Category Archives: unschooling

Just Let Them Go

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From an article by Richard Elmore, instructor at the Harvard School of Education, on the modern secondary school:

I wonder, finally, what would happen if we simply opened the doors and let the students go; if we let them walk out of the dim light of the overhead projector into the sunlight; if we let them decide how, or whether, to engage this monolith? Would it be so terrible? Could it be worse than what they are currently experiencing? Would adults look at young people differently if they had to confront their children on the street, rather than locking them away in institutions? Would it force us to say more explicitly what a humane and healthy learning environment might look like? Should discussions of the future of school reform be less about the pet ideas of professional reformers and more about what we’re doing to young people in the institution called school?

“What Would Happen if We Let Them Go?”, Education Week, May 17, 2011

Re-Entry

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Back from spring ARGH, the twice-yearly unschooler gathering in the mountains of east Tennessee. A smaller group this time, fewer families, less frenetic, with plenty of time and space to wander and think and porch-sit and play.

making telephone wire jewelry at ARGH

ARGH stands for Autodidactic Radical Gathering of Homeschoolers. Kind of a mouthful. But it makes for a memorable acronym. And memorable gatherings. We’ve been to five so far. I like to imagine that we’ll just keep going, growing old among these people who are our spirit sisters and brothers, our found family. Continue reading →

Deschooling Our Stories

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My feed reader is my personal daily news. Everything in it is something I find stimulating enough to invite into my life on a regular basis. It’s the stuff I want to read.

The stuff I don’t want to read but others think I ought to read  – stuff about Libya and Scott Walker and the federal budget, for example — seeps in on its own, so it’s not like I don’t have a clue what’s going on. I just don’t let it on my feed.  It takes some vigilance to avoid becoming a sponge for all the crap put out into the world.

Anyway, two thoughts came together in my mind as I read through this morning’s feed. One had to do with deschooling, the other with stories. Continue reading →

What About Socialization?

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As my unschooler daughter moves through her teens, we don’t get the “socialization” question as often as we used to. The things people ask now are more likely to be about college than about fitting in.

But “fitting in” still comes up, mostly in my own head, and sometimes in conversation between the two of us, as we look for interesting things to do in our community, and interesting people to do them with, and find ourselves feeling out of step rather more than we might like.

Shared experience is the basis of all relationship, and the most common shared experience in our culture is school.  When you don’t go to school, you have to build other experiential bridges.  Which we do.

But there’s another reason we’re often out of step. Continue reading →

Masters & Taskmasters

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Back in the 1970s polymath Herbert Simon floated the idea that true mastery of a subject or skill takes something like 10,000 hours or so of effort, which works out to about 10-12 years, given the normal demands of life.

Lots of people have had a go at that number over the years, and I suspect most would agree that it’s somewhat arbitrary, and subject to lots of provisos, depending on the skill or subject in question. I think, though, that the basic premise holds true: however you chose to define it, mastery takes time. And not just any old time, but nice chunks of uninterrupted time, so that a thought, an idea, an experiment, a hypothesis, an activity, a creative process gets its full due.

Thinking takes time. Playing takes time. Wondering, imagining, experimenting, coordinating, executing, these all take time.

This sort of time is one of the first victims of compulsory k-12 schooling. Continue reading →