Freedom From Compulsory Schooling and Children’s Right to Live and Learn in Freedom

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children must have the right to live and learn in freedomOne of the foundations of life learning / unschooling is freedom from compulsory schooling and compulsory instruction. Many of the articles in Life Learning Magazine can be distilled down to that, and I personally write a great deal about children’s rights to control what they learn – as well as when and how – and what they do.

Boston College research professor Dr. Peter Gray has written a thought-provoking and important new blog post on this topic, framing this topic in terms of the right to quit in many aspects of life. He wrote, “Schools, like all institutions, will become moral institutions only when the people they serve are no longer inmates. When students are free to quit, schools will have to grant them other basic human rights, such as the right to have a voice in decisions that affect them, the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, and the right to choose their own paths to happiness.”

That harkens back to an article that Life Learning’s sister magazine Natural Life published in 2008 by teacher Jim Strickland, in which he also questioned compulsory schooling. He wrote, “Compulsory attendance laws undermine learning by creating an atmosphere of coercion, mistrust, and manipulation. They do this by their very existence as the faint (or not-so faint) hum in the background of each potentially joyful moment in every classroom. We all know the best way to make anyone hate doing something is to force their compliance under threat of punishment. Learning that is meaningful, lasting and real can only take place with the consent and willing participation of the learner. One cannot teach the values of freedom and democracy using a totalitarian pedagogy. The medium is the message.” (Jim has another insightful article on the topic in the May/June issue of Natural Life Magazine.)

Interestingly, Jim Strickland works in the public school system, trying to make change from the inside, and Peter Gray ‘s new book Free to Learn (reviewed in the May/June issue of Life Learning Magazine) spends a great deal of time extolling the virtues of Sudbury Valley Schools, where attendance is compulsory!

So it’s left to life learners / unschoolers to lead the change toward respecting children as whole people who can be functioning members of society. But as more and more voices join the chorus (and the level of coercion in public schools becomes more egregious), I am hopeful that we will reach a tipping point. And then, the adult-child relationship in our society will change from one of power, hierarchy, and coercion to one of respect and trust.

On Walking, Laughing, and Trusting Children to Learn

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On Laughing, Walking and Trusting Children to LearnI think there are two important things to keep hold of amidst all the talk about how much influence parents should or shouldn’t have in their unschooled children’s lives. One is to retain our sense of humor about life (and parenting), and the other is to remember back to the days when we were trusting children to learn some of the very basics, such as walking, and what our role was in that learning.

Blogger Amy Milstein posted this smart piece today that covers both of those bases. And that reminded me of this humorous piece that we published in Life Learning Magazine back in 2011 about trusting children to learn; it is a sort of forerunner to Amy’s post.

Enjoy…and keep trusting your children to learn, as well as your parenting instincts. Oh, and don’t forget to laugh!

Unschooling and the Power of Authority

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Unschooling and the power of authorityOne of the first issues I encountered as a life learning / unschooling parent was to overcome and then challenge the influence of the authority associated with schools. I saw two aspects of that authority. One was the officials who wrote and enforced the laws that affected homeschooling and unschooling (and those – like the truant officers and local school principals who didn’t have a clue about what the law actually said); they thought their authority gave them the right to frighten and control families. The other was the more subtle authority vested in the “experts” who “know” that kids must go to school to learn and that parents who don’t send their kids to school are therefore bad, uncaring, abusive parents, or anti-intellectual. I was rebel enough – and certain enough about the damage wrought by school – that I overcame both challenges pretty quickly.

A few years later, as I became an advocate/activist for homeschooling and unschooling, I realized that many people replace that old authority with something that is just as authoritative: They search for an expert authority on the subject who will tell them how to do it right. That concerns me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I think it’s a poor example to our unschooling children if we want them to be autonomous learners.

My problem is the word “authority.” Clearly, someone who has studied something in depth (maybe even experienced it), has amassed a great deal of knowledge about it, and has become passionate about it is someone to be sought out for information or advice on that topic. But it’s good to remember that their knowledge may or may not apply to us. So even though we might consider someone to be an authority on a topic – in this case education of children – we needn’t give them the power over us and our decisions that normally is invested in authority.

This notion of authority also applies to other aspects of our life learning / unschooling lives. In an article entitled “The Many Subtle Faces of Authority,” published in the January/February 2007 issue of Life Learning Magazine, writer, math prof, and mother of grown unschoolers Marion Cohen points out that “the tyranny of wanting to do the right thing for our unschooled children can cause us to replace school-type authorities with a seemingly more benign homeschool-type.” As Cohen sees it, we might invest many things and situations with unnecessary and sometimes undesirable authority. These could range from books, libraries, and websites to get-togethers with other families, structured play opportunities or programs, performances for children, arbitrary family schedules, or various other restrictions created by adult priorities. Cohen writes that giving these things authority can “ignore children’s strengths and streamroll their autonomy.”

Being an expert is tricky. It gives you power to influence or persuade others. And I believe it’s important that those in such roles use our power responsibly and respectfully – whether we’re parenting our own children or assisting other unschooling families. As parents, and when we share our knowledge of unschooling with others, let’s keep in mind the wonderful potential that the writer and activist Starhawk calls “power-with-others,” which she points out we can use to accomplish good things and to effect change through working together.

Boredom, Creativity, and How Unschoolers Learn

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boredom, creativity, and learningIn Life Learning Magazine’s July/August 2004 issue, I wrote an article about how unschoolers learn and the benefits of boredom. I described how, in my experience, “if one is brave enough to hang out with boredom for a while (in oneself or one’s children), they will find that boredom can be the great motivator, a push to develop one’s inner resources.” I wrote about how I’ve found that what we call boredom can be tool for developing my creativity. I also found that my life learning daughters often looked bored but really weren’t; sometimes, lacking a window into our children’s brains – and prompted by our lack of trust in the process of learning – we can make assumptions about what’s going on (or not) with our unschooled kids.

So I was interested to read that a British academic agrees that boredom is a creative state. Dr. Teresa Belton interviewed a number of authors, artists and scientists in her exploration of the effects of boredom. She wasn’t, of course, talking about how unschoolers learn, but she concluded from the responses of her interviewees that “children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them.”

Unfortunately, children in school don’t often have the luxury of that time. As a result, boredom can mean something entirely different in that context. As writer Claire Madgwick notes in an article in the upcoming May/June issue of Life Learning Magazine, school can lead to a state of tedium. And she quotes John Holt from How Children Fail: “We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.”

Given that most of us experienced that type of schooling, it’s no wonder that a fear of boredom and a drive for diversion are embedded in our culture. Ironically, as adults, work and even many of our leisure pursuits often involve what seem like repetitive and boring chores. If we’re going to be good role models for our unschooling / life learning kids, we’d do well to provide ourselves with some regular “stand-and-stare time.”

Grades are an abomination, said Benjamin Spock…33 years ago

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Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child CareWhile sorting through some old files the other day, I came across a newspaper clipping from June, 1980. Dr. Benjamin Spock – author of the iconic book Baby and Child Care and who died in 1998 – was in town, addressing a thousand or so school trustees, administrators, and teachers. And he had something important to say about tests and grades.

He told them, “People who think that education has to be crammed down the throat of a child…think of education in terms of hurdles. Adults who don’t trust children…think everyone has to be coerced… But grades are an abomination. They mislead the parents and the child.”

Spock, who was known for advising that children be treated with respect and for encouraging common sense, also reportedly reminded his audience that teachers of Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin said they were hopeless at school and “would grow up to become insignificant adults.” “See how wrong,” he noted, “the school people can be about this philosophy of grades.”

Apparently, the message wasn’t taken very seriously.