By Duncan Kinney
The current K-12 educational system exists, generally speaking, for two primary reasons. First, its scalability makes it easy for the state to educate its citizens, and second, it gives children and teens a shared public space where they learn to interact with others and hopefully pick up some societal norms.
According to Alberta Education, of the just over 600,000 K-12 students in Alberta, just under 10,000 of them are home-schooled. The percentage of home-schooled children compared to children in a typical school environment comes to just 1.4 per cent. Home-schooling, at this point in time, is simply not a mainstream activity.
Drill down even farther within the home-schooling crowd, though, and you come to un-schooling, a minority within a minority. Why should you care about this tiny community of people with some pretty borderline-crazy ideas? Because, funnily enough, it might be a singularly amazing and fulfilling way to educate your young children.
“To be perfectly honest, most days I feel like I’m getting away with something big,” says Theresa Shea, a 47-year-old Edmonton-based writer and proud un-schooler of her three children aged 8, 10 and 12. “I think people would be surprised at how good the life is.”
So what is it? Un-schooling is a slippery concept, and it defies easy explanation. The Unschooling.com website has a page dedicated strictly to the different definitions of the practice, and it features over 20 interpretations.
Put simply, though, un-schooling is learning without the trappings of a formal schooling arrangement. It is the act of trusting your child’s natural curiosity to teach them what they need to know. This is not to say that you abandon your children at the playground and pick them up at the end of the day, mind you. Instead, the parent plays a critical role as a resource who is there to answer questions, to talk with and to provide support.
Writers and thinkers have explored this approach to education for some time. Influential books in the un-schooling canon include Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich and a suite of books by author John Holt. Holt, who has been credited with the creation of the word un-schooling, wrote How Children Fail, How Children Learn and his final book Learning All the Time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught.
Shea, who lives in the community of Millcreek in Edmonton, is part of a clutch of families un-schooling their children in that neighborhood. She didn’t have a grand home-schooling plan. When her oldest was five she still had two younger children in the house and didn’t relish the thought of getting him to kindergarten and back twice a day, so they nixed attending kindergarten.
“Grade 1 came. We thought that was nice. Let’s skip grade 1,” says Shea. From there Shea went down the path to un-schooling all of her children.
People frequently laugh off the formative influence of formal schooling on children. References to the school of hard knocks or real life experience are plentiful in success stories, especially in Western Canada. However, it’s worthwhile to examine the conditioning that comes into play in alternative schooling arrangements.
One day, as Shea was watching her children play soccer from the sidelines, she started talking to this cute-as-a-button eight-year-old named Kate. Being polite, Kate asked Shea where her kids went to school. When Shea told Kate that her kids didn’t go to school the little girl’s big blue eyes welled up with panic. “But how will they learn?” said Kate, in all of her eight-year-old sincerity.
This little anecdote is funny, but it’s also incredibly common. If someone told you they were unschooling their children what would your first reaction be?
Well, it turns out the children involved learn just fine. Shea’s children never did phonics or memorized the alphabet, but still they learned to read on their own.
Last year Shea’s son wanted to do more math so, deviating from the strict un-schooling line of thought, they placed him in an online math course.
“He did an entire year of curriculum in 3 months,” Shea says. In one year, he’s gone through 2 ½ years of math.
Brenda Baradoy is a grandmother from Calgary and is a co-owner of Canadian Home Education Resources, along with her husband. She home-schooled her own children, and during that process saw a business opportunity in selling educational books and materials to home-schooling families. She meets, talks to and interacts with plenty of home-schoolers every week.
Baradoy puts un-schoolers on one end of the home-schooling spectrum and the “textbook and let’s sit down and do school between 8 and 4” on the other.
“It can be a valid way of teaching. It depends on the parent, but that’s like any form of education. If you’re just letting the children play and there’s no parent involvement you’re going to run into problems,” says Baradoy.
“I’ve seen some who’ve done amazingly well and I’ve seen some that have been a disaster. It depends on the parent’s involvement and the resources you make available to your child.”
Given the demands it places on parents, un-schooling is not a solution for the majority of the population. It requires a flexible work schedule and deeply committed parents. More importantly, perhaps, the parents have to guard against bringing their own ideology into the process, and find ways to make up for the social interaction that the children miss out on when compared to their public school peers.
“I don’t think the unschooling life is for everyone, just as I don’t think any particular life would make everybody happy,” says Shea.
Not surprisingly, the most contentious element of the un-schooling process revolves around the question of socialization. Will children be socialized properly in an unschooling process, or will they turn into nose-picking little monsters who get along better with imaginary friends than real ones?
It’s hard to say but one thing that will make the process easier is having the community that Shea does with several other families unschooling their children in the same neighborhood.
Still, Shea believes passionately that she’s made the right choice for her children. “Home-schooling has this air of preciousness about it. There is this notion that it’s not the real world. School is less the real world than un-schooling,” says Shea.
So, would you unschool your children?
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I personally learned how to do math by watching The Price Is Right, well before attending kindergarten, and was being introduced to algebra in special sessions with aides from the third grade class before it was time for me to enter first grade. So, I quite obviously know how well a child can learn through simple curiosity and the help of a nearby adult.
But I also understand that it would be a serious mistake to promote this kind of educational model except in a very limited set of parental situations. Home-schooling so often produces woefully undereducated individuals for a reason: just being a parent does not make you an able teacher. I notice this does not mention any measure of Shea’s childrens’ knowledge. While these particular children may be very learned, if you do this with 100 families, most will not be. The majority will indeed be “getting away with something big.”
Both my niece and nephew were home schooled, and unschooled. We were familiar with the work of John Holt since my mother is a specialist in small child development, who later taught learning disabled. My nephew just graduated from college with a bachelor’s in History at the age of twenty. It’s not just that he’s brilliant: he has a freedom of thought and lack of prejudice on the origins or classifications of knowledge that is shaping him up as a renaissance man. He used to ask for math books, which he considered puzzles. The experience blew us away. You can’t even recognize the fetters of the system until you realize how your own experience with school shaped your relationship to certain ideas. Coercion is never a good idea, and mandatory schooling can kill the passion for learning.
I think this is brilliant! There is too much brainwashing going on with society. We are not supposed to follow all the rules and play nice, we are animals deep down. I think this lets children grow up to be the people they WANT to be, instead of being forced into a tiny preset role in life. Let THEM explore what they are curious, and they’ll be much happier and self-motivate to learn on their own.
The school system is a joke.
Bravo, I encourage this!
“Home-schooling so often produces woefully undereducated individuals for a reason”
This is not correct at all. Every study has shown that on average homeschooled kids are better educated than institutionalized (state educated) kids.
Many people wonder how unschooling works in practice, especially for mathematics and sciences. Unschoolers at Natural Math recently started to collect their stories about a particular, mundane math topic – multiplication. You can see the variety of practices, read the stories and contribute your own, here: http://naturalmath.wikispaces.com/Child-Led+Multiplication+Study
Some kids learn times tables at six, some at sixteen, and some not at all – yet they are doing well in college calculus!
my observation of a couple of my friends kids in the home school arena, was that they were deprived. they are living in a rural area so any enter action with there peers is not there. also the chance to be a team player in sports will aid them in real life experiences eventually. there uncle, a longtime friend of mine noted that they don’t get to do anything. well, yeah there parents choose this sheltered lifestyle. this poor judgement of parents will be kicking themselves one day and regretting the choice they made. when opportunity is there only once, you shouldn’t be so narrow minded when education is such an important thing in todays world.
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“Home-schooling so often produces woefully undereducated individuals for a reason: just being a parent does not make you an able teacher.”
This comment is pulled out of the commenter’s arse. There is a large body of research showing that homeschoolers do better academically (and socially, for that matter).
Let’s admit it: school is mostly about babysitting. Let’s get those kids warehoused because I need to make my money.
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