Unschooling Teaches Us To Release Control Over Kids
The September/October, 2010 issue of Life Learning Magazine has been published and is now available for subscribers to download.
The theme for this issue is control – and letting go of it. Education in our culture is all about control – control over kids by adults, control over teachers by principals, control over principals by school boards, control over the curriculum and testing by governments, control over increasingly schooled students by “experts” who have attained even higher levels of schooling….
When I first started thinking about this issue, I thought the theme was food, given that there are two articles using it as an analogy for how unschoolers life learners live…but then I realized those articles are also about relinquishing control.
As I wrote in this blog recently, adult control over kids’ lives is often called “adultism,” as in sexism, racism, and a host of other “isms” that most of us try to overcome. (That blog post attracted record traffic to the blog and it’s still circulating in cyberspace.) That makes me optimistic that there is interest in helping kids make their own choices (as developmentally appropriate, of course).
Relinquishing control over our children’s lives (as opposed to giving up the parental stewardship role) is not easy. For some, it can be a fine line to walk, for others a wide cavern to jump. I hope the selection of articles in this issue is helpful for both groups, and – and although I realize readers of Life Learning are mostly the converted – that the articles will help free children from the disrespect with which they are so often treated and allow them to take possession of their lives and their learning.
Always Learning
Learning is not a finite thing. When exactly does the process of learning to read end? When we can identify a stop sign? Read Dick and Jane books? A newspaper? A games manual? War and Peace? I am still learning to read, to comprehend more, to expand my vocabulary, to read more quickly when I want to, to explore different genres and styles of writing. At some point, I may have to learn Braille!
Nevertheless, as fall approaches and many schools prepare to re-start classes, the back-to-school rhetoric is also revving up. The common thread – in advertising, media coverage, and back fence and water cooler conversation – involves preparing children to begin learning once again. What a narrow-minded, nonsensical, sad, and dangerous notion! Of course learning doesn’t stop and start just because those who run an institution like schooling say it will.
People are learning beings, constantly picking up skills and insights. In fact, school, with its boring regimentation, packaged curriculum that fails to relate to most children’s needs or interests, and often bleak surroundings, is actually not all that conducive to learning.
Fortunately, the fall is not-back-to-school time for an increasing number of unschoolers life learners. These kids are free to live, grow, and learn in their own joyous ways, not held back by the demands of an out-of-date and monolithic institution whose gatekeepers believe that children turn learning off and on at their bidding.
Defeating Adultism
There are many “isms” in our vocabulary – racism, sexism, and so on – which address discrimination on the basis of things like ethnicity, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, and physical abilities. Many of us try to overturn these “isms” in our own lives and in the broader culture. One “ism” that isn’t so often dealt with – even by progressives – is adultism. In our culture (and most others in the world), adults have a special status of control over kids. Adults make decisions for children (their own and other people’s), create rules that govern children’s day-to-day lives, and generally tell kids what to do. That manifests in ordering, yelling, directing, preaching, disciplining, demeaning, embarrassing, questioning, patting and other touching without permission, yanking, ignoring, and referring to children in the third person.
This behavior isn’t usually undertaken with abusive intent; indeed, most adults wield power over kids because they assume it’s their duty, as well as their right. Adults are thought to be entitled to these behaviors on the assumptions that they are superior to children and young people, and that they know best what’s good for the younger generation.
Scratch below the surface, and you’ll find that this sort of adult disrespect is inherited. It’s how we were treated as children by our parents and in our schools…and how our parents were treated by the generation before that. And it’s reinforced by other social institutions like churches and medical systems, as well as by laws. The context of the adult-child relationship in our society is power, hierarchy, mistrust, and coercion.
One of the places that adultism manifests itself is our education system. Most people believe that children and young people must be made to go to school or else they won’t learn. So we have created factories in which children are processed and warehouses where they are stored until it’s convenient for adults to have them around. Getting rid of the factory model of public education challenges not just our assumptions about how children learn, but a variety of agendas related to adultism and other sorts of power.
I wrote about this in the introduction to my book Challenging Assumptions in Education – From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society:
“By our very use of words like ‘teaching’ and ‘schooling,’ we seem to accept the idea that some people at the top are doing things to other people farther down the totem pole. Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted. That is no way to help children grow up into compassionate citizens who think independently and participate in the life of their communities and countries.”
Arguing against adultism is difficult. Giving up power can make people fearful and leave them feeling threatened. They think “unschooling” means unparenting, and life learning means uneducated. But life learners are at the leading edge of an important attempt to broaden the definition of childhood, to respect children as whole people who are functioning members of society…and to improve our education system along the way. So we must defeat adultism by leading with how we speak to (and about) children, and how we treat them.
Here is a longer article in Life Learning Magazine that is based on this post.
The Myth of Summer Brain Drain
Party’s over, kiddies. Right on cue, half way through the summer holidays, many (most?) parents are getting jittery that in another month their offspring will have forgotten everything they learned during the last school year. One writer said she needs to accelerate the academic prep about now, even though her kid has been engaged in everything from movie-making to writing stories at summer camp. Here’s another example of this genre from the Huffington Post.
Parenting magazines are full of these remedies that involve managing your kids’ time and activities in ways that read like school teachers’ lesson plans: Have your kids help cook dinner in order to practice math skills, start a book club and choose engaging (rather than “overly challenging”) books for summer, get your kids involved in the family vacation by creating a scrapbook. (This is, of course, stuff that homeschooling families do as a matter of course, and that some unschooling life learning kids get involved in without the parental organizing or the covert agenda.)
The rationale for this mid-summer frenzy? Apparently, some researchers have decided that forty percent of “math skills” and thirty percent of “language arts skills” are forgotten over the summer break from school.
There are lessons to be learned here, of the life learning sort: 1) If you forget something after two months, you didn’t learn it in the first place (although you may have memorized it well enough to ace the end-of-school test.) 2) Coercion and manipulation – no matter how well-meaning or cute – is not conducive to learning (or to good relations between people, but that’s another story.) Well, actually, maybe it’s the same story…here’s a gem of horrific manipulation on this topic that Kelly Hogaboom told me about today. Please, schooling parents, give your kids a break!
Computers and Self-Directed Learning
In the July 9 online edition of The New York Times, Silicon Valley-based business professor Randall Stross published an article entitled Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. He described some studies in which economists have been measuring a home computer’s impact on the school performance of children in low-income households. (Actually, he and the researchers he quotes refer to “educational impact” but there is, of course, little correlation between getting high scores on school tests and being educated.) Anyway, the researchers have concluded that there is “little or no educational benefit” to providing students with their own computers because they apparently resulted in declining test scores. Worse, they found that low-income kids’ test scores often decline more than their richer counterparts after the computers arrive.
The author begins by declaring his ignorance of how people learn, his sharing of our culture’s lack of respect for kids, and the education industry’s arrogant belief that there is little value to anything except what schools teach. He writes, “Middle school students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.” And he ends on the same note: “How disappointing to read in the Texas study that ‘there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.’ When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.”
Too bad Professor Stross doesn’t realize the irony in those two sentences. If the schools had put less effort into controlling learners and what they were supposed to learn, the students would have wasted less of their self-directed energy. I wonder what he and the researchers would say about the education unschooled life learning kids give themselves at home with computers and without “hovering supervision” (not to mention their satisfaction levels). No matter what sort of manipulation, supervision or technology is directed at the educational process, people learn what they want and need to learn. And that’s an education – whether business professors, schools, and educational researchers like it or not.
The Fast Food Model of Education
A curriculum is a diet of other people’s ideas that is fed to children in schools. It is designed by a group of people assumed to be much better qualified than mere parents – let alone children – to decide exactly the type of information that should be fed, and when, and how its digestion should be measured. However, that very process results, more often than not, in what I call “fast food education.” It is no wonder that many students have to be forced to eat this diet…and in many cases fail to digest it. Its standardized content is often bland, bulked up with fillers, and short on flavor. Its delivery is regimented and, many times, uninspired. School children are seldom consulted as to their tastes, or even level of hunger, let alone trusted to understand their own nutritional requirements or dietary quirks! The force-feeding process is so relentless that many students gag on it, in some cases becoming permanently soured on learning.
In spite of catch phrases like “child-directed learning” and many good intentions, fast food education is the norm because a curriculum diet is an easy, efficient way to feed facts simultaneously to large groups of people. For purely management reasons, school systems feel they must chop up knowledge, parcel it out, and feed it to children in small portions. Whether or not the parcels make sense to a particular learner, or the portions are of the correct size, are secondary to the need to get everyone fed at least something. And to make things worse, each meal-sized portion of each subject area is desiccated, premixed and fed by teachers who have minimal knowledge of, or connection to, what other teachers are feeding, and who are not able to provide context tor the disconnected facts they’re shoveling into their students’ mouths. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, students never receive a complete experience at school, except on the installment plan! The information provided often has no relation to the lives of the learners, especially those who aren’t part of the dominant culture. And few tools are provided for decoding the information, or for thinking critically about it.
Unfortunately, home educators aren’t immune to feeding educational fast food. Their motivation is usually to comfort themselves (and those “authorities” who are mandated to oversee their children’s learning) by attempting to control what is a very mysterious process. Learning is open-ended and often invisible. It is difficult to observe and manage. Papers and plans can be something to hold onto when a child’s intellectual growth process seems chaotic or obscure (or doesn’t measure up to Jimmy’s next door). Yes, there is a great deal of comfort involved for everyone in the use of curriculum…except, of course, for learners, who often end up frustrated, confused, bloated, and yet still hungry.
Languid acceptance, half-hearted digestion, and mindless regurgitation are not a good recipe for developing minds that will be able to think us out of the social, economic, and environmental messes we have put ourselves in!
The meals created by hungry individuals weaving together their own education using their own timetables and the resources found in their communities are so much more delicious, nourishing and useful! Call it “slow learning!”
(This essay is adapted from the book Challenging Assumptions in Education.)
The Roots of Unschooling Denial
I once had a remarkable conversation with someone at a social event. A lawyer and I were happily chatting about many things, including what we each do for a living, when I, in response to a question, casually mentioned my advocacy for life learning (but certainly didn’t try to “sell” it.). All of a sudden, this man became highly defensive about his own children’s schooling arrangements and his own love of school. In fact, he went on and on, unable to enthuse enough about his schooling. He apparently loved school, did very well academically, played sports, had a great social life and made many lifelong friends, etc., etc. So, he stated emphatically, school was great for him and is great for his kids.
I just smiled, said I was glad he enjoyed school, that I did too, and then we moved on. However, I couldn’t help but chuckle as, throughout the evening, I picked up snippets of other comments from this very pleasant and gregarious man, which provided many hints about his real school experiences…and the fallout. He confessed in various other conversations to being science-phobic, to having no patience for – and actually “hating” – poetry and plays, to being overly competitive (and his wife not enough), and to wishing he’d had more time as a kid to daydream, to be in Nature. He laughingly (and seemingly self-approvingly) recounted a story about how his “in-group” of teenagers had bullied other kids (although that’s not how he presented it) and baited the teacher.
But school was great and he has no idea why I think it should be abolished in favor of a more respectful, learner-centered alternative. While I respect this man’s right to his memories and opinions, I feel sad that he hasn’t connected his regrets about himself with his childhood experiences. And I feel angry that he is unwilling to apply them to his own children’s lives. But I understand the implications of doing that: An examination of such issues would demand change, and going with the status quo is much simpler for most people. If adults admit to the damage done to themselves by their schooling, they would have to question sending their own children to school. And that could be inconvenient. So denial rules.
Kids Are Capable of Much More Than We Give Them Credit For
The recent sailing misadventure of sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland and the successful climbing of Mount Everest by thirteen-year old Jordan Romero have me thinking about skill and ability as related to age. Whenever a kid accomplishes something major, it hits the media because children aren’t expected to achieve much in our society. But the coverage usually involves adult disapproval more than admiration and encouragement. In Romero’s case, we read cute stories about him calling his mom from the summit, along with some age-related criticism, even after he reached the top. Sunderland and her parents have been the topic of a great deal of media negativity, especially since she had to be rescued.
Although the term hasn’t been used, to my knowledge, in coverage of these two situations, the word “prodigy” comes to mind. The dictionary definition of prodigy is an extraordinary, marvelous, or unusual accomplishment, deed, or event – which, I think, fits both adventures. A child prodigy is defined as someone who, at an early age, masters a skill at an adult level…with the assumption that the achievement is extraordinary, marvelous and unusual. Although both Sunderland and Romero are at the upper end of qualifying as children, they have, by all accounts, mastered skills that most adults have not.
But what exactly is an “adult-level skill”? Who decides? Why do we connect a person’s age with their talent and ability anyway? And why do we have such a problem with kids pursuing – and perhaps achieving – excellence? Our ageist culture is in awe of prodigious talent, but only when it’s seen in adults; in kids, it’s usually either dangerous or weird, and given a label that smacks of condescension. Do a web search for “child prodigy” and you’ll find lots of sites listing such people as some kind of freak of Nature, the gosh wow factor often accompanied by sad tales of lives wrecked by the burden of unusual talent. There’s even one site called oddee.com, which concerns itself with the “odd, bizarre and strange things of our world”…and highlights ten kids who have accomplished things. Of course, it’s not the talent that’s odd, but our reaction to it.
It’s likely that all kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. Joyce Reed, in her new book What Really Matters, co-authored with David Albert, points out that anthropologists have found evidence of human communities in which the oldest bone artifacts are of eighteen-year-olds. She writes, “It means that in order for that society to continue and to develop, it had to more than reproduce itself within eighteen years. Children (by our standards) were having children as soon as they were biologically capable (ten to twelve?), but they were then dying before they raised those children past the ages of six or eight. Thus, between ages five and eighteen, these ‘children’ lived in groups, sharing and caring and learning to take care of themselves and each other. Isn’t that an astounding thought? It certainly could mean that humans are programmed to do our best problem-solving in those years – if we are given the freedom to do so…Yes, we are concerned that our twelve- and thirteen-year-olds could be as precocious as Romeo and Juliet, but we rarely realize that they could also develop and demonstrate the leadership and decision-making abilities of Alexander the Great, who was leading a significant portion of his era’s population into a new and different concept of nationhood at age eighteen.”
Instead of allowing children to follow their passions and play meaningful roles in society, most parents cocoon them, even living their lives for them, with the conflicting goals of keeping them safe from the world while helping them compete in it. Schools don’t challenge kids either: Six-year-olds belong in first grade, whether or not they are capable of (and are often already doing) third grade level work. Society stereotypes age groups, generalizing that all adolescents are equally immature, violent, or rebellious. And the few kids who do manage – often with the support of parents who see things differently – to excel at something are labeled as prodigies…odd and unusual, and best pushed back to where they belong lest they get hurt.
Perhaps the recent generations of life learners will break through this ceiling and help normalize the idea that children are capable human beings with the right to develop their abilities and passions as they choose…and with the help of adults, rather than with their criticism and faux protection.
What Really Matters is Now Available
Our latest book is hot off the press! What Really Matters by David Albert and Joyce Reed is subtitled “Two veteran homeschooling advocates discuss what learning is really all about.”
The official publication date is September 1, but copies are now available for sale (with no shipping!) to friends and subscribers.
We are thrilled with all the wonderful things people are saying about the book. You can read some of them (by people you may recognize in the home-based learning world) here.
Just a few minutes ago, we created a Facebook page for the book. We’ll be keeping it up-to-date with reviews and other information, so we invite you to drop by.
This is a powerful conversation about parenting and home-based learning from parents who, between them, have helped seven children (now grown) learn without school. It will be reassuring and informative for those just embarking on the path, and provide a great deal of food for thought for the rest of us.
Unschooling: Doughnuts and Peanut Sauce
The ABC News show Nightline has recently featured “unschooling.” I guess budgets are low and the network is repurposing content – or at least ideas. Last month, one of the Nightline segment “reporters” did a similar piece, with a different family, on the ABC show Good Morning America. It was equally as ignorant, unbalanced, and sensationalist. But I guess they were proud of their first foray into the muck, since, in an oddly sort of déjà vu manner, the shows are quite similar, right down to the website text accompanying the two videos. Aside from having moved from calling this supposedly odd phenomenon “radical homeschooling” to “unschooling,” even the headline is the same. Oh, and the scandalous food that these reportedly irresponsible parents supposedly “let” their kids eat has changed from doughnuts to pasta with peanut butter sauce.
Sadly, it looks like the “reporter” didn’t learn from (did she even read?) any of the feedback to the first piece before doing the second one. For instance, many of us pointed out that unschooling life learning isn’t particularly new (some families – mine included – were living this way with our families 35 years ago, and John Holt coined the term back then too), but there they are gushing on about this “radical new approach to education and parenting.”
This is becoming wearisome. Even film critic Roger Ebert has weighed in on the subject, for heaven’s sake! However, I’ll put my ennui aside one more time to challenge the ridiculous notions in this show, simply because it reaches so many people. One of the things that apparently bothers these “reporters” is that unschooling life learning parents allow kids to decide what to learn and when. The reality is that (contrary to what most people prefer to believe) even school kids decide what they want to learn and when. They can’t help it; it’s a prerequisite of learning. Oh, they might memorize some stuff in order to pass a test or otherwise regurgitate on demand, but that’s not learning. The idea that adults can decide what kids will learn and when is delusional, futile, and counterproductive.
Real learning is not something adults do to kids, no matter how much parents and schools want it to be. This Nightline show picks algebra and Shakespeare as examples of topics that kids miss out on by not being in school. I suspect that most people use simple algebra in their everyday lives, whether or not they know/care what it’s called, that it is taught in school, and that it’s supposed to be difficult. And to say, as these self-appointed TVland experts do, that people need to be exposed to Shakespeare is just silly. Almost as silly as saying that life learners won’t be. Or that there’s something wrong with pasta with peanut sauce. Pad Thai anyone? We’ll eat it while we’re reading some of the books we’re apparently not supposed to have in our homes (according to the piece’s title).
We need to remember that these shows are entertainment for the masses, not news. And that the people who use them to justify their own fear of a better future for their kids will be the last ones to embrace or create change. If this show and its clones enlighten a handful of families looking for another way to help their kids learn, then the brave life learners involved have spent their time well.