Dear Creative Friends (Yes, I Mean You)

Posted on by

I have something for you. It has nothing to do with unschooling, per se, except that it’s all about shifting your perspective so you can live a more creative life, so I suppose it has everything to do with unschooling.

It’s my brand new ebook, hot off the virtual press, 42 pages of fresh perspective on getting your artful act together. It’s for writers and painters and furniture makers and anyone who wants to make stuff and needs a little encouragement to get started or to keep going.

And it’s free. Continue reading →

Re-Entry

Posted on by

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 →

The Garden I Aspire To

Posted on by

We’re between thunderstorms here in the Midwest USA, and the yard growth — some of it grass-like, most of it weed-like — is tall and lush and astonishingly green. It’s also getting a little out of hand, and I can’t seem to find a moment to mow it down before another swell of dark clouds appears overhead.

For years I’ve been trying to shrink the mowing area of my yard. I’ve put in perennial beds and planted shrubs and such, and a tree here and there. But at the rate I’m going it’ll take a decade or more to eliminate the parts that need to be mowed.

Part of my slow progress is due to the fact that I’m a terrible gardener. Continue reading →

Deschooling Our Stories

Posted on by

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?

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 →

School is Prison

Posted on by

Classic Peter Gray:

“If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.”

“The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.”

and:

“Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and eager teachers, hears or reads about some “new theory” or “new findings” from psychology that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning. But none of it has worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in school they are not free. Joyful learning requires freedom.”

From Gray’s September, 2009 post in Psychology Today, “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Worth every moment you’ll spend reading it, and following the links, and reading some more.

See more of Peter Gray at Freedom to Learn.