It is very satisfying for parents to see their children in pursuit of knowledge. It is natural and healthy for the children, and in the first few years of life, the pursuit goes on during every waking hour. But after a few short years, most kids go to school. The schools also want to see children in pursuit of knowledge, but the schools want them to pursue mainly the school’s knowledge and devote 12 years of life to doing so.
In his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year award in 1990, John Gatto said, “Schools were designed by Horace Mann . . . and others to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population.” In the interests of managing each generation of children, the public school curriculum has become a hopelessly flawed attempt to define education and to find a way of delivering that definition to vast numbers of children.
The traditional curriculum is based on the assumption that children must be pursued by knowledge because they will never pursue it themselves. Most children don’t like textbooks, workbooks, quizzes, rote memorization, subject schedules and lengthy periods of physical inactivity. One can discover this — even with polite and cooperative children — by asking them if they would like to add more time to their daily schedule. I feel certain that most will decline the offer.
The work of a schoolteacher is not the same as that of a homeschooling parent. In most schools, a teacher is hired to deliver a ready-made, standardized, yearlong curriculum to 25 or more age-segregated children confined in a building all day. The teacher must use a standard curriculum, not because it is the best approach for encouraging an individual child to learn the things that need to be known, but because it is a convenient way to handle and track large numbers of children. The school curriculum is understandable only in the context of bringing administrative order out of daily chaos, of giving direction to frustrated children and unpredictable teachers. It is a system that staggers ever onward but never upward, and every morning we read about the results in our newspapers.
One alternative approach is “unschooling,” also known as “natural learning,” “experience-based learning” or “independent learning.” Before I talk about what unschooling is, I must talk about what it isn’t. Unschooling isn’t a recipe, and therefore it is impossible to give unschooling directions for people to follow so it can be tried for a week or so to see if it works. Unschooling isn’t a method; it is a way of looking at children and at life. It is based on trust that parents and children will find the paths that work best for them without depending on educational institutions, publishing companies or experts to tell them what to do.
Unschooling does not mean that parents can never teach anything to their children, or that children should learn about life entirely on their own without the help and guidance of their parents. It does not mean that parents give up active participation in the education and development of their children and simply hope that something good will happen. Finally, since many unschooling families have definite plans for college, unschooling does not even mean that children will never take a course in any kind of a school.
Then what is unschooling? I can’t speak for every person who uses the term, but I can talk about my own experiences. Our son has never had an academic lesson, and has never been told to read or to learn mathematics, science or history. Nobody has told him about phonics. He has never taken a test or been asked to study or memorize anything. When people ask, “What do you do?”, my answer is that we follow our interests, which inevitably lead to science, literature, history, mathematics and music — all the things that have interested people before anybody thought of them as “subjects.”
A large component of unschooling is grounded in doing real things, not because we hope they will be good for us, but because they are intrinsically fascinating. There is an energy that comes from this that you can’t buy with a curriculum. Children do real things all day long, and in a trusting and supportive home environment, “doing real things” invariably brings about healthy mental development and valuable knowledge. It is natural for children to read, write, play with numbers, learn about society, find out about the past, think, wonder and do all those things that society so unsuccessfully attempts to force upon them in the context of schooling.
While few of us get out of bed in the morning in the mood for a “learning experience,” I hope that all of us get up feeling in the mood for life. Children always do so — unless they are ill or life has been made overly stressful or confusing for them. Sometimes the problem for the parent is that it can be difficult to determine if anything important is actually going on. It is a little like watching a garden grow. No matter how closely we examine the garden, it is difficult to verify that anything is happening at that particular moment. But as the season progresses, we can see that much has happened, quietly and naturally. Children pursue life, and in doing so, pursue knowledge. They need adults to trust in the inevitability of this very natural process, and to offer what assistance they can.
Parents have many questions about fulfilling state requirements. They ask, “How do unschoolers explain themselves to the state when they fill out the paperwork every year? If you don’t use a curriculum, what do you say? What about required record keeping?” To my knowledge, unschoolers have had no problems over matters of this kind. This is a time when even many public school educators are moving away from the traditional curriculum, and are seeking alternatives to fragmented learning and drudgery.
Unschooling is a unique opportunity for each family to do whatever makes sense for the growth and development of their children. If we have a reason for using a curriculum and traditional school materials, we are free to use them. They are not a universally necessary or required component of unschooling, either educationally or legally.
Allowing curriculums, textbooks and tests to be the defining force behind the education of a child is a hindrance in the home as much as in the school — not only because it interferes with learning, but also because it interferes with trust. Even educators are beginning to question the pre-planned, yearlong curriculum as an outdated, 19th-century educational system. There is no reason that families should be less flexible and innovative than schools.
Unschooling provides a unique opportunity to step away from systems and methods, and to develop independent ideas out of actual experiences, where the child is truly in pursuit of knowledge, not the other way around.
From the FPEA Guide to Homeschooling in Florida. This is an edited and adapted version of an article written by Earl Stevens that can be found in its entirety at www.naturalchild.org/guest/earl_stevens.html (accessed September 19, 2011).
Incredible article. Thank you!
If a parent recognizes that a particular book or teaching material is perfect for the unschool student who wants to learn the art and craft of writing, how would the parent go about sharing the book as a resource to homeschool families?
Thank you,
Lee B. Woods
Cocoa, FL