas, imparts important cultural values.  School activities such as spelling bees and sports encourage competition and showcase success.  Children also receive countless messages that their society's culture is both practically and morally good."

Taught to think our culture is both "practically and morally good," is it any wonder that things continue to be so bad?  If our culture is good, then there's obviously no need to change things in any real or radical way.  The same book also goes on to say that "schools further socialize young people into culturally approved gender roles," something that, as a person who often chooses to identify as a feminist, and has a good handful of queer friends, disturbs me on multiple levels.

I find it funny that so many people consider writers like John Taylor Gatto (who wrote, among many other things, this essay, which I think is great) to be so shocking, considering he's really just framing what the education profession knows to be true in a different light.

This is all just to say that not only do I consider myself justified in my dislike of the schooling institution, but also that the people who claim these things are untrue don't seem to have done much research themselves.  It seems they react in automatic defensiveness, and out of a desire for it simply not to be true, not because they've actually thought about or researched the possibility that, well, it is true!  Now if only more people could start seeing that truth, things would start changing faster...

Why People Don't Get Unschooling #1: Don't Trust Yourself!

I've decided to start a new series of posts, on the subject of Why People Don't Get Unschooling (I have a strong urge to write that Twitter style: #WhyPeopleDon'tGetUnschooling). We all know how many misconceptions about unschooling there are, how many questions people have, but I think it's also interesting to explore why people have these reactions, and what myths are commonly believed that inhibit people's understanding of life learning.

Welcome to post #1: Don't Trust Yourself!

“All I am saying ... can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” ~ John Holt

I think that quote sums it up nicely: as children, people are taught not to trust themselves. Taught that they don't know what's best for themselves; are incapable of making even the most basic decisions (like what to wear or when to eat); are unable to learn by their own volition, or to know what they should learn at any given time; and are just generally untrustworthy. This message, that they are incapable and untrustworthy, is pounded into people throughout their childhood and teenage years. Then suddenly, as Adults, they're expected to be both capable and trustworthy. As if a switch has suddenly been turned in their head from the "irresponsible" setting to the "responsible" one! I suppose it's little wonder that many people continue to make themselves dependent on various institutions, on their workplaces, throughout their lives... They don't know how to live without turning to a higher/outside authority. They don't know how to trust themselves.

So what we're doing when we ask people to accept unschooling, is to not only accept the idea that parents are trustworthy, and thus capable of making decisions about their children's education (a hard enough concept as it is, as evidenced by this comment I once came across in response to an unschooling article: "how do people have the arrogance to say that parents know what is best for their children?"), but that the children themselves are deserving of trust, and capable of pursuing their own education.

That's a pretty big thing for people to swallow. Hell, it's a pretty big thing for unschooling parents to come to terms with: the fact that, despite everything they've been taught, they are worthy of trust, and quite able to choose a much freer, more consensual way of living for their children and themselves, and their children are quite capable of blossoming in just such an environment. Even for the unschoolers themselves it's difficult, since even if their parents are supportive of unschooling (and there are definitely instances where this isn't the case), the rest of the world is sending those same dis-empowering messages to them. Our society seems determined to keep people from realizing and acting on their own power. In trusting ourselves, and trusting our children (and by "our" I mean children collectively, not just the ones who share some of your DNA), we take a big step forward in reclaiming that power.

Unschooling Beyond High School (Unschooling is Forever Part 4)

I give you the 4th and final part of the speech I gave at the Toronto Unschooling Conference, dealing with a subject I'm currently very interested in thinking and talking about: Unschooling beyond the traditionally compulsory schooling years. Unschooling as true lifelong learning.

Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

The college & university years

This Fall marks the first time that both my sister and I are officially past the high school years.  Now at age 19, I would have graduated two years ago, and had Emi been in school, she would have finished up this past spring.  This is probably a good time to explain that in Quebec, high school only goes until grade 11, so people graduate at age 17 (or 16, depending when their birthday is).  "Higher education" in Quebec consists of CEGEP (sometimes called College), which is free for Quebec residents and usually takes two years to complete the chosen program, which is then usually followed by university, which works the same as everywhere else, except that if you've gone to CEGEP, university only takes three years for a bachelors program.  This is what both my sister and I are watching the vast majority of our peers doing, while we follow very different paths.

I know that to some, unschooling is simply an educational philosophy that covers the traditional elementary and high school years, something that's a good preparation for moving on to higher education, perhaps, but something that does have an endpoint. Yet to embrace unschooling as true life learning (learning as something that's inseparable from life) means to accept that learning never ends, and to truly become a lifelong unschooler. Now, to me being a lifelong unschooler can definitely include college or university, but it can just as easily not. It's all in how you approach life, and how you think about learning and education, not in whether some of your life learning happens in a school building or not.

For me, I doubt college or university will be part of my life, and if it is, it certainly won't be in the near future.  I know it isn't the right choice for me right now for several reasons:

1. I have a fundamental disagreement with the institution of schooling.  With the structure, how it's run, how it's looked at and what it means to most people, the hierarchy and the commercialization of education.
2. The thought of spending my days in a classroom seems positively stifling to me, which tells me that's definitely not where I should be right now!
3. Of all the things I'm interested in doing with my life, all of the things I think I might do to earn money, a degree is necessary for none of them.
4. The cost.  Especially considering all of the above, to go into debt for a degree I don't want and will likely never use seems ridiculous!

I've managed to learn everything I've wanted and needed to know up to this point without going to school, so the idea that a school building it absolutely necessary all of the sudden is counter intuitive to me, and feels just wrong.  I've quoted it many times before, but this quote by Eartha Kitt always comes to mind:

"I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma."

Learning, the knowledge and skills and experience that's absorbed every single day simply by living life, can and does continue past high school, even if you choose, as I have, to pass on institutions of so-called higher education.

As I happily go through another not-back-to-school season, and while many of my peers are heading back into the classroom, I'm instead following  my own personal, ever changing and evolving "curriculum" (though it looks startlingly like just living life) that currently does or may well include:

• Speaking at the Toronto Unschooling Conference, and at other events, about freedom based education, and specifically unschooling;
• Organizing, with the assistance of a great group of co-conspirators, a freedom-based education conference in Montreal, which will include a wide range of speakers and workshops that give people the knowledge and tools to step outside of the mainstream views on education, learning, and life;
• Continuing to write regularly on my blog to an ever increasing audience;
• Starting to write the first draft of a book about unschooling;
• Finding and implementing creative and non-traditional ways of making money;
• Publishing the second issue of DIY Life Zine, a self-published magazine;
• And helping to further the cause of freedom-based education in Quebec, which includes collaborating with people involved in both starting a freeschool and a lobby group, among other projects.

As you can see, my life currently revolves around both unschooling and writing, two things that I hold very close to my heart.  I feel like I'm following a calling right now, and doing what I'm really *supposed* to be doing in my life.  That doesn't include college, and that's quite fine to me!

I also want to address the frequency with which I see people, even unschoolers, putting a huge gap between pre-eighteen and post-eighteen life.  As if, along with the end of unschooling high school and the start of college, turning eighteen means there suddenly has to be a huge shift in the way you act, what is expected of you, and how you’re treated.  I know that leading up to my eighteenth birthday I felt a HUGE amount of pressure!  To be doing something vastly different suddenly, to be taking on a ton more responsibility all at once!  As if eighteen was a kind of magical number and age.  Yet, I was still the same person on the day before my birthday as I was on the day after.  Still growing and changing, yes, but not making any huge jumps in that growth just because I’d passed a day that a bunch of people have decided holds special significance!  I see much talk among unschoolers about allowing your child to grow at their own pace, respecting their natural timeline and not attempting to force an external measure of when they should be doing what upon them.  Yet many seem to think that philosophy no longer applies after age eighteen.  You’re an adult now: act like one!

I encourage parents to realize that there is no magical age, and that their kid is still the same person, and no matter what their age should not be held to any external measure of what they “should” be doing.

So, Where do I go from here?

At my age, people now want to know what I’m going to do with my life.  Because seemingly, a decision must be made before age 20, and changing your mind frequently, or heaven forbid, moving into and through adulthood without a solid plan, is unacceptable.  People think that you have to have answers: goals and 10 step plans and ‘where you want to be when you’re forty’.  The time to decide what the rest of your life will look like is now, so many people think.  Yet to me, over-planning feels stifling.  I’d rather take life as it comes, make short term plans only, try lots of different things, focus on what’s truly important to me at each point in my life, and just do my best to make things work out.  Sometimes, the sheer spontaneity and lack-of-certainty of this non-plan seems terrifying to me, but looking at people I admire who are in their thirties or forties and have basically lived this way for years gives me courage.  They don’t usually have much money, but they’re happy: and to me, that’s what’s important!  I don’t want to be rich, I just want to be happy, to contribute my best self to the world, to do good, and to live by and act on my personal ethics and morality.  To me that’s true success, not the gaining of social station or monetary profits.  

The power of life learning

In closing, I want to reiterate what I said earlier: that true life learning never ends.  We’re always learning, growing, and discovering.  And as unschoolers, we’re in a marvellous position to think, see, and live outside of the box.  I make YouTube videos about unschooling sometimes, and in one video I interviewed my sister.  One of the questions I asked her was what does she think the best thing about unschooling is?  And, after saying she can think of LOTS of good things, she said:

“You get to have freedom in shaping yourself, and I think you really come to know who you are and what you want to do...in life. I often encounter people in school with the mindset of ‘oh, this is just the way things are, well I’m just going to do this, I guess’.  I think not having that sort of close-minded, narrow path kind of outlook on life is the best thing you get from unschooling.”

If you know and trust yourself, if you feel confident in your ability to direct your own life, you have the tools to see where you want to be, where your unique skills and passions can best be put to good use.  You have the courage to change your mind, and choose a new path when the old one no longer feels like a good fit.  By giving children and teens the power over their own lives, you create individuals who can enact important changes in their lives, the lives of those around them, and the world itself.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with another quote by Wendy Priesnitz:

"Personal empowerment begins with realizing the value of our own life experience and potential to affect the world.”

The Need For Schooling

I've gotten more negative comments on this blog in the last couple of weeks than ever before!  They have been kind of nasty (I think I deleted one, because it really bothered me), ignorant, defensive, and rather hostile.  Several have been responded to wonderfully by other commenters, I've responded to a couple, and some I've decided have enough in them that I'd like to really take the time to respond not only in the comments, but in an actual post.  This is one of them, a comment that was posted (anonymously, of course) on my post Unschooling is Forever Part 3: Isolation, Socialization, and Doubters.  The comment is in italics, my response in regular font.

Schooling and life learning are not mutually exclusive. Schooled children learn in a structured manner on school days for approximately 6 hours. The rest of their life is spent learning freely.

Really?  Only six hours?  What about transportation to and from school?  The hours of homework to be done after school?  It seems to me that school takes up quite a bit more time than six hours a day, and that for the majority of schooled people, very little time is left over to "learn freely"!

Not all parents are as patient and nurturing as you experienced with your mother.

Of course they're not.  But what other experience am I expected to write from besides my own?  I write and speak about unschooling from my own experience, my own observations of others experiences, and research (reading anything about freedom-based education I can get my hands on).  But, mainly, from my own experience.  I don't claim and have never claimed to speak for or represent all unschoolers: I represent myself only, and my mother is a wonderful, nurturing person.  I hope that comes across whenever I write about her.

However, there are lots of other unschoolers out there with very different experiences (though I'm happy to say the majority of unschooling parents I know are very "nurturing").  Some have bad relationships with their parents.  Some unschoolers left high school to unschool entirely against the wishes and without the support of their parents.  Each experience is different.

There are many children who benefit greatly from the structure and separation that school provides. In some cases there are sad situations behind that reality. In other cases, it just works well.   There are also many families who do not have the luxury of the stay-at-home-parent.

Now, I see a couple of points that need to be addressed here:  firstly, unschooling is NOT against structure.  What unschoolers are against is *forced* structure.  Unschooling is all about personal choice: putting the power over their own learning and life into the learner's/student's/individual's hands.  It's then up to that individual to choose how much or little structure they want in their lives.  Sometimes (fairly frequently, actually), unschoolers decide to try school!  Many end up choosing to leave again at a later date, some stay.  Unschooling isn't a philosophy against structure: it's a philosophy against force and coercion in the choosing of what and when to learn.

By sad situations, I assume you're talking about bad home lives.  I agree, that's incredibly sad, and in such cases, which are way too common, unschooling definitely isn't an option.  In low income families, again, I agree that unschooling can be extremely difficult, and even impossible, to do (I should mention that I do know unschoolers who either are on or have been on welfare, so some low income families definitely manage to unschool!).  But there's a reason I say I'm not just in support of unschooling, but of freedom-based education.  Under that umbrella of freedom-based education, I place both unschooling and something else called freeschooling.  The most basic description of freeschooling would be unschooling in a building!  Virtually every freeschool I've heard of is dedicated to accepting as many people who want to go there as they can, no matter their economic backgrounds.  This certainly holds true for the freeschool starting up near me, as the organizers have a strong social justice bent and envision something truly wonderful, community based, and inclusive!

There are many children who would not have the drive to learn to read, as you did.

Oh dear, here I do believe you're showing your ignorance in having never interacted with the unschooling community, and seen the results! As Peggy Pirro, who writes one of my favorite unschooling books, said:

“We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.”

And that's how unschooling works.  As humans, we're creatures who love and want to learn, creatures who will learn everything they need to function in the society they're born into, simply by being a part of that society.  However, when you dis-empower people by telling them that they're not smart enough, not mature enough, not trustworthy enough, to control their own learning and life, you create people who no longer know how to learn if not from an "expert".  Schooling creates people who look to a higher authority for the answers, and don't trust their own power.

I have yet to meet an unschooler who *didn't* learn to read, and at this point, I've been lucky enough to meet hundreds of unschoolers in real life, and dozens more online.  And yet at the same time, I don't think literacy, knowledge of math, or any other academic achievement should be used as a measurement, *the* measurement, of success for any human being.  Memorizing stuff, learning to read?  That's easy.  And there are plenty of very well educated people who are miserable, depressed, and suicidal.  Is being "educated", as defined by having a body of knowledge that has been judged the Most Important Things To Know by some far off authority, really the most import thing out there?  I'd ask instead: are you happy?  Do you have a knowledge of your own value?  Do you love?  Do you feel loved?  Are you living in a way that makes you feel good?  Are you giving your best self to the world?  These are what I would consider measures of success, not whether you can do algebraic equations.

Schools do provide a service to our society, even if all it amounts to is increasing literacy of our community.

If everyone graduated high school being able to read, then this might be a more convincing argument.  It might also be a more convincing argument if the tons of people who graduate high school and can read, actually all liked reading, instead of many planning never to open a book again if they can help it.  Forced "learning" (because forced learning is never as real or powerful as true, deep learning, chosen willingly) often sours the subject, makes it hard and boring and distasteful.  Who enjoys being forced to do something against their will?  When you come to something yourself, you come to it without the tangled web of negative emotions and experiences attached to something you were forcibly made to do.

It sounds like your objective is to promote unschooling as superior. What you should be doing is seeking acceptance of unschooling as an equivalently effective method for preparing our children to become productive adults in our society.

That's what I *should* be doing, is it?  I should tell you now, Anonymous, that I don't take well to doing things I *should* be doing.  Everyone has their own idea for what everyone else should be doing, and many feel no shame in sharing their visions of what an individual should be doing loudly and authoritatively with said individual.  Whereas me?  I'm a fan of listening to your own intuition, looking at what you need and want, what your community (human, non-human, nature) needs and wants, and then taking the path that seems best to you.

I believe in freedom: freedom from government, corporation, hierarchy, oppression.  I don't see unschooling as simply one option among many (should I unschool this year, or go with a private school?), but as a method of freeing individuals from a government controlled institution that's intent on turning out well schooled individuals, who don't question the status quo, and happily consume as an empty attempt at gaining fulfillment.  Unschooling isn't just a type of education to me: it's a revolutionary and joyful choice.

So yes, I definitely consider unschooling  to be superior to other so-called methods of education.  No, I *shouldn't* simply be "seeking acceptance of unschooling as an equivalently effective method for preparing our children to become productive adults in our society".  I have absolutely no desire to become a "productive member of society" (=cog in a very large and currently earth destroying machine), or to suggest anyone else do such a thing.  What I want to be, and what I see as being created by unschooling/life learning/freeschooling is *good* (kind, compassionate, passionate, strong) people.  That's my wish and my hope, and more importantly than wishing and hoping, what I'm trying my hardest to be and do.

There are so many children in our world that need schools. 

No.  There are so many children in our world that need love, and food and shelter, and acceptance, and support, and trust.  No one *needs* schooling!