Unschooling

Kathryn Baptista, who heads the Northeast Unschooling Conference and Rue Kream, author of Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life, were interviewed for an article on unschooling for The Patriot Ledger in Boston.
Click here for the entire article plus photos.

When DROPOUT isn’t a bad word:
Some local teens are thriving by setting their own schedules and learning by doing

Anna Finklestein, a 16-year-old Sharon resident, is learning on her own and is director of Stepping Out Theatre. Her second professional production, "The Laramie Project," which features actors 14 to 23 years old, is completing its run this weekend. Anna Finklestein left Sharon High School after the ninth grade because she was bored and felt she could put her time to better use. She started a professional theater company for young adults, interned at Boston’s Huntington Theater and took college courses at the Harvard Extension School.
This year, she got a part-time job at Ward’s Berry Farm. At 16, she spends her spare time thinking up future projects and how to accomplish them - like starting a coffee shop, a homeless shelter or a baby-sitting service.

‘‘I’m unschooled. I basically control what I do,’’ said Finklestein, whose second theater production, ‘‘The Laramie Project,’’ closes this weekend. ‘‘I would not be doing any of this if I was still in school. I wouldn’t have time.’’

Nationally, an estimated 1.5 million students are being taught at home, with as many as 150,000 considered unschooled. Unschoolers are home-schoolers with no set curriculum. Rather than attending school or following lesson plans set by their parents, they focus on what interests them and learn along the way.

They discover mathematics and science when baking or gardening, engineering when playing with toy cars and astronomy because they just happen to like the stars.

‘‘Learning doesn’t have to be something done in a certain place, on a certain schedule, in a certain way,’’ said Rue Kream of West Bridgewater, the mother of two unschoolers and the author of ‘‘Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life.’’
State law requires children to attend school until the age of 16, or to have a home study plan approved by their local school committee. Finklestein had one before her 16th birthday.

‘‘It was just a normal home-schooling plan that included all of the basic materials and opportunities for cultural enrichment,’’ said Sharon School Superintendent Claire Jackson.

Eight students are currently being home-schooled in Sharon, she said. It’s up to the parent to monitor the child’s progress. ‘‘We certainly can’t supervise minutely what happens to that plan. I don’t think it’s the intention of the federal or local governments to do so,’’ Jackson said. All states allow home schooling. Some require curriculum outlines, and others just mandate a statement of home education, said Kathryn Baptista, a Salem mother who organized a conference on unschooling last spring.

Unschooling Conference

More than 300 families - about 60 from Massachusetts - attended Baptista’s Northeast Unschooling Conference in Peabody last spring. Some, like Finklestein, leave school on their own. Others are encouraged to do so by their parents or are never sent to school at all. Some education experts worry that unschoolers will lack social skills and basic life skills necessary for life.

‘‘Schools provide sort of a liberal arts education. You get well-rounded. Does that happen in an unschooled situation?’’ said Lorne Ranstrom, chair of the division of teacher education at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. ‘‘Who’s in charge of that kind of teaching? Is it her parents? Is she pretty much on her own?’’ Donna San Antonio, a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, agrees. ‘‘The idea behind unschooling is that not everyone is going to be a biologist or a mathematician,’’ San Antonio said. ‘‘The idea is that people can follow the path that their own learning brings them. ‘‘The problem is that we never know where our lives are going to bring us. Some people find themselves in situations where doors are closed because they didn’t have biology or they didn’t have algebra 2 and pre-calculus.’’

That’s what worries Finklestein’s mother, Janet Penn. ‘‘Something came up and somebody mentioned something about symbiosis,’’ Penn said. ‘‘I said, ‘Do you know what that means? What do you think about learning some of the basic principles just so you understand them?’’’ Penn said. ‘‘Her response was typical of an unschooler. ‘When I need to learn it, I learn it.’ ‘‘She has a lot more time than most teenagers to think, think about her life, read things that may not relate to anything, that sort of, ‘Who am I?’ and, ‘What place do we have in the universe?’’’ Penn said.

Home-schoolers and unschoolers do not receive standard diplomas. They can take a GED course or register with online schools. Finklestein was registered last year with Clonlara School, an alternative diploma program based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Movement started in ’70s

The unschooling movement started in the 1970s when teacher John Holt published ‘‘How Children Learn, How Children Fail’’ and founded a magazine called Growing Without Schooling. The movement has had a second wind in recent years, after the publication of Grace Llewellyn’s ‘‘The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education,’’ which encourages teenagers to leave full-time school and let their curiosity guide their learning.

In 1996, Llewellyn founded the Not Back to School Camp for home-schoolers and unschoolers 13 to 18. Finklestein attended it last summer. Finklestein said Llewellyn’s book was an eye-opener. She went to work on her parents and after some prodding and debate they decided to let her take a year off from school.

‘‘She said, ‘I am not happy in school. I don’t think I’m learning in school. I don’t think I’m learning how to learn in school. And you always taught me to go after things that I believe in and am passionate about,’’’ her mother said. Her parents insisted that if they were not happy with her progress, she would go back and repeat 10th grade. But after a year, they saw her blossom. She became more articulate and started reading voraciously, rather than watching television, Penn said. ‘‘I saw her getting passionate and excited. She was clearly not engaged in high school,’’ her mother said. ‘‘What I see is a young woman who’s very thoughtful. She’s respectful. She’s using her time well. It’s been incredible as her mother to watch.’’

Out before kindergarten

Jennifer Harnish of Natick took her son out of school before kindergarten. ‘‘He’d shown an ability to really learn on his own without needing a teacher or me to teach him,’’ Harnish said. ‘‘I just couldn’t imagine him sitting in a classroom or sitting at the kitchen table, making him do work every day.’’ Now he is 7 and spends his days at home, at the park with other home-schoolers or at the zoo or a museum or local organic farm. ‘‘It’s real life learning,’’ Harnish said. ‘‘It’s amazing to see the math concepts he picks up without us having to teach him anything in particular. For example, with recipes if we’re making cookies and we have to double the batch then he’s working on multiplication or fractions.’’

Cassia Gordon, 17, of Norton, a lifelong home-schooler who recently switched to unschooling, said she got sick of the structure and having to get a certain amount of work done every day. ‘‘Unschoooling, in my mind, is doing what you’re interested in and what you feel would be best for you. It’s more self-directed and generally less planned and less scheduled,’’ said Gordon, an actor in Finklestein’s play.

Not for everyone

Unschooling isn’t for everyone. In well-educated families, ‘‘It probably doesn’t do the children any harm,’’ said Charles Glenn, interim dean of Boston University’s School of Education, who had a few children of his own drop out of high school and go on to college. ‘‘Unschooling is ideal for all children, but not for all parents,’’ said Kream, of West Bridgewater. ‘‘Unschooling parents need to be enthusiastic about life and learning themselves, they need to want to be very actively involved in their children’s lives and they need to be caring, supportive and respectful parents. They also need to believe that the desire to learn is intrinsic to human beings.’’

Finklestein generally wakes up between 8 and 9:30 a.m. and goes to bed by midnight. She’d like it to be earlier. Some days, she works in the morning and then heads to driver’s ed and then to rehearsal. Other nights, she stays home and reads or hangs out with friends, takes a walk or visits with her grandmother. She just finished ‘‘Memoirs of a Geisha’’ and reread ‘‘A Wrinkle in Time’’ and Llewellyn’s ‘‘The Teenage Liberation Handbook.’’ She’s taking an American history class and plans to take two or three courses in the spring.
Finklestein is working toward a two-year college degree through credits at Harvard University, but doesn’t plan to go to college until she’s ready. ‘‘I won’t have a conventional-looking transcript, so I’m kind of staying away from the mainstream college frenzy,’’she says. ‘‘If I feel like I’m ready to spend $40,000 to talk and learn things, but I feel like first I need to do some more soul-searching. ‘‘I’m really interested in sort of spreading my wings some more and leaving Sharon and exploring things on my own. I’m very independent.’’

Unschooling

Class dismissed...how the unschooling movement is changing how we think of learning.
By Rachel Tennenbaum

Imagine waking up on a Monday and driving up to Berkeley to check out a new art gallery opening. That night you play some video games and crack open a book before hitting the hay. Think this sounds like a day off for a college student? It’s actually the school day of a 9-year-old. No, it’s not a fantasy Ferris Bueller-style: It’s a daily reality for thousands of young learners who call themselves “unschoolers.”

Unschooling. Some call it a counter-culture, but others just call it natural learning. It’s an offshoot of homeschooling coined by educational philosopher John Holt, but it varies from traditional homeschooling in the sense that there is no curriculum. None. No math, no English, no science, no history. You just live.

It’s the freedom to express yourself in any way at any time,” said Kevin Greene, a 15-year-old unschooler. “If you’re an artist you can paint, you can let your mind wander.”

It may sound difficult to wrap one’s head around — to just live and fill a life with knowledge? This is shocking to most Americans who have attended school their entire lives. But for those who practice unschooling, it’s not that crazy. The idea is that people have a natural curiosity and can learn from living, and this is what will fill up children’s days.

“It doesn’t really seem necessary to have people be in an institution to learn,” said Pam Tellew, mother of two unschoolers. “I think libraries are about a zillion times more important than schools.”

The Internet is a tool that is especially supportive to unschoolers, Tellew added.

So what does one do all day if there’s no school? The question may be flawed.

“You sound like you’re talking about learning about one specific thing… That’s not really what we do,” said Jesse Boss, an 11-year-old radical unschooler. Radical unschoolers like Boss often have no limits on what they study, how much dessert they get and no bedtimes.

“There is no typical day,” said Annie Twist Lubke, a mother of two unschooled boys, Cortland and Caedan. “[One day] we’re traveling up to the city, San Francisco and Berkeley, to get together with other unschoolers. Another day we’re over chopping wood at [the boys’] grandparents house so we have fire. Our days really go wherever the interest is and whatever’s on our schedule.”

Another idea behind unschooling is that all information is interconnected. It’s not that the children aren’t learning, parents say; it’s just that information is not divided up into a curriculum.

“The thing is that we don’t create it as this big subject,” Lubke said. “It’s not this big scary thing — it’s just part of our day.”

She explained that her sons, for example, learned multiplication figuring out the square footage of a shed. Unschoolers and parents insist that this sort of learning will make education pleasurable, as opposed to creating fears of inadequacy.

“It’s been really interesting because it just confirms what I’ve felt all along — anything is an avenue to learning, anything that engages you teaches you something,” Tellew said.

This can be anything from soccer to the video games which one of her sons plays avidly.

And for television fans everywhere, 11-year-old Boss had this to say: “I’m pretty sure my little brother learned math watching television.”

The theme of interconnectedness does not stop at pedagogy. Unschooling expands to breed an idea of jointness throughout life, information and social systems. It’s simply about knowing how to live.

“So much of the focus on schooling is academic information. I’ve come to understand that, yes, all that’s good, but the critical thing is that you know how to learn, how to think, how to communicate,” said Mike Boss, Jesse’s father.

Boss considers unschooling more of a form of parenting than just an educational philosophy.

Parents play multiple roles in unschooling. They are not just teachers, but facilitators in a system foreign to most of them, since almost all attended school. At a large gathering of unschoolers in Boulder Creek, only one parent had been unschooled. The revival of this movement is just now seeing its oldest off to college. For parents, it’s a struggle at times to maintain an open mind.

“Every once in awhile I get a bug in my head saying, ‘Gosh, I don’t think I know that this is out there in the world,’” Tellew said. “I started telling them about math and they didn’t really care. Pushing that kind of stuff is what gives people that resistance.” She would rather her children follow something that excites them.

In this case, parents act as the school themselves — many families often register with the state of California as a private school in order for their children to receive credit for their education. Others work with the local school board or with the HomeSchool Association of California (HSC) in order to get their requirements squared away with the state.

Studies have shown that this type of learning as a family dynamic has proven effective. Dr. Doris Ash is an assistant professor in UC Santa Cruz’s education department and has researched science learning in informal settings like aquariums and zoos.

“The family for me is a stand-in of a social unit that can collaborate together,” said Ash, who watches families as they interact and learn from their environment. “Some kind of exquisite mix happens between what people already know and the activity they’re learning. What kind of knowledge does [the family] build collaboratively? It’s always the case that they know more together than alone.”

Unschooling and home schooling have been growing in popularity during the last few decades. An average conference of unschoolers can pull in as many as 700 to 800 individuals. Other alternative educational systems have gained popularity as well — notably Montessori Schools, which emphasize self-directed child activity, and Waldorf Schools, which stress interdisciplinary learning.

These schools, and unschooling, are an antidote to what some see as the rigid standards surrounding education and evaluation. Dr. Ron Glass is a philosopher and an associate professor in UCSC’s education department. Much of his research focuses on the moral and political philosophy of education and the ideology of education.

“The notion that learning should somehow follow human nature has been around since the time of Rousseau,” Glass said. But the schooling we’re all now familiar with, he explained, is relatively new.

“The school system that we have now was invented in the late 19th century and had very explicit models: factories, railroads and the army,” Glass said. “So they took features from each of those areas and created a school system. The school was designed to basically rank and sort people into the economic, social, ideological order.”

But the 21st century is a very different time than the Industrial Revolution, with few remaining factories.

“Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.”

Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.”

Many are beginning to react against the current schooling system. The change, however, is slow.

“I think schools have become so tightly connected to economic, political and social opportunities, and because of that people aren’t willing to abandon the standard model,” Glass said. Still, he continued, people are beginning to push back. Unschooling and the revival of home schooling are two examples of such a change.

“[People are] trying to find a way to have schools be of good quality and give people real opportunities, but without hurting people along the way,” he said.

While these new options are helpful, Glass pointed out that for the time being they are mostly available to families of solid socio-economic ranking. Children with two working parents must attend school.

While questions about lower education are soothed, many still worry about college. How will children transition into the real world? How will they go about applying to college? The reality is that it’s not so difficult. Many unschoolers begin to attend community colleges around the age of 15 or 16, and others have specialized in areas of interest, something looked upon favorably by many private schools. Much also depends on personal goals.

“If [the kids] decide that they want to go to college, they’ll get themselves ready for it,” Tellew said. “What I’ve also seen is people growing up this way and saying, ‘You know, this isn’t what I want.’ It’s more about finding something that’s meaningful to them and meaningful to the world. They don’t care as much about the trappings of [societal definitions of] success.”

But the unschoolers themselves aren’t worried. In fact, they see things a little bit differently. A group of unschoolers met last week for a campout in Boulder Creek sponsored by the Homeschool Association of California (HSC) for all homeschoolers in California, where they found good luck with weather — they camped out under the first week of sun in almost a month. When asked about the perks of unschooling the kids counted friendliness, ease in communication and vivacious curiosity among the benefits.

“Not getting caught up with everything,” said 16-year-old Teamo (pronounced “te amo”) Gregori. “You can just learn and figure things out your own way.”

“Another advantage is getting up a little later,” Jason Ramos said. What time did he wake up that day? 2 p.m.

Ramos stood among a group of boys aged 8 through 16, all of whom were enthusiastic, well-spoken and appeared to be having a great time. Inside, children and adults were walking around together, playing outside or sitting engrossed in card games. A man playing cards wore a blue shirt proclaiming the famous Mark Twain quotation “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” It’s clear that something has begun, and the kids know it too.

The Unschooling Unmanual

I received a very nice e-mail from Jan Hunt asking me to pass along the following news about the upcoming book, The Unschooling Unmanual, which I'm really looking forward to reading.

Hi Joanne,
I love your blogs and would like to post some information about our new unschooling book on An Unschooling Life. I'll attach the press release - you can read an excerpt at http://www.naturalchild.org/unmanual/ . Let me know if this kind of post would be OK, and how to go about it.
Best wishes,
Jan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Unschooling Unmanual to be Published by The Natural Child Project
SUNRIVER, OREGON - August 1, 2007 The Natural Child Project will publish a collection of stories and articles on unschooling this fall.

Through engaging personal stories, examples, and essays, the writers offer inspiration and encouragement for seasoned and prospective unschoolers alike.

The book will include an intriguing first-person story by Netherlands writer Nanda Van Gestel, whose four sons have unschooled in the US, Ireland, and The Netherlands. Also included are articles by Rue Kream, author of Parenting a Free Child; long-time unschooler and mother of four girls Mary Van Doren; and Jan Hunt, author of The Natural Child and A Gift for Baby. Ms. Hunt lives in Sunriver with her son Jason, who has unschooled from the beginning. Jason is the co-editor of the new book.

Unschooling - sometimes called natural learning or child-led learning, is a form of home education that trusts the child's natural curiosity, and respects each child's unique timetable for learning. As Nanda Van Gestel observes in the new book, "Unschooling is more than an education - it's life."

The Unschooling Unmanual can be pre-ordered at a discounted price of $12 through August at www.naturalchild.org/unmanual/. An excerpt from the book can be read at www.naturalchild.org/unmanual/our_family.html.

For additional information, write to Jan Hunt at jan@naturalchild.org or call 541-593-1547.

UK Unschooling Article

From The TimesSeptember 6, 2007
"Home education serves her better than school would’

Sara Sengenberger lives in Oxford but was brought up and schooled in the US. She delayed formal education for her daughter Catryn, 7, but has found home education suits Catryn so well that she has no plans to send her to school.

“I came across a book published in the 1970s by Raymond Moore called Better Late than Early, which claims that many biological and psychological factors make 8 to 10 the best age to begin structured learning. Young children learn a great deal through play. I don’t require Catryn to do any formal academic work at all. At the age of 6 she decided that she wanted to read; she had been resistant to the idea before then. Because she started on her own initiative she learned very quickly.

“We follow an approach called Autonomous Education, or ‘Unschooling’, pioneered by John Holt in the US. The idea is that children are given the freedom to follow their interests, on the principle that they learn better that way. Just as I didn’t teach my daughter to walk and talk when she was a toddler, she doesn’t need me to direct her learning now. We make materials available to Catryn and she decides what she wants to do. She does an astonishing amount of arithmetic every day without us having to make her sit down and do worksheets. It is a very relaxing approach. Because we never force Catryn to do anything we live a very harmonious existence.

“At some point she may decide that she wants to go to school, and that’s fine by us, but for now home education is serving her far better than school would.”

Unschooling in the News

Kids Take School Into Their Own Hands: Some Home-School Families Are Opting for a New Approach to Curriculum: Unschooling
BY Claire Scheumann

From stock whips to ballet, Dungeons and Dragons to NASA, some Berkeley students say they are studying subjects they would not have access to in a traditional setting by pursuing a new kind of education called “unschooling.”
Teaching children at home has a long history, but in the past decade, families have been engaging in a learning philosophy which allows students to dictate the curriculum.

Sam Fuller, 12, joined the 10 percent of home-schooled students participating in unschooling nationally when he began his education seven years ago.

“We kind of have phases of learning,” said Sam, who lives with his family on the border between Albany and Berkeley. “We learn what we are interested in.”

Sam’s mother, Pam Tellew, was a teacher before she got the idea of unschooling at a teaching retreat shortly after Sam was born. Sam’s 7-year-old brother Nicky has also begun unschooling.

Unschooled students do not engage in traditional classroom learning, instead pursuing a hands-on approach in museums and outdoor settings.

Skeptics say unschooling may not expose students to necessary subject matter because they follow no required curriculum.

“I want educators to make decisions about what kids need to learn,” said school board member Shirley Issel. “If you only open the doors that interest them at first, they may have a limited range of options available to them when they want to go on to higher education and employment.”

In California, there are approximately 10,000 families a year that file requests declaring themselves as a private school, which allows them to specialize curriculum.

Parents of home-schooled students in Berkeley say their choice was not determined by the quality of the city’s public schools. Rather, an interest in a variety of cultural and learning resources contributed to their choice.

In the Berkeley Unified School District, 129 students participate in the independent study program, which allows them to meet with teachers for only 30 minutes per week, pursuing other interests in the meantime.

District officials say they do not know the number of students in the city who opt for home schooling.

Advocates for unschooling insist the approach creates greater student engagement, leading to deeper learning than traditional methods.

“Personally, my sons outgrew what the public schools could offer them,” said Livermore parent Cyndy McClay, a representative of the California Homeschool Network. “I loved my neighborhood schools, but my kids didn’t always fit there.”

Results of studies examining homeschooled students show, on average, they score 15 to 30 percentile points above public school students, said home education researcher Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

There is limited research on the long-term success of home-schooled adults, but studies have shown that the students tend to earn their college degrees at a slightly accelerated rate and become more engaged in leadership throughout their adult life than their public school counterparts, Ray said.

One study showed that achievement did not differ between home-schooled students who learn in a traditional setting and unschooled students, Ray said.

In addition, home-schooling typically does not impair students’ social skills, he said.

Sam Fuller has become involved in the Junior Ranger program, which provides outdoor education for children ages 9 to 12, and a fair organized by families with home-schooled students to raise money for charity.

Valerie Fitzenreiter and Laurie Chancey interview

Valerie Fitzenreiter is the author of The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School , a book about "...how we raised our daughter, Laurie, with attachment parenting and unschooling methods. I discuss issues that concern parents who are considering unschooling their children and offer advice on living a peaceful coexistence with children".

She and her daughter Laurie (who is pursuing her PhD in sociology) were interviewed together by the American Public Media. Soon after, Valerie was invited back to reply to readers comments, including a teacher who thinks we should keep our children in school and work harder to make the school better. Personally, I think the public school system has more than enough time and help.

Here are the links to both interviews. I highly recommend taking time to listen to both of them if you're interested in learning more about unschooling.


School? NOT
Unschooling Revisited

Thoughts on the Dr. Phil show

If you didn't get a chance to see it, scroll down to the next post watch it.
Dayna Martin, who appeared with her family on the show is a member of an unschooling group I belong to. She gave me her permisssion to reprint some of what she posted to our group about the show.

My husband and I were guests on the Dr. Phil show. We flew out to Hollywood from New Hampshire to represent Unschoolers on the show. A few days before flying out, a film crew filmed a day in our life. The day the crew was here was fabulous! We had so much fun and the crew shared openly with us how "real" we were and they all (I'm serious all 3 of them!) asked me more information about Unschooling for their own children! It was a joyful day and I looked so forward to sharing our awesome life with the world! (50 million people watch Dr. Phil).

The kids waited in the dressing room for 3 hours with a friend whom we brought to watch them. The only other family on the show that brought their kids was the other unschooling family! (They spoke from the audience and Deanne did such an awesome job!) It spoke volumes to me that only the Unschoolers brought their kids!

About the show, It was a heated debate and Dr. Phil certainly didn't understand or agree with our way of life, but I feel we held our own and were respectful.They put together our video a bit dishonestly because it was half-truths. They only used portions of some things I said instead of my reasoning behind them. I knew it may happen. Unschoolers may have an entirely different take on the show than the traditional homeschoolers in the audience.

I have no regrets about doing the show! I am proud to have represented us and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I think the positive will shine through for Unschoolers! We tend to be an optomistic group of people.

On the Dr. Phil site, they conducted a poll asking "Which style of schooling do you think is best"? Here are the results of that poll.

6% (935) Public school
3% (816) Private school
80% (17062) Homeschooling
11% (2403) Unschooling

Homeschooling on Dr. Phil:part 1

For those who may have missed it when it originally aired. This is part one of five.

Homeschooling on Dr. Phil:part 2

This is part two of five.

Homeschooling on Dr. Phil: part 3

This is part three of five.

Homeschooling on Dr. Phil: part 4

This is part four of five.

Homeschooling on Dr. Phil:part 5

This is part five of five.

An Unschooling Article

'Unschool' parents: Kids can be own best teachers
tennessean.com 1/28/07

Suzanne Fisher-Miller cradles son, Ocea, 1, as son, Khai, 5, (foreground) and daughter, Miyana, 9, craft Valentine's Day cards. Fisher-Miller believes in what she calls child-led learning and sees her role as facilitator as her children explore their interests.

It's midday on a Friday, and 9-year-old Miyana flips through a book about dragons before her attention turns to making Valentine's Day cards at the kitchen table.

Her sister, Aeyah, 7, across the table, expertly threads a needle and sews a tiny cape for a clothespin superhero.

While other children their age are quietly sitting in a classroom, the Fisher-Miller children have the freedom to pass the time without order and doing as they please in their pursuit of knowledge.

Younger brother Ocea, almost 2, drops marbles into the bell of a trumpet. "He's using it as a funnel," says their mother, Suzanne Fisher-Miller. Brother Khai, 5, plays noisily with two friends, the back door slamming shut as they run in and out.

What may look like bedlam is a radical style of home schooling that the Fisher-Miller parents think is best for their children: unschooling. It's child-directed or child-led learning. Some call it relaxed home schooling. Topics aren't learned until a child expresses curiosity, and they're dropped as soon as the child is ready to move on.

Their curriculum is whatever interests them in life. There are no textbooks in their East Nashville home, nor lesson plans, schedules or tests.

Their parents say this unconventional style of learning shows respect for their children as full human beings who can learn lessons from everyday life.

Children, they feel, don't need to master reading or multiplication tables until they're ready. These families reject the structure of formal schooling that, they say, crushes creativity and curiosity.

But some education experts — and even fellow home schoolers — feel this free-form style could lead to gaps in learning. They are afraid children do nothing all day or develop strengths but ignore their weaknesses.

'Trusting your children'

When Miyana asked her mom where carrots came from, the family took a field trip to a farm. Learning often emerges in their childish games, like the time Miyana created play people from orange peels and started figuring out how many of them would have to share if she only had three forks.

Her mother, however, did not turn that moment into a structured math lesson about division. Rather, she let it unfold at Miyana's pace.

Twenty-five Nashville-area families are on an unschooling list-serve group, but many more families in the area unschool, perhaps as many as 300, said Fisher-Miller, who established a Nashville unschoolers group last year.

"It's trusting your children to learn for themselves," the 33-year-old mother said.

"Learning comes from the inside. You cannot make a child want to learn," she said. "In today's school system, it's not a love of learning but it's 'Let's push facts down your throat and have you regurgitate it.' The best thing I can give my child is to love to learn."

Author Resa Steindel Brown, an educator and national expert on child-directed learning, said now, more than ever, parents should explore alternative education styles to match the fast-paced world. Youngsters are children of the Information Age, a time of technology and fast media, she said.

"The way our children take in information is much faster and involves more of their sensory perception — think TV, the Internet and Podcasts," Brown said. "The way they pursue information is different from sitting in a classroom with a book reading it from front to back."

Is it best for children?

Some educators expressed concern that this free-form style of education isn't good for children.

"If unschooling is curiosity-led, not all children are question-askers," said Cindy Benefield, who oversees home schooling for the state Education Department. "If they're focused on one area, the child may know everything about gardening but won't know multiplication tables."

"It's risky to put all the eggs in the child's basket," said Mary Jane Moran, an assistant professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, where she instructs future teachers of pre-kindergarten to third-graders. She has not studied unschooling.

"If children are the only lead horses, then there is no educational map through which they are led in a purposeful way," she said. "It's random starts and stops. Therefore, there is less opportunity for deep learning."

It may be better to have a negotiated partner ship between a child and and a parent who knows the child's needs and abilities, Moran said.

"You can make curriculum come alive and make it more relevant and tie it in to real-world experiences without throwing out structure," said Terry Weeks, 55, a professor of educational leadership at Middle Tennessee State University and the national teacher of the year in 1988 when he was at Central Middle School in Murfreesboro.

Retired Metro schoolteacher Clata Miller is a grandmother of unschoolers and feels torn over the learning philosophy.

"I would be doing things differently, but I can't say what they're doing is not going to be successful," said Miller, the grandmother of Miyana, Aeyah, Ocea and Khai.

The Franklin woman would prefer a more planned and thought-out learning environment for her grandchildren but respects the hands-on approach their mother takes to tap into the children's interests.

"But as an educator, I feel you have to use your knowledge and experience as an adult to bring to them the things they need," Miller said.

What about gaps in learning, worries Tina Bean, a former Metro schoolteacher who home-schools her 7-, 9- and 11-year-olds.

"It's fine to cater to their interests somewhat, but sometimes you have to say, 'Sorry, you have to do this, too,' " said Bean, 39, who lives in Antioch. "My 11-year-old, given his druthers, would never do spelling and always do math."

The leader of a Montessori school, which also follows a child-centered philosophy but with some structure and limits, explains society's reluctance to accept unschooling this way:

"I think that's because people ultimately do not value children or trust them," said Sherry Knott, executive director of Abintra Montessori School in West Meade and an admirer of unschooling.

"They do not think children are capable, when in reality they are," Knott said.

School systems rejected

Families often turn to unschooling in rejection of what they see as a one-size-fits-all school system they say crushes curiosity and creativity. Advanced children get bored waiting for classmates to catch up, while slower learners can fall between the cracks.

They also shun traditional home schooling because it follows the same mold of telling children what they need to be taught and how to learn it.

"The object of school is to make everyone come out the same. That whole concept offends me," said Chelsea Gary of Franklin, who is unschooling an 18-year-old stepson, Chris, and her other two children, ages 3 and 5. There's nothing a school system could do to persuade her to enroll them, she said.

Chris, nestled in an oversized red beanbag in his bedroom, said he hated reading until his parents pulled him out of school in California in December 2005 so he could direct his own education at home.

"I've learned more in the last year than I ever did in public school," said Chris, who spent the first few months "deschooling," getting used to his educational freedom.

A giant TV, shelves of CDs and a nearby computer loaded with video games are easy distractions in the typical teen-age bedroom. But Chris said he's not tempted because he's more interested in what he's reading, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things.

"Topics I don't like, I skim it," he said. "It's kind of a cool idea. I focus on things I want to use in life."

Life, he hopes, will mean either being a rock star or chef — that's why he spends the afternoons working at a Panera Bread cafe or rehearsing in a heavy metal band. He's not sure if he'll go to college.

"I want my children to grow up retaining all their creativity and interests they were born with," his stepmother said. " I can't imagine someone crushing that out of them."

It's not a new idea

Unschooling, while still an underground movement, has been around as long as modern-day home-school education — and some say as long as humans.

Each family has its own approach. For the Fisher-Millers, there's an emphasis on nutrition and money management.

"Honestly, what do children really need to know when they graduate from high school — to balance their checkbook, change the oil in the car and check the tire pressure, real-life things," said Suzanne Fisher-Miller. "I think those things are just as important as history, math and reading."

Today's unschooling parents tend to have college educations. Fisher-Miller has a high-school diploma and started a math degree.

They are often two-parent households in which one parent stays home.

"I thought I would never be a stay-at-home mom. I'd been a photographer and artist," Fisher-Miller said.

Her husband, Brian Miller, too, put his photography career — and its long hours — on hold and took a pay cut to work at a Wild Oats Marketplace so he could be home with the family by 3:30 p.m.

At home, they practice "strewing," leaving books, games and other interesting items in their children's path for them to discover.

That's not to say there is no parental involvement.

Rather, these parents said, they must be totally aware of the needs of their children and able to find resources to seek out information, whether that's the local librarian, an entomologist at a nearby college or the grocer who can explain an exotic fruit.

To critics who say their children are missing out on socialization, they say there's plenty of time to make friends outside the home, whether it's visits to museums and the zoo with other home-schoolers, weekly gatherings of home-schoolers at a park or tae kwon do lessons, they said.

"Instead of being shoved into a class with people the same age, they can choose to be around all kinds of different people," Gary said.

Unschooling parents talk about respect for their children, who in the outside world are often treated, wrongly they believe, as "lesser humans" without much say in things.

They trust their children to gain the knowledge they need within their own time frame.

"Elijah hates writing, coloring, and painting," unschooling mother Amanda Slater, 30, of Hermitage said about her 5-year-old.

"It's never a thing he chooses to do. I assume at some point, he'll want to. I don't like children being forced into something they're not ready for," she said.

"Elijah's not writing now, and that would get him in trouble in school," Slater said. "School wouldn't wait for him to read or write until 8 or 9 or let him do multiplication and division in kindergarten, when he's ready for it."

Likes books, doesn't read

Miyana loves books. The pile in the living room. The stacks they check out of the library. The hundreds of shelves full at the bookstore.

However, the 9½-year-old doesn't read yet.

In an unschooling household, that's no reason to sweat.

"What's important to us is that she learn at her own pace," her mother said. "We feel that the joy of reading is just as important as learning to read, and we don't want to force anything."

That kind of pace would not be tolerated in formal schooling, she said.

The brown-haired girl has an extensive vocabulary and can read some words but other times turns certain letters around — like "b" and "d" — because of dyslexia, her mother said.

"When she does start reading, she'll be reading way above her grade level," Fisher-Miller said. That's been the case with other unschoolers who were delayed readers, she said.

Take the now-adult children of author Brown, a home-school program director in California who raised her children to learn at their pace at home.

Her oldest son did not start reading until he was 9, and by the time he was 11 he was taking electronics courses at a local college, Brown said. By 14, he was a computer system administrator for Warner Bros.

"The age of normalcy to read is between 3 and 9," said Abintra Montessori Executive Director Sherry Knott. You'll find 9-year-olds in public and private schools who aren't reading yet either, she said.

But assistant professor Moran said a 9- or 10-year-old who is not reading yet could be at risk.

"There are sensitive periods of development when children are open to new kinds of information," Moran said. "If a child is going on 12 and finally comes around to reading and everyone else has been reading for four or five years, she's disadvantaged academically and socially."

By the time the Fisher-Miller children reach high school age, their parents believe they'll be learning completely on their own.

"A lot of parents would get nervous. 'Are they learning enough or getting enough?' I don't have that anxiety," Fisher-Miller said. "I really believe in my kids."

Courier Journal Unschooling Article

'Unschooling' popularity grows: Children pursue what interests them
Post-Tribune

ST. JOHN, Ind. — As other children are waking up and heading toward the school bus on a Tuesday morning, Adele Schiessle asks her children if they want to spend the day playing on a 6,000-square-foot indoor inflatable play area.

Collin, 6, and Amber, 7, agree that would be a pleasant way to start the morning. After they play on the bouncy furniture, they head back to their home in St. John, where they spend the rest of the day watching TV, navigating XBox, working on art projects and playing games.
It is just another day in the Schiessle household, where the children learn through a branch of homeschooling called unschooling.

While the definition of unschooling varies, it generally reflects a concept of child-led learning.
For Carol Pozos' oldest child, it meant self-taught reading at age 4.
For 18-year-old Abby Stewart of Chicago, it meant the recent news that she had won early admission to Princeton.

"It's an awareness that learning is always happening because it's part of living," said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. "It's almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in."

Unschooled children don't go to school, but unlike other homeschoolers they don't necessarily learn through workbooks, educational guides or study sources. Instead, the children pursue what interests them. The unschooling concept has been around for decades, but it's been slow to catch on, as initially most parents shy away from letting their children have such control over their own education.

"I'm trying to get rid of the idea that learning happens at a certain time in a certain place," Van Stelle Haded said.

There aren't any statistics on unschoolers yet, but the popularity of unschooling is reflected in the number of message boards on the Internet, in the abundance of unschooling clubs, in the frequency of unschooling conferences and in the slow but steady movement of unschooling into the vocabulary of educators.

Marilyn Haring, professor of educational studies at Purdue University, said that while unschooling is valuable because it questions aspects of traditional schooling, it is not without problems.

"With regard to unschooling, I believe this is best described as utopian," Haring said. "A minuscule few youngsters may have the high intelligence and motivation to inquire broadly and also learn how to learn. The vast majority, however, have no idea what might be learned and why it is important."

Part of the increased attention on alternative education may be the rebellion against educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. It was one of the reasons Janna Odenthal of Chesterton embraced unschooling for her child. "The testing doesn't do any good," she said.
In a 2003 survey by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of children educated at home nationally was 1.1 million, an increase of 29 percent from the previous study in 1999.

Seth Odenthal, 10, has been unschooled since he was about 5.
"I went ahead and gave it a try, and I fell in love with the things we could do together, the flexibility in our schedule," his mother said. When Seth took an early interest in cooking and baking, Odenthal embraced his curiosity, and the two of them cook together. She even signed him up for a local cooking class. Seth never formally learned math, but Odenthal said he excels at it because it's a natural progression from his cooking interests.

Indiana doesn't require the unschoolers to take standardized tests, and parents are allowed to give their unschooled children high school diplomas when the parents believe the children are ready to graduate.

Since education laws in Indiana are loose, parents of unschoolers can take different approaches to learning. But most tend to have a few common practices. Students don't sit at desks to learn, as parents believe learning happens all the time. And while they aren't taught how to read or write or do science, the children usually ask their parents enough questions that they eventually learn on their own.

"My oldest was reading on her own without being taught before she turned 5," said Carol Pozos, who unschools her three children in her Michigan City home. "I did not do anything except read to her, and she soaked it up and was reading full sentences. I thought to myself, 'Obviously, this works.' " Pozos, who has a degree in elementary education, enrolled one of her children in preschool because the child had been begging her to go to school since she was 3. But when her daughter refused to return to school halfway through the year, Pozos decided to try teaching her children herself. Her children are 8, 7 and 4, and other than a half-year of preschool, all three have been learning at home their entire lives. They also have chores they're required to do every morning.
And once they finish their chores? "We do whatever we want," said 8-year-old Isabel, who spent a recent afternoon on the floor of her living room flipping through a picture book with her 4-year-old brother. On Thursday mornings the children attend an art class filled with unschoolers and their parents. "Books are out, and if they want to draw they can draw," Pozos said of the class. "If they don't want to participate, they can go off in the corner and play."

To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, 18-year-old unschooler Abby Stewart bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted an overall SAT score of 2,350 out of a possible 2,400.

Pozos said she'd be happy if her children went to college, as long as they are happy with their decision. "I'm not one of those people who says, 'I want my son to be a doctor and my daughter to be an attorney.' I just want them to be happy. If Armand wants to be a stay-at-home dad and Isabel wants to be a marine biologist, that's just fine."

Unschooling article from Education Week

From Education Week: Published: December 20, 2006
‘Unschooling’ Stresses Curiosity More Than Traditional Academics
By Michelle R. Davis

As yellow school buses rumble through Nicole Puckett’s Spokane, Wash., neighborhood, her eight children are often asleep in bed. When they wake up, instead of heading to school, they go downstairs to begin another day of "unschooling,

" an educational approach that is the subject of much debate among home-schoolers and traditional school advocates. Ms. Puckett keeps her children at home for their education, but she doesn’t have a textbook in the house. Instead, she follows the philosophy of letting the child decide each day what activities to pursue—or avoid.
On a typical day, Ms. Puckett’s children—who range in age from 4 to 17 and have never gone to a traditional school—might watch a few hours of television, read the Bible, amuse themselves with video games, play with their siblings, practice the violin, or learn Russian. On many days, they’re out of the house visiting museums, going to concerts, or attending theatrical plays.

"I believe that each child is gifted, but each has different gifts," said Ms. Puckett, who sees it as her job to help facilitate the learning that her children choose. "When I see them veering toward something, I guide them toward it. If they’re showing no interest, then we don’t do it." This child-led method of home schooling means that what children do during a typical school day is entirely up to them.

In an era of increased standardized testing, top-down curricula, and the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, unschooling is attractive to some parents, who say learning should be a more organic, curiosity-inspired exercise. Advocates say it allows children to become passionate about, and invested in, their own learning.
Risks Involved But critics, including some of those who opt for more-structured home schooling and proponents of "child centered" classrooms in regular schools, say that there are risks involved, and that learning deficits can result from letting children basically learn whatever they want.

Nel Noddings, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, describes herself as an advocate of child-centered education when it is done right. But she said unschooling raises many questions of concern. For instance, she said, an unschooling parent who never liked science might de-emphasize the subject because of those feelings or a lack of knowledge about it. And she worries that religious fundamentalist parents, for example, might use unschooling "to keep their kids away from the breadth of ideas they might be exposed to."

The term "unschooling" was coined by the late John Holt, one of the godfathers of the home-schooling movement, who wrote a stack of books about alternative ways of educating children. Mr. Holt first used the word in 1977 and equated it with home schooling. The term resonated with many home-schooling parents who didn’t want to use traditional methods, such as textbooks and organized subjects, to educate their children, said Patrick Farenga, the president of Holt Associates, based in Wakefield, Mass. Mr. Farenga took over leadership of the company, a home schooling publishing and advocacy organization, when Mr. Holt died in 1985. Unschooling should not mean "schooling without a plan," Mr. Farenga said in an interview. "It’s self-directed learning. I define unschooling as allowing children as much freedom to explore the world as you can comfortably bear."

Brian D. Ray, the president of the Salem, Ore.-based Home Schooling Institute, estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the 1.9 to 2.4 million K-12 children being home-schooled in the United States also fall into the unschooling category, also sometimes called "relaxed home schooling." "We’re talking about people who purposely, intentionally, philosophically make learning an integral and organic part of everyday life," he said.

State laws on home schooling also pertain to unschooling and vary considerably around the country, Mr. Ray said. Some states require home-schooled children to take several standardized tests during their K-12 years. Other states have few or no requirements of home-schoolers, he said. For instance, in Washington state, where Ms. Puckett’s family lives, the law requires that home-schooled students take an annual achievement test, though they’re not required to meet a particular educational achievement target, according to a listing of each state’s requirements compiled by Home Education Magazine, a bi-monthly magazine about home schooling that has been around since 1983. Connecticut asks that parents who engage in home schooling file an annual plan for their child’s education and meet once a year with local education officials to review the plan. Pennsylvania requires that home-schooling parents provide at least 180 days of instruction and maps out what subjects must be taught.
Pennsylvania also requires annual testing and detailed documentation from parents to prove instruction is occurring.

Sandra Dodd, a longtime advocate of unschooling who lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and whose two children never attended a traditional school, said when her oldest child was of school age she believed he was already soaking up more on his own than he would in kindergarten. "If you don’t separate the world into educational and noneducational, your child wants to learn everything, so everything around them is what he’s learning from," she said. "They’re learning in natural, real world ways, the way you learn to drive or cook or sew."

‘Less Structured Place’ Unschoolers argue that if a child is intrigued by a book, for example, they don’t have to quit reading it to make way for a science lesson; or if they love dinosaurs, they can study them for weeks at a time, and visit museums to bolster the experience.

Jane Powell, a Bowie, Md., mother of four children who practices unschooling, said she never taught her oldest son, now 9, to read. He learned how to read by playing video games, she said. "As he was playing his games, he was asking me to read, so I was reading what he needed. Then he was asking me less and less frequently, and then it stopped. … He learned to read," she said. "I didn’t teach him. I didn’t prod him. I didn’t give him any helpful shoves in the appropriate direction. He learned to read when he was ready."

Likewise, Ms. Dodd said she never taught her children mathematics by using worksheets or word problems. Her children learned math by figuring out how many weeks of allowance it would take to save up for a certain toy, by calculating percentage discounts on items at stores, and by estimating tips at restaurants, she said. Ms. Dodd said her son, at his own request, took his first formal math class at age 18 at a local community college. When he took the initial placement test, she had to explain to him that multiplication could be represented by an X or by a dot or by a parenthesis. He scored well on the initial test, she said and by the end of the class he had pushed his scores even higher, she said. With unschooling, "how you learn something is because you want to learn it," Ms. Dodd said, adding that her children have been able to follow their own interests—rather than a list of subjects determined by others. "My kids have had a glorious full life of absence of school," she said. Of course, those from more traditional education circles worry that such free-form education could make it difficult for a child to adjust as an adult to the more structured world of college or work.

But Ms. Noddings of Stanford, despite her reservations about unschooling, believes just the opposite. "Perhaps these kids may help the world be a less miserable and less structured place," she said. "Perhaps they’ll have something to say against the overly bureaucratic system we have now."

Different Approaches To those who have chosen unschooling, Mr. Farenga of Holt Associates said, the method can take a variety of forms. He doesn’t espouse any particular way of unschooling, but "some parents take a very laissez-faire approach," while others choose more structure, he said. Ms. Puckett, for example, limits her children to two hours a day of television time, a practice that makes some of the more extreme unschoolers wince. "Unschooling is not unparenting," Ms. Puckett said. "My choice is that too much TV is not good for their brains, and it inhibits their natural curiosity."

Ms Dodd, on the other hand, said her family has TVs and video games in many rooms, and her children’s time using them is not limited. More often than not, though, the TVs will be off because her children find more creative and interesting things to do, she said.

But some educators, even within the home-schooling world, argue that unschooling can leave children with a lopsided education. Manfred Smith, the president of the Maryland Home Education Association, based in Columbia, Md., said members of his organization once considered themselves unschoolers. "It meant we were not going to replicate a traditional school-like focus on curriculum and text," he said. "We wanted to focus on the needs and interests of our children." But Mr. Smith said his group stopped using the term unschooling when it concluded the word had become tainted. "You have people claiming to be unschoolers, providing minimal or no supervision," he said. "Unschooling can be this great rationalization or outright excuse not to make an effort."

Alfie Kohn, a well-known education author who is an expert on progressive and child-centered education, said there’s wide variation in the definition of unschooling.
"There are those levels of extreme unschooling where parents will say, our children can figure out life on their own and we’ll let them do it themselves," he said. "Other levels are not as structured [as typical homeschooling], but parents make sure children are on par or even excel over where they should be." Mr. Kohn said "there’s no question that unschooling leaves behind most of the bad stuff in a lot of schools. The question is whether some good stuff or potential good stuff is missing."

John Holt

John Holt was a teacher when he wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn. He eventually quit teaching and became a speaker and supporter of education reform and went on to write several more books. Deciding that schools could not be reformed, he focused his energies on alternatives to conventional schooling. He founded Growing Without Schooling, America's first homeschooling magazine and continued writing until his death in 1985.

A Conversation with John Holt (1980)
Interviewer: Marlene Bumgarner

In 1980, Marlene Bumgarner, a homeschooling parent, hosted author John Holt in her home while he was in California for a lecture tour. While he played in the garden with her two children, John and Dona Ana, she interviewed him for the bimonthly magazine Mothering.

What is your philosophy of learning?
Basically that the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we need to learn; we are good at it; we don't need to be shown how or made to do it. made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Why homeschooling?
That's a big question. The great advantage is intimacy, control of your time, flexibility of schedule, and the ability to respond to the needs of the child, and to the inclinations. If the child is feeling kind of tired or out of sorts, or a little bit sick, or kind of droopy in spirits, okay, we take it easy, and things go along very calmly and easily. When the child is full of energy and rambunctious, then we tackle big projects, we try tough stuff, we look at hard books. And I think schools could do much more than they do in this kind of flexibility, but in fact they don't. I want to make it clear that I don't see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. Itis a supplementary resource.But the school is a kind of artificial institution, and the home is a very natural one. Thereare lots of societies without schools, but never any without homes. Home is the center ofthe circle from which you move out in all directions, so there is no conceivable improvement in schools that would change my mind about that.

What does one do at a homeschool?
That's what Growing Without Schooling is about, of course. What one can do depends a loton what one's own life is. A lot of families have small businesses or subsistence farms orcrafts, or various kinds of activities that the parents are involved in, which the children arealso very involved in. The children just partake in the life of the adults wherever they are,and then questions are answered as they come up. Other people may live at home andwork somewhere else; they may have a more conventional kind of existence.I don't believe in formal fixed curriculums, but it may very well be that when parents andchildren start off, they're both a little nervous. They're both wondering what they shouldbe doing. If it makes people feel happier to have a little schedule, and to work with a correspondence school for a year or so, kind of as a security blanket, there's nothingwrong with that. It's a starting place.My advice is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine whathappens and to give children access to as much of the parents' lives and the world aroundthem as possible, given your own circumstances, so that children have the widest possiblerange of things to look at and think about. See which things interest them most, and helpthem to go down that particular road.How that's done depends very much on the family's circumstances and their interests, and the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to buildthings, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever.The mix is never going to be exactly the same.

Does homeschooling require that the parents spend a great deal of structured time with their children in a formal learning situation?
Homeschooling doesn't require that parents spend a great deal of structured time. I thinkas parents get into this they tend to spend less time. How much time they spend with theirkids depends a little on the circumstances in their own lives. Sometimes they spend a lotof time in company together just because it's fun. Other times that's harder for them todo. The children, though they may enjoy a lot of their parents' company during the day,don't need it once they get past 7 or 8.

Is the parent without background in education or experience as a teacher at a disadvantage in a homeschooling situation?
I'd say they have a very great advantage. I wouldn't say that a person was disqualifiedfrom doing it because they had had training in education, but I would have to say thatpractically everything they taught you at that school of education is just plain wrong. You have to unlearn it all. I never had any of that educational training. The most exclusive, selective, demanding private schools in this country do not hire people who have education degrees. If you look through their faculties - degrees in history, mathematics, English, French, whatever - you will not see degrees in education. I think for the most prestigious private schools you could almost set it down as a fact that to have a teacher's certificate, to have had that kind of training, would disqualify you.

Are parents talented or knowledgeable enough to teach physics or math?
Oh, well, the children don't have to learn physics or math from you. There are plenty of people to learn from; there are plenty of books; there are plenty of extension courses. GWS will have information on that. There are plenty of other people to answer your questions. And the children don't have to get it all from Mom and Pop. There are people who have only high schooling, or may not even have finished that, who are now teaching their children at home and doing a very good job of it.

What about the child's social life?
As for friends – you're not going to lock your kids in the house. I think the socializing aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues - kindness, patience, generosity, etc. are learned by children in intimate relationships, maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different - popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours, during vacations, at the library, in church.

What about the opportunity for youths to meet members of other backgrounds, other socioeconomic classes?
Most of the schools that I know anything about are tracked - there would be a college track, and a business track, and a vocational track. Studies have shown over the years that these tracks correlate perfectly with economic class. I think I know enough about most high schools in this country to say there is very little mingling of people from different backgrounds, different religious groups. The rich kids hang out with the rich kids, the jocks hang out with the jocks, the pointy heads hang out with the pointy heads, the greasers hang out with the greasers. Maybe there are some exceptions to that but the idea of school as a social melting pot where people of all kinds of backgrounds get together - pure mythology, folks.

What is your philosophy about teaching reading?
I think the teaching of reading is mostly what prevents reading. Different children learn different ways. I think reading aloud is fun, but I would never read aloud to a kid so that the kid would learn to read. You read aloud because it's fun and companionable. You hold a child, sitting next to you or on your lap, reading this story that you're having fun with, and if it isn't a cozy, happy, warm, friendly, loving experience, then you shouldn't do it. It isn't going to do any good.I think children are attracted toward the adult world. It's nice to have children's books, but far too many of them have too much in the way of pictures. When children see books, as they do in the family where the adults read, with pages and pages and pages of print, it becomes pretty clear that if you're going to find out what's in those books, you're going to have to read from that print. I don't think there's any way to make reading interesting to children in a family in which it isn't interesting to adults.

What your philosophy about math?
My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things with them, or make certain judgements about them. And so I say let children do with numbers what we do with numbers. I'm a great believer in many kinds of measuring instruments - tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales, thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: "We'll have to teach them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money." I think dealing with money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you're talking about basics, those are basics.The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the human mind. It's fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and liabilities and depreciation.Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really "big adult stuff." Let the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why? This is inherently interesting, so let's at least make this part of our life - like every other part - accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything else. It's embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing floating around in space, and it's a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business;there are numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions incooking. So wherever numbers are in real life, then let's go and meet them and work withthem.

What subject matter do you see as essential?
None.

What about the parent who works outside of the home?
One question which often comes up is "How am I going to teach my kids six hours a day?" And I respond to that by saying, "Who's teaching your kids six hours a day now?" I was a good student in supposedly the best schools and it was a rare day that I got five minutes of teaching... that's five minutes of somebody's serious attention to my personal needs, interests, concerns, difficulties, problems. Like most other kids in school, I learned that if you don't understand what's going on, for heaven's sake, keep your mouth shut.

What happens when children become ill, or have an injury, etc.?
Home teachers come in for three to five hours a week. It has been found that this is perfectly sufficient. These children don't fall behind. No child needs, or should stand, six hours of teaching a day, even if a parent were of a mind to give it. It would drive them up the wall!

How are homeschoolers evaluated when they go to enroll at the university level?Just like anyone else. You know, there are these tests you can take... the College Boards, the SAT, and so forth. Actually, homeschoolers do exceptionally well on these things. They're more motivated to learn what areas will be covered, and prepare for them.

Does it sometimes happen that a homeschooling student will express a desire to go to or return to traditional schooling? How do parents handle this?
Various ways. Sometimes parents have to decide (we're the grownups) that we don't want them to go back to that school, and then stick with it. But other times, if the children want to go, then that means they're immune to the manipulation the schools can do with the children who don't have a choice about whether they have to be there or not. The school loses some of its power when the children know they can quit if they want.

Post Tribune Unschooling Article

Alternative form of homeschooling embraces child-directed learning
(http://www.post-trib.com/news/194009,unskul.article)

January 2, 2007
BY DANIELLE BRAFF Post-Tribune

It's a Tuesday morning. As children throughout the Region ae waking up, packing their bags and heading toward the school bus, Adele Schiessle turns to her children and asks them if they wanted to spend the day playing on a 6,000-square-foot indoor inflatable play area at Jump Central.

Collin, 6, and Amber, 7, agree that would be a pleasant way to start the morning. After they played on the bouncy furniture, they headed back to their home in St. John, where they spent the rest of the day watching TV, navigating XBox, working on art projects and playing games.

It's just another day in the Schiessle household, where the children learn through a branch of homeschooling called unschooling.

While the definition of unschooling varies, it generally reflects a concept of child-led learning.

For Carol Pozos' oldest child, it meant self-taught reading at age 4.

For 18-year-old Abby Stewart of Chicago, it meant the news last week that she had won early admission to Princeton.

"It's an awareness that learning is always happening because it's part of living," said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. "It's almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in."

Unschooled children don't go to school, but unlike many other homeschoolers, the unschoolers don't necessarily learn through workbooks, educational guides or study sources. Instead, the children are free to pursue what interests them.

The unschooling concept has been around for decades, but it's been slow to catch on, as initially most parents shy away from letting their children have such control over their own education.

"I'm trying to get rid of the idea that learning happens at a certain time in a certain place," Van Stelle said.

And while homeschooling students far exceed unschoolers in terms of numbers, the unschooling movement appears to be slowly increasing. There aren't any statistics on unschoolers yet, but their popularity is reflected in the number of unschooling message boards on the Internet, in the abundance of unschooling clubs, in the frequency of unschooling conferences and in the slow but steady movement of unschooling into the vocabulary of educators.

Part of the increased attention on alternative education may be the rebellion against educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. It was one of the reasons Janna Odenthal of Chesterton embraced unschooling for her child.

"The testing doesn't do any good," she said.

The focus on alternative schooling hasn't been missed by the media, who have featured unschoolers on the talk show "Dr. Phil," and in a recent report in the New York Times.

In a 2003 survey by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of children educated at home nationally was 1.1 million, an increase of 29 percent from the previous study in 1999. The study didn't ask about unschooling specifically, but homeschooling parents continue to strive for other educational methods, with unschooling becoming a more popular second to traditional homeschooling.

Ten-year-old Seth Odenthal has been unschooled since he was about 5. He went to preschool, and tried going to kindergarten, but dropped out after a few days because he preferred being at home. He even tried going to school for a few days in the first grade, and then in the second, but he continued expressing interest in staying at home, so his mother researched the unschooling methods.

"I went ahead and gave it a try, and I fell in love with the things we could do together, the flexibility in our schedule," Odenthal said of unschooling her only child.

When Seth took an early interest in cooking and baking, Odenthal embraced his curiosity, and the two of them cook together. She even signed him up for a local cooking class. Seth never formally learned math, but Odenthal said he excels at it because it's a natural progression from his cooking interests.

"He learns all about math and science through a lot of cooking that we do," said Odenthal, a writer who occasionally freelances for the Post-Tribune.

The state of Indiana doesn't require the unschoolers to do any standardized testing, and parents are allowed to give their unschooled children high school diplomas when the parents believe the children are ready to graduate.

Since education laws in Indiana are loose, the unschooled parents can take different approaches to learning. But most tend to have a few commonalities.

They don't sit at desks to learn, as the parents believe learning happens all the time. And while they aren't taught how to read or write or do science; the children usually ask their parents enough questions that they eventually learn on their own.

"My oldest was reading on her own without being taught before she turned 5," said Carol Pozos, who unschools her three children in her Michigan City home. "I did not do anything except read to her, and she soaked it up and was reading full sentences. I thought to myself, 'Obviously, this works.' "

While Pozos has a degree in elementary education, there were many aspects of traditional schooling that disgusted her. She said many schools care more about the business and the money involved with schooling, instead of focusing on the individual needs of the child.

Pozos enrolled one of her children in preschool because the child had been begging her to go to school since she was 3. But when her daughter refused to return to school halfway through the year, Pozos decided to try teaching her children herself.

Her children are 8, 7, and 4, and other than a half-year of preschool, all three have been learning at home their entire lives. They also have chores they're required to do every morning.

And once they finish their chores?

"We do whatever we want," said 8-year-old Isabel, who spent a recent afternoon on the floor of her living room flipping through a picture book with her 4-year-old brother.

On Thursday mornings, the children attend an art class, filled with unschoolers and their parents.

"Books are out, and if they want to draw, they can draw," Pozos said of the class. "If they don't want to participate, they can go off in the corner and play."

The point, she said, is to encourage them to do whatever interests them and makes them happy and inquisitive children. The same applies to the unschooled children's higher education and career goals.

Schiessle said she was a college graduate, and her husband wasn't. But even after all that schooling, Schiessle still feels like her husband has more knowledge about the world than she does.

"I looked back to my schooling, and yeah, I was an A honor student, but what did I know? I was just memorizing for the test. I was so focused on that grade," Schiessle said. When she teaches her children, "They're not being measured as a person by that absolute number."

Traditional school does teach children to memorize complex mathematics scenarios and scientific equations, and Schiessle said if her children decide they want to go to college, she'll buy the books to help them learn the advanced information that they may not necessarily learn through her.

But only if they want to go to college and want to learn about algebraic equations and the periodic table.

And some do. To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, 18-year-old unschooler Abby Stewart bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted knockout scores: an overall SAT of 2,350 out of 2,400.

Not all unschoolers or home-schoolers have Abby's scores, but on another popular college admission test, the ACT, test-takers who identified themselves as home-schoolers have scored a notch above the national average for the last decade. This year, they averaged 22.4 on a 36-point scale compared with a national average of 21.2.

At Harvard University, admissions director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said, unschoolers without transcripts can submit college admission scores, and then "tell us what they have done in the way of academic preparation for college, and we'll take it from there."

But just like traditional schoolers, not all unschoolers want college.

Pozos said she'd be happy if her children went to college, but she's also be happy if they didn't, as long as her children were happy with their decision.

"I'm not one of those people who says, 'I want my son to be a doctor and my daughter to be an attorney.' I just want them to be happy. If Armand wants to be a stay-at-home dad, and Isabel wants to be a marine biologist, that's just fine."

Isabel, who was listening as her mother explained the philosophy, turned and asked her, "What's a marine biologist?" Pozos answered, teaching her child without her daughter ever knowing she was being lectured.

Some children, however, aren't as inquisitive as Isabel, making unschooling difficult, said Marilyn Haring, professor of educational studies at Purdue University. She said that while the unschooling movement is valuable because it questions aspects of traditional schooling, it is not without problems.

"With regard to unschooling, I believe this is best described as utopian," Haring said in an e-mail. "A miniscule few youngsters may have the high intelligence and motivation to inquire broadly and also learn how to learn. The vast majority, however, have no idea what might be learned and why it is important."

Schiessle contended unschooling parents can still guide their children without forcing education upon them. She often reads books to her children about a variety of topics, from ancient Egypt to farming, and if her children express an interest, they can explore that idea further.

"It's not that I don't lead, but I don't make the decisions for them," Schiessle said. "I look at it like I'm their guide. I'm there for guidance for everything."

New unschooling article in the Chicago Sun

'You have to trust that the child will learn'
12/24/06

Eighteen-year-old Abby Stewart got word this month that she won early admission to elite Princeton University, even though she has never set foot in a high school classroom.
She also wrapped up a huge challenge -- dancing the Snow Queen role in "The Nutcracker Suite" at the Athenaeum Theatre -- largely because she has never set foot in a high school classroom.

Five years ago, frustrated with the pace and depth of a Chicago Public School gifted program, Abby withdrew from eighth grade and entered uncharted territory -- a branch of home schooling often called "unschooling."
Under this ultimate form of "child-directed" learning, Abby used no set curriculum. She called her own hours, worked at her own pace and, most important, followed her own interests -- without taking tests or receiving grades. Some days, she'd wake up, grab a bowl of cereal and go back to bed with a book.

Since then, she has amassed a six-page reading list ranging from Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species to Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Calculus to 16 Shakespearean plays.
"I do exactly what feels right to me," says Abby. "If I want to just read literature for three weeks or three months, that's perfectly fine with my family."

The flexibility of unschooling made it easier for Abby to take ballet classes six days a week, resulting in the shopping bag full of pointe shoes in the corner of her Hyde Park bedroom and her recent role in Ballet Chicago's Studio Company production of "The Nutcracker Suite."
Abby also volunteers three days a week at the Field Museum, where she reduces animal carcasses to bones. Her first day at work, she was given a pair of gloves and a scalpel and directed to the remains of a Siberian tiger.
"Compared to a kid in high school with worms and frogs, it's pretty heady stuff," said her dad, Dana Stewart, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
'Delight-driven learning'By some counts, Abby is part of a growing movement, at least in the Chicago area.

Federal officials estimate that about 1.1 million students nationwide were home-schooled in 2003, up a hefty 30 percent from four years earlier.
Although numbers on unschooling are more difficult to come by, since 1999, at least five unschooling online support groups have sprung up in Illinois, four of them concentrated in the six-county Chicago area, said Melissa Bradford, founder of Many Rivers Unschooling, serving mostly DuPage and Will counties.

"It's definitely growing. Look at our group," said Winifred Haun, a choreographer and dancer who co-founded Northside Unschoolers of Chicago in 2001 with some half-dozen families. Last year, membership hit 100.

Unschooling is rooted in the ideas of education reformer John Holt, who said children are innately curious and will learn what they need to know when they need to know it.
That doesn't mean unschoolers won't ever take conventional classes.
Art enthusiasts may take art classes. Teens who want to go to college may take community college classes first.

Unschoolers figure out what they want to do in life and then learn what they need to get there. Advocates say they absorb material better by learning it when they need it.
One unschooling Web site calls the approach "delight-driven learning." Author Pat Farenga, a student of Holt's, calls it "the natural way to learn."
"This is the way we learn before going to school and the way we learn when we leave school and enter the world of work," Farenga writes in Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Unschooling.

One Northside Unschoolers mom was seeking an alternative to the test emphasis and heavy homework in her public school. Other unschooling parents may want to avoid labels schools put on especially active kids or late readers.
"The hardest thing for most people ... is that you have to trust that the child will learn," said Mary Griffith, author of The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World As Your Child's Classroom."For those of us who had late readers, it was really hard. A lot of unschooled kids don't learn to read when they are 6. Sometimes waiting until they are 7, 8 or 9 is quite common," said Griffith.
"But once they learn to read, they read anything and everything."
'Noodling around' The tools of unschooling in the early years are scattered across a third-floor playroom of Winifred Haun's turn-of-the-century Oak Park home.
Dice and board games help daughters Athena, 10; Iris, 5, and Selene, 2, learn math -- and social skills. Pads of paper, pencils and markers are there for writing and drawing. Books are omnipresent.

This "unschooling" morning, Iris and Athena have completed math problems they asked their dad, Stephen Parke, a Harvard grad and physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, to create.
"Iris was interested in 1 plus 1 is 2," Haun says, so Parke's worksheet expands the idea all the way up to 50 plus 50. Athena's problems amount to early algebra.
Selene plays on a futon as Iris works with her mom on sewing and Athena announces "I need to practice my writing."
Athena has seen what she's missing -- and doesn't miss it.
"I've been to school for a day. It was fun, but I like it here better. In school, they just sat there while the teacher talked," Athena says.
Athena knows some question whether home-schoolers will develop the proper social skills away from a classroom full of kids their age.
"I say home-schoolers do get social skills," Athena says. "I go to choir where there's one other kid who's home schooled. And I go to a home-schooling group where there are kids of all ages. And I have Girl Scouts and ballet."
Haun said some days her kids "just noodle around, but they are investing in days when they produce more."
Besides, she said, "You can teach your kid in 90 minutes a day what it takes the school six hours. ... The other 4½ hours are, 'Stand up. Sit up. Let's go to the bathroom. Let's take attendance. ...'
"If my daughter needs to know ... how to find her friend's name in the phone book, I can take five minutes and explain to her about alphabetizing," Haun said. "I don't have to test her. I know when she can look up the name on her own."

In their teenage years, said Grace Llewellyn, author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, unschooling kids can study biology with a textbook, in a community college or with software. Or they can befriend a doctor and brainstorm on books to read or projects to do. Or they can volunteer to work in a veterinarian's office.
"The sky is the limit," Llewellyn said.
The college questionAbby's dad and mom, a hospice social worker, gave their three children a taste of school (all won admission to gifted programs), and eventually let them decide if they wanted to stay there. All three wound up pretty much unschoolers, with the oldest graduating from Dartmouth in June.
Abby wanted to go to college, too, and plunged into subjects she'd need to get there.
To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, she bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted knockout scores: an overall SAT of 2,350 out of 2,400.

To pad out her track record, she also took the SAT world history, literature and U.S. history tests, scoring 800, 790 and 780, respectively, on an 800-point scale.
Not all unschoolers or home-schoolers have Abby's scores, but on another popular college admission test, the ACT, test-takers who identified themselves as home-schoolers have scored a notch above the national average for the last decade. This year, they averaged 22.4 on a 36-point scale compared with a national average of 21.2.
Before Abby got the news last week that she had won early admission to Princeton, she had researched applying to seven other colleges and found them "pretty forgiving" about her lack of a traditional grade-point average.

At Harvard University, admissions director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said, unschoolers without transcripts can submit college admission scores, and then "tell us what they have done in the way of academic preparation for college, and we'll take it from there."
Some may wonder if unschoolers can adjust to the structure of college life. After the regimen of ballet classes, Abby doesn't expect problems.
Unschooler Sam Dickey, 23, an Oak Park native now attending Beloit College after four years at a community college, said he has no difficulty making it to classes. He found he performs well on deadline and is a "very good writer" despite never having written a research paper before college.

But just like traditional schoolers, not all unschoolers want college.
Jan Hunt, an unschooling counselor who operates the Natural Child Project Web site, said her unschooled son didn't go to college. He started a computer consulting company instead.
"He continually beats us at Trivial Pursuit. He's an incredible editor," said Hunt. "He can do any math problem in his head. I have the proof in the pudding right here."
Not for everyoneYet even advocates caution that unschooling is not for everyone.
"It's just kind of a scary way of doing things. Not many people are willing to go out on that limb," said Dorothy Werner, founder of Home Oriented Unique Schooling Experience, an Illinois home-schooling support group.
"You have to trust that children want to learn. You can't believe that children must be forced to learn," Werner said.

"Parents who need to be in control ... would have a hard time. If you want your child to be learning the same factoids as the child next door, unschooling is not for you."
Home-schooling researcher Michael Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is "wary of the hype." He wonders what unschoolers are really learning about people of other races, religions and cultures.
"There is no public accountability," Apple said.
Counters unschooling author Farenga: "Who is going to be the commissar of correct thought?"
William Schubert, professor of curriculum studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, home-schooled his daughter using a few unschooling ideas.
He says unschooling can be positive, but requires time, resources and "dialogue with ... well-educated people."
"We don't know that children are innately curious. The question is open," Schubert said. Some unschoolers "may not get any further than eating candy bars."
Unschooling may be easier for parents with the time and resources, Farenga agrees, but "everyone can find that within their own little sphere."
"I'm not trying to make this sound like it's easy," Farenga said, "but it's not easy if your child is failing or hurting in school, either."
Abby and others insist every child has a passion waiting to be ignited.
"Every person has something they absolutely adore and would like to do for the rest of their life," Abby said.
"If you can pinpoint that, and have your kids run with it, you'd be amazed how excited your kids can be about learning."