Five Requirements for Effective Parenting
In an interview this morning, I was asked to name the five things that I think are crucial for effective parenting. Respect and trust were the first to come to mind; I’ve been talking about them forever as prerequisites for creating an environment in which kids can develop and learn. It took me a little while longer to distill everything else into three words. But I eventually came up with open-mindedness, experimentation, and communication. Parents need to be open-minded and willing to experiment with ways to live with children, rather than blindly following rules provided by other parents, books by “experts,” or variously defined parenting or educating “styles.” And communication is the key to creating an environment of respect, trust, open-mindedness and experimentation.
(A word about terminology: The words used in the interview were actually “radical unschooling;” “life learning;” and “natural, non-coercive parenting.” I just removed them from the above paragraph because I’m tired of conceptualizing those terms as alternative. It’s time that non-coercion of kids by adults, respect for and trust in kids, and all the rest of the non-domination sorts of behaviors, define how the two generations interact, rather than being some newfangled, utopian alternative. Obviously, we’re not there yet, and conversation would dry up without those short-form words to describe a new way of living, but we need to keep moving these ideas from the sidelines to the mainstream.)
March/April 2010 Issue Now Published
Subscribers to Life Learning Magazine have just been notified that the password-protected March/April 2010 issue is now available for them to download.
You can view the table of contents here and you can subscribe here.
We’ve also posted a short sample article from the issue on the Life Learning Magazine website.
Drop by the website and check out our new and fast-growing index of articles that are archived there.
Unschooling, Radical Unschooling, or Something Else?
Most life learners don’t like to label their children – whether it’s using the alphabet soup provided by those who would drug children into submissive behavior or by means of school-style grades. So I’m always amused and disturbed in equal parts when the debate begins about what to call this sort of child-led, non-coercive, lifestyle that also – obviously – includes learning. Is it simply “unschooling”? Or is it more radical than that? Do we avoid that discussion and find new terminology like “life learning”? We all have our favorite term and can passionately defend it and explain why it describes our family’s way. Of course, we all know there is no one right way to learn or to live…and, oh yes, we don’t like labels. Nevertheless, we – often unconsciously – end up with a label that describes a set of parameters. And we are quite certain of what “breaks” those “rules.” Sometimes this is a good thing. It helps us locate like-minded people to hang out with, which can be comforting when our views are far from the mainstream. It also allows us to describe and discuss this lifestyle with others, while continuing to clarify our philosophy. But our attachment to these labels can be counterproductive. Putting ourselves in boxes can be divisive, creating barriers and sometimes even hostility within a community of people who really would be better off working together – or at least keeping the lines of communication open – in the face of mainstream opposition.
I don’t know what the solution is to this, except to continue to deschool ourselves, which should lessen our need for segmentation, ranking, labeling, and so on. We can also remember to be aware of how our use of these labels affects others with different beliefs and opinions, and to see the definitions as amorphous rather than rigid. Yes, that’s messy and can feel like we’re living with no boundaries, no assurances, no precedents, no guidance (and we are!). But it’s also exhilarating to know we’re at the leading edge of change – of progress – continually redefining how families can live together in a respectful manner. Best of all, it mimics how our children learn: experimenting, making mistakes, leaping forward, sitting back, redefining, locating their own unique path, and slowly finding the vocabulary to describe what went before.
Preview of March/April issue of Life Learning Magazine
We’re working hard on the March/April issue of Life Learning Magazine. Here’s a preview of the cover.
There will be a great new article by John Taylor Gatto; a brilliant piece by David Albert about sorting out our own philosophy of life, parenting and education; and lots more wonderful inspiration and reassurance for unschoolers. (Yes, I’m biased, and no, it’s not too late to subscribe and start your subscription with that issue!)
And stay tuned: We’ll be publishing David Albert’s latest book – written as a conversation with Joyce Reed – this Spring. It’s a compilation of their What Really Matters columns published in Life Learning Magazine.
Accessing Articles From Life Learning Magazine’s Archives
Although we charge for subscriptions to Life Learning Magazine, we aim to keep approximately 15% of the content from back issues available on the site for free.
We’ve recently made that simpler for you to find. Now, on every page of the website (left hand column, halfway down, is a link to the archive of articles that are on the site. We are just beginning to list them there, so keep checking back.
There are two particularly important columns by Naomi Aldort about the problems of labeling children and their so-called “disorders.” Naomi believes that instead of labeling, medicating or trying to change children, we should respond to who they are. And, in many cases, that means removing them from situations in which they aren’t functioning well – including school. We’ll be cataloging the rest of Naomi’s Life Learning columns in the near future.
Wanted: Unschooling Quotes by Women
A few years ago, I was approached by a woman who wanted to write my life history as a woman homeschooling advocate as her PhD thesis. While doing her MA research, she had been struck by the lack of women’s voices in the academic literature. She did write that thesis as a contribution to the literature, and there are now a number of other women choosing this topic for their research. There have also been many popular books written on the subject of home-based education / unschooling over the past five or ten years (not to mention a few going back twenty or thirty years, including my first book School Free).
So why, then, do those ubiquitious lists of quotations about the problems with schools and the benefits of self-directed education contain mostly male voices?
I have set out to remedy this. Already, on my main blog, there are a number of such quotes by both men and women. But I’d like to collect more. So please email me with your favorites. (I’ve closed comments on this blog due to an extremely high level of spam.) I will collate them and post the list on the Life Learning Magazine site.
Labels That Unschoolers Reject
Our school systems like to label children, then medicate them for these so-called problems. Kids are said to be ”learning disabled,” “hyperactive,” “oppositionally defiant,” and to have a variety of other “disorders.” I’ve written about this for years, preferring to think that the problem is with the schooling system rather than with the children. All too often, schools deflect blame onto the victim rather than owing the problem, which originates from a misalignment between children’s needs and the demands of an outdated, assembly line education system.
One of my articles appeared in Natural Life Magazine in 2006 and detailed how, in addition to the school problem, behaviors that are labeled as problematic can result from environmental and dietary issues.
Unschoolers and homeschoolers often reject these labels. And, often, when their children are removed from the school environment and allowed to learn at their own speed, based on their own interests, the so-called “symptoms” disappear.
Psychologist Naomi Aldort has written two important articles in Life Learning Magazine about this issue. She says, “Labels are the invention of the human mind when it believes that one way of being or learning is right and another is wrong.” The first of two columns is entitled The Einstein Syndrome and Other Labels. And the second one is linked from the bottom of that one.
Why is it scary to honor and trust our children?
Thanks to Kyla Matton for her insightful review of our recently published book For the Sake of Our Children by Quebec author Leandre Bergeron.
I know the book is challenging (otherwise, why publish it!?), but I’m wondering why the ideas of honoring one’s children (rather than treating them as possessions), allowing them the freedom to self-direct their own learning, trusting them to know what’s best for them, and the other natural parenting and unschooling notions described in Bergeron’s book are still thought to be so radical. Indeed, says Matton, they might make readers angry, or at least challenge them to disagree. She is probably right in thinking this. And I’m probably insulated against this sort of reaction after 35 years of living this way and writing about it. But there must be a way – other than writing articles and publishing books about life learning – to counter this defensiveness, this apparent fear of change. Indeed, we must find ways to address this sort of reaction – to reassure people – if we are to move toward a culture of respect for children and their ability to learn without school.
We’re All Life Learners
I’ve been doing the New Year clean-up shuffle over the past few days. Among the piles of random notes falling out of my journal and cluttering up my desk was this quote from John Holt: “People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.” When I first came across this quote (although I must have read it before, having devoured all of Holt’s books as they were published), I shrugged it off as stating the obvious – at least if one believes in the parental right to oversee a child’s education. It even seemed a bit odd to me that Holt, of all people, would be forgetting that children should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want. But on second glance, I realized that “themselves” is likely the operative word. I’m guessing that he was referring to the fact that parents should be role models of self-directed learning for their children in a sort of doing unto others manner. Since I can’t locate the context of the sentence, I’ll have to continue to wonder. But I do know that too many of us – yes, even unschoolers – forget that if life learning works for our kids, it works for us too…and that learning doesn’t stop when one turns 16 or 25 or 60.
Self-directed Learning Happens Everywhere
Reconciling our beliefs about the flawed nature of schooling with the need for education in the developing world is an ongoing dilemma for many unschoolers. It’s often the basis for the criticism “it’s okay for you to do, but…” There was, in fact, a spirited discussion on the topic about a year ago in the letters section of Natural Life Magazine. So I was recently pleased to learn about the work of Sugata Mitra, a scientist and education researcher from India. In 1999, he and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected computer, and settled back to watch what happened. (Sound familiar? His work inspired the novel that became Slumdog Millionaire.) What they observed was kids playing with the computer and, in the process, learning how to use it, and then teaching each other. Furthermore, they used their new skills to solve the daily problems of their lives. Subsequently, Mitra formalized the experiment into the Hole in the Wall project, which has demonstrated that self-directed, curiosity-based learning is not the prerogative of upper middle class white kids. Mitra, who is now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK, calls it “minimally invasive education” and suspects that his project is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what kids can learn in this manner. There’s a talk on this subject by Mitra on the TED website.