| So, my friend Wendy sent me this article this morning, thinking that it might spark my interest. After reading it, I found myself hopping onto my soapbox and raging to the world. First I’ll give you the article, and then I’ll hand over the “sermon”.
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A new chapter in education: unschooling
Controversial home-taught approach lets kids take the lead in learning
By Victoria Clayton
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 10:22 a.m. MT Oct 2, 2006
It’s a Monday afternoon in Mar Vista, Calif., and while other 9-year-olds might be fidgeting at their desks, Isobel Dowdee has played all morning and is now joining her mother and two sisters on a big blanket in their front yard.
Mom, Heather Cushman-Dowdee, keeps the younger girls, Fiona, 5, and Gwyneth, 2, busy drawing pictures. For Isobel, she’s made a large grid with numbers down the side and across the top so her daughter can fill in the multiplication answers. Not that Cushman-Dowdee cares if Isobel does the chart. It’s just that the girl actually wants to do it. Occasionally they play math games or sing counting songs.
For the past three weeks this has been the ritual — Math Mondays they’ve taken to calling it. Yet Cushman-Dowdee bristles at the idea that this is any kind of mathematics class. That’s absolutely against what she and her husband, Kevin Dowdee, believe in.
“The kids love it so far, but I am open to them changing their mind. We adapt and alter what we are doing all of the time,” says Cushman-Dowdee, an artist and cartoonist.
The Dowdees’ ultra-relaxed learning is called “unschooling.” It’s a fast-growing subset of homeschooling that turns traditional education on its ear.
And it's catching on. In the past 20 years the number of unschoolers in the United States has grown from fewer than 2,000 to more than 100,000, says Patrick Farenga, president of Holt Associates, Inc., a Boston-area organization started by John Holt, the late education reformer who coined the term “unschooling.” That’s a conservative estimate; others in the education field put the number closer to 200,000 and say the unschooling population is growing by 10 to 15 percent each year.
Interested in the Greeks? Start cooking
While homeschooling began as a trend among fundamentalist Christians with largely religious motivations, unschooling is more about educational philosophy. It’s rooted in the belief that humans are naturally driven to learn and will do so fiercely if left to their own devices.
Unschooling is difficult to define because no two unschoolers do the same thing.
Like homeschoolers, unschooled children don’t attend traditional class. Unlike most homeschoolers, however, unschoolers do not follow any sort of curriculum. Children are allowed and encouraged to set the agenda and pace using their parents, their own lives and their homes and communities as resources.
So if they want to spend all day learning about bugs or gardening, they head outdoors. If they’re interested in criminal justice, parents might set up a visit to the police station or help them get books on the subject. If something about Greek mythology piques their interest, maybe they’ll cook Greek food or write a play about Perseus and the Gorgon. Or maybe not.
“Here’s how I define it: Unschooling is allowing your child as much freedom to explore and learn from the world as you can comfortably bear as a parent,” says Farenga, co-author of "Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling"
Others have called unschooling ambient learning or child-led learning. Some call it bunk
Some kids left behind?
Homeschooling itself is controversial. The National Parent Teacher Association opposes the practice, as do the National Education Association and the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
Unschooling is even more controversial. To some educators it’s tantamount to uneducating. They worry that while the popularity is gaining, it’s not a good idea for many families.
“If the parents are highly educated and/or from a higher socioeconomic level, the kids are going to get all kinds of rich experiences because the nature of the home is going to be about books, experiences, education and learning,” says Myron Dembo, a University of Southern California professor of education. “These kids won’t be harmed as much from [unschooling] as the kids who have parents without much education. One thing I worry about, though, is that the parent may be less competent than the parent thinks.”
Dembo, the author of "Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success," agrees that the best education comes when children are self-motivated, but he says without formal matriculation some kids risk simply being left out. They may not master basic skills, they won’t receive so much as a high school diploma, and their chances for productive futures could become nonexistent. Yet he acknowledges there are alternative ways to gain college acceptance — such as taking the GED or writing an essay. And unschoolers may enroll in school, or even community college, long enough to develop something of a transcript.
Shana Ronayne Hickman of Cedar Park, Texas, says unschooling has worked well for her son, Kenzie, 8.
She first learned of unschooling when her son was 3. “It made more sense than anything I had ever read in my life,” says Hickman, who now publishes an unschooling support magazine called Live Free Learn Free. “Of course, people learn best when they’re interested in something. Of course, we retain information much better when we actively seek it out. Of course, learning through life is ideal.”
Kenzie, who was surrounded by books and stories from birth, began reading at 4 without any prompting or effort from his parents, says Hickman. Through his own recent exploration and the help of his parents he knows about a range of subjects, including mythology and the Great Depression.
Isobel Dowdee was never taught to read per se either. Yet when she was about 8 she caught on simply through years of wanting and having books read to her. Once she started putting sentences together she almost immediately picked up advanced chapter books and read voraciously for six months straight. Her 5-year-old sister Fiona has just recently started to read on her own.
But not all unschoolers stick to the plan so religiously.
Farenga, perhaps the best-known advocate for unschooling alive today, says his three daughters — the eldest who is now a senior at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and plans to attend medical school — have mostly been unschooled, but they have all also attended more traditional private and/or public schools at various times.
“When it comes to unschooling, of course it’s very important to talk about the parents,” says Farenga.
Unschooling parents must have revolutionary amounts of patience, he says. They have to want to be around their children day in and day out. It helps, too, if they are extremely intellectually curious. But more mundane matters such as finances also come into play.
“If you homeschool or unschool, you’re cutting out some of your income. Even in our family, sometimes financial pressures became a reason the kids went to a school because my wife and I both needed to be working. Other times, my children just wanted to try school,” says Farenga.
Unschooling isn't for everyone, he acknowledges.
"It’s just an alternative and there needs to be more of them in education," he says. "The key is to use school on your terms. Nobody should be forced into a classroom.”
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I’m going to start off by saying that I am seriously opposed to homeschooling for many reasons. Firstly, it allows a child no opportunity for social interaction with their peers, and even if the child has siblings, it is important to interact with those outside of the family unit. It also provides a child with an educator who, in many cases, is not qualified to be an educator. You can be a fantastic parent and love your children dearly, but that doesn’t mean that you are qualified to teach them. Many homeschooling parents have never achieved education past the high school level, and with the way the education process is constantly changing, they tend to be under qualified to serve as an adequate educator. Not to mention, as a future educator, I’m mildly offended that someone feels they are more qualified to teach their child than I am, despite the fact that I have gone through all of the classes and training to make myself qualified to educate children and the parent has gone through none.
Now, moving on to my problems with this particular method of “unschooling” children, I find myself kind of baffled. When did it become practice for parents to stop telling children what they should or should not do? I mean, I understand that people want to offer children more freedom, but this sounds as if they are doing no actual parenting in order to give their children this freedom. If a child doesn’t have any real interest in science, does that mean the children does not have to learn anything about science and the world should accept the child’s deficiency in that area? If the child shows no interest in math, does the parent avoid pushing the fact and then later, if the child can’t balance a checkbook, just accept it as something that was unnecessary to teach? If the child does show interest in a subject, what is the primary source of information on that subject? If it is the parent, and the parent is not educated well enough to adequately explain the subject, then it seems to me that no progress is made. If it is the Internet, one has to consider the wealth of misinformation available on the web when sending a child out onto it. Just because it’s on the Internet does not make it true.
As for all of these children just mystically discovering the ability to read, I think that’s bunk. If that were the case, why is the illiteracy rate so high? There is not an elementary school in the nation that does not read aloud to children, and as education progresses, students find themselves surrounded by more and more books, so why are other children not just developing this ability to read? And let’s not neglect the fact that just because a child is capable of reading does not mean the child is retaining any of the information. The ability to read words and the ability to have sufficient reading comprehension are two entirely different things. If a child can read but lacks the ability to comprehend and think analytically about what they have just read, then there is no learning going on at all. Basically, the child is prepared to be able to buy their groceries and read street signs, but not a lot more. Learning can’t happen until comprehension is achieved.
I will never understand this new fad that parents have started embracing that allows their children unlimited freedom, and with that, a lack of boundaries. Children CRAVE boundaries, which is why they are constantly testing them. These parents are breeding children who will not be able to properly function in a realistic society. I will not say that the public school systems in this country do not have problems, because they do, but it seems like parents are taking the easy way out. Instead of lobbying Congress or their State Representatives to find ways to provide better education for their children, they simply pull them out of the school system and teach them at home, which isn’t much more beneficial. Teachers are trying! Teachers want their students to succeed, but they are not always provided with the tools to make that happen. This is not their fault, and it’s not always the fault of the district. Success or failure is often determined by the mighty dollar, and these days there aren’t a lot of those to spread around. I find it so insane that there are millions of people willing to criticize the education system, and they’re the same people who do NOTHING to help improve it. I will be proud to be a teacher once I finish my certification. I will be proud of every student I watch succeed, and I will work my hardest to see that all of my students do become successful. Because I know that there are many other teachers out there who are as dedicated as I plan to be, and who work as hard as I plan to, I have a huge respect for educators in this country. Sure, there are bad ones, but I think the good far outweigh the bad. So if someone wants to preach the good word of homeschooling, I suggest they do it elsewhere, because I find it disrespectful to the thousands of men and women who work their asses off every day in the hopes that those students will succeed and surpass them and some day look back and realize that they couldn’t have done it without those teachers. |
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