For a kid who never went to school, Matt Moyer is doing pretty well. Matt is currently a junior at the University of Tulsa on a full academic scholarship (a result of earning a 33 on the ACT) and has already received an offer from TU for a scholarship to complete his master’s degree. His future plans include moving to Washington D.C. so he can pursue a career in computer security with an intelligence agency. “I’ll also finish a Ph.D. in computer science somewhere down the line,” says Matt.
What makes Matt’s story even more interesting is that, unlike other traditionally home-schooled children, Matt had no formal schooling at all until he was 16 years old and requested it. He then attended TCC taking algebra and calculus through a concurrent enrollment program offered to high school age students.
But just because Matt wasn’t formally schooled doesn’t mean he wasn’t educated. Matt’s parents chose a different educational approach known as “unschooling.” Matt’s mother Leslie, a child development major in college, hadn’t planned on such a non-traditional approach to education for her children. “The first homeschooler I met happened to be an unschooler,” says Leslie. “Her children had such a fire for learning. I wanted my kids to always have a passion for learning.”
Leslie said she began homeschooling Matt because he was quiet. “I thought I might homeschool just that one year. But it [unschooling] went so well we did it another year and so on.”
Leslie has now unschooled all three of her children, Matt, now 21; Sarah 18 and a freshman at OU; and 14-year-old Elizabeth.
What is Unschooling?
John Holt, a teacher and advocate for education reform and supporter of homeschooling, first coined the term “unschooling.” According to the John Holt and Growing Without School website, unschooling is a type of homeschooling that “doesn’t use a fixed curriculum.” It is also known as “interest driven, child-led, organic, eclectic or self-directed learning.”
So, while a traditional homeschooled child might have a math textbook and study math every weekday between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., or attend a math co-op classroom with other homeschooled children, the unschooled child will have no formal math education at all. The same goes for reading, history, social studies, English, science—all academic subjects. The children learn when they are ready to learn, using experiences and resources they discover themselves and/or are made available to them by their parents.
According to the website, Holt believed that “We don’t need to be taught how to learn: we’re born knowing and wanting to. It’s our nature, our genes, our biological inheritance. The hardest thing for parents to learn is hands-off. Teach less, not more.”
According to Patrick Farenga, unschooling advocate and president of Holt Associates Inc., unschooling is self-directed learning but not “learning without a plan.” In an interview with Stanford University School of Education, Farenga defined unschooling as “allowing children as much freedom to explore the world as you can comfortably bear.”
Trust in the Process
“It requires an enormous amount of trust at first,” says Jenny Thompson, an energetic woman with a warm smile and sparkling eyes. “But then, after not too terribly long, it just makes so much sense.”
Jenny, her husband Chris, and their four children: Molly 15, Kyla 13, Rachel 10 and Aren 7 have embraced what Jenny calls a “radical” unschooling lifestyle.
“We don’t have a schedule, but a flow,” says Jenny about the family’s daily routine. The Thompson’s don’t dictate bedtimes, chores or television times. “I think if you make anything the enemy you are defeating unschooling. But it’s not like I have four kids who are raising themselves,” she’s quick to add. “We do have rules.”
“We wake up at different times, so breakfast together wouldn’t work,” says Rachel. “Kyla wakes up at 5:30 and Molly…at noon!” says Rachel, giggling.
“But we almost always have dinner together,” says Jenny. “Chris and I usually cook, but Molly and Kyla will be cooking Thursday nights this fall because of soccer practice.”
Kyla has been reading cookbooks to prepare herself for the responsibility. Molly likes to experiment. “I’d rather do it all myself,” says Molly when talking about cleaning up the kitchen and cooking.
When it comes to housework, Jenny says she’ll announce, “Okay, we’ve got to clean up today. Divide it up!” She says the kids always work it out peaceably.
Jenny says she doesn’t restrict television, but that it isn’t a problem. “If you watch too much you feel bleeeck!” says Rachel, grimacing and sticking out her tongue.
According to Jenny, Aren watches about two hours of PBS Kids in the afternoon. “My eyes get tired if I watch too much,” says Aren.
“They need to learn to know when they are hungry, tired, full. My kids don’t crave T.V. because it’s not off limits,” says Jenny.
All four Thompson children have their own rooms. “One reason we are successful is that we all have a door,” says Jenny. She believes homeschooling can work in smaller spaces, but is glad that her family has “personal space to retreat to.”
Lively and animated, Aren is most interested in playing. His bedroom floor is strewn with his favorite toys. In the world of unschooling, that is just fine, for play is seen as the natural way children learn.
Rachel’s room reflects her interest in art; she loves to draw and paint. Many of her favorite drawings are displayed on her walls and throughout the home. An open sketchbook reveals a delicate rendering of a tiger lily in bloom, drawn, she says, by looking at a flower in her backyard. This summer the outgoing 10-year-old attended Holland Hall’s art camp.
Quiet and studious, Kyla is passionate about animals and books. One long wall in her bedroom has a spacious pen for her two guinea pigs, Skittles and No Name. “We got the information for the pen off the internet and built it ourselves,” says Jenny.
Kyla also volunteers at the public library and keeps a spiral notebook of all the books she wants to read in the future. She says that the librarians keep her informed of books she might like. “Kyla reads with a dictionary by her side and looks up every single word she doesn’t know,” says Jenny. “I never taught her to do that.”
Molly, a well-spoken, confident teenager with long wavy hair, is preparing to attend Tulsa Community College when she turns 16. For the first time in her life she is using structured educational materials to prepare for TCC. “I think it’s a natural transition,” says Jenny. “As they age, they crave more structure in their academics. Most importantly, it’s her choice.”
Molly says she finds math somewhat tedious. But she adds, “Sometimes your brain just needs to work. That’s when I pull out a math workbook or logic puzzles.”
Resources
While Jenny doesn’t have formal curriculum in the home, she has a wide range of resources. “We love the Dorling Kindersley math books,” says Jenny. “And I get great math workbooks at Sams.” Additionally, the Thompson’s home is filled with art supplies, books, puzzles, maps school supplies—resources of all kinds. “It’s up to them to find out what makes them tick, and then I help them find the resources,” says Jenny. “You don’t have to sit down and have ‘school’ to watch them blossom.”
Jenny admits giving her children the freedom to take classes that interest them can get expensive. “We do have credit card debt,” she says. Jenny says the family has learned to live simply in order to pursue the lifestyle they choose. “We only have one car. (Chris drives a commercial vehicle.) I make my own laundry soap—we do a lot of laundry! We shop at thrift and consignment stores.” In addition to having a house full of resources, both Jenny and Leslie count on community resources to stimulate their children’s minds, bodies and creative spirits. Between the two families, the children are involved in scouts, athletics, drama, art classes, library events, exchange programs, museum events, and much more.
“When my children were young, we plugged into the homeschooling community,” says Jenny. “Now that they are older, we plug into their interests.”
Though parents often voice concern that the homeschooled child won’t have adequate socialization, neither Jenny nor Leslie have found that to be true with all the resources and social activities available in the Tulsa area.
Gaps
Gaps in learning are an expected part of the unschooling experience and are not regarded with distress. “I’ve had gaps for some period of time,” says Matt, “but over the long haul they get filled in.” Matt says that he was never interested in learning long division on his own. He says he picked it up when he got into a college class where he needed it.
“I never required my kids to learn long division or multiplication tables.” says Leslie. “I encouraged it, I told them why it was important, but I didn’t require it,”
Matt can’t explain why he excels in upper level math but never memorized his multiplication tables. “As your brain develops, it becomes really intuitive,” he says.
One of the key components of unschooling is that children learn when they have the need to learn. “Part of my job as an unschooling parent is to put them in challenging situations so they need to learn,” says Leslie. “It’s true, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink; but, you can salt the oats!”
Leslie says that her youngest child, Elizabeth, didn’t learn to read until she was eight and a half years old, no matter how much Leslie “salted the oats.” “One evening, when I was cooking dinner, she asked me to teach her to read…Within 10 days she was reading and within one month she was reading Harry Potter.”
Advantages
Matt believes that his unschooling experience has given him advantages over other young adults. “In general I’m better at independent work. I had an internship in Washington D.C. where I had to start a research project without any supervision. I think a lot of people would feel challenged by that, but for me it was no problem. I’m also not as jaded [about education] as some of my public school peers. A lot of people [in college] have set ideas about what they want to study or don’t want to study; I can go into any class and be engaged and be interested.”
Matt says he didn’t have any trouble transitioning into college. “In college I’m still responsible for my own learning. I’ve had a really great time in college. I’ve done well academically and found a good niche in my major. I have been really happy in school.”
Jenny says one of the advantages she sees is that her children don’t have as much stress or pressure to conform. “When people ask me why I unschool I say, ‘Because I have a 15-year-old daughter who loves herself because it hasn’t occurred to her that she shouldn’t.’”
Not For Everyone
“I think it would be a wonderful way to be schooled,” says Dr. Diane Beals, associate professor of education at the University of Tulsa. “But it takes a great deal of thought and planning. It would work for kids who are curious and highly motivated, and parents who are highly motivated and have a deep understanding of the fields of knowledge they are trying to teach their children. But, there are a lot of kids who just naturally don’t want to learn anything academic. The basic assumption is that kids do want to learn. I don’t think you can say that about all kids everywhere.”
John Holt believed that all children are hard wired to learn. “This idea that children won’t learn without outside reward or penalties…usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” wrote Holt in his book, How Children Fail. “So many people have said to me, ‘If we didn’t make children do things, they wouldn’t do anything.’ Even worse, they say, ‘If I weren’t made to do things, I wouldn’t do anything.’ It is the creed of a slave. When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, ‘You may believe that, but I don’t believe it. You didn’t feel that way about yourself when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?’ To a large degree, it was school.”
Leslie, however, believes that not all parents are suited to unschool. “But,” she adds, “I don’t think it is as difficult as most people think it is. I’ve heard that to successfully unschool you either need to be well-organized or lead a very interesting life!”
Both Leslie and Jenny agree that one wonderful aspect of unschooling is that you don’t ever have to get into an antagonistic relationship with kids over learning. “The relationship with my kids has just gotten better and better,” says Leslie.
Unschooling is an extension of how our family lives,” says Jenny, whose passion for learning has her working on a master’s degree in English literature at Northeastern State University. “I’m diggin’ school! I would be in school forever,” she says. “I want my kids to feel this way about learning. Some days it’s hard. But overall it has been joy, joy, joy, joy!”
What are your experiences and opinions about unschooling, homeschooling and traditional schooling? Send us your emails or letters and we’ll publish some of them. Email editor@tulsakids.com or send to TulsaKids, 1820 S. Boulder, Suite 400, Tulsa, OK 74119.
For an extensive list of resources regarding unschooling visit the TulsaKids website at www.tulsakids.com.
Sidebar:
“Is Unschooling Right for You and Your Family?”
Leslie Moyer offers the following list to help determine if unschooling is right for your family:
• Willingness to invest time in your child
•Willingness to research resources for learning experiences
•Cooperation from partner or spouse
•An appreciation of your child’s unique strengths
•Willingness to develop and explore your own passionate interests (be a role model of learning)
•Willingness to rely on direct observation for “proof” of learning
•Have respectful, two-way communication about learning
•Commitment to put your relationship with your child before any educational matter
•Willingness to let go of your own expectations about your child’s adult life
•Ability to let go of pre-conceived notions about what constitutes “education”
•Acceptance of the idea that we don’t have control over what happens in someone else’s brain
Sidebar2:
Additional Unschooling Resources:
Unschooling 101
************* BOOKS *************
Learning All the Time
by John Caldwell Holt
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0201550911
How Children Learn
by John Caldwell Holt
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0201484048
How Children Fail
by John Caldwell Holt
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0201484021
Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling
by John Holt and Patrick Farenga
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0738206946
Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better
by John Caldwell Holt
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0525134379
Moving a Puddle and Other Essays
by Sandra Dodd
http://sandradodd.com/puddlebook
Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-child Relationships from Reaction And Struggle to Freedom, Power And Joy by Naomi Aldort
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1887542329
The Relaxed Home School: A Family Production
by Mary Hood
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0963974009
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How To Quit School and Get a Real Life & Education
by Grace Llewellyn
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0962959170
Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go To School
by Grace Llewellyn
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0962959138
The Homeschooling Handbook
by Mary Griffith
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0761501924
The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child's Classroom
by Mary Griffith
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0761512764
The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self
by Linda Dobson
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0913677140
The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling's Most Respected Voices
by Linda Dobson
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0761535705
Homeschooling Our Children; Unschooling Ourselves
by Alison McKee
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0965780627
Deschooling Our Lives
by Matt Hern
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0865713421
Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life
by Rue Kream
http://www.freechild.info/
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
by John Taylor Gatto
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0865714487
A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls
by Susanna Sheffer
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0867094052
In Their Own Way: Discovering and Encouraging Your Child's Multiple Intelligences
by Thomas Armstrong
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1585420514
Seven Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Multiple Intelligences
by Thomas Armstrong
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0452281377
You're Smarter Than You Think: A Kid's Guide to Multiple Intelligences
by Thomas Armstrong
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1575421135
For the Children's Sake
by Susan Schaeffer MacAulay
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/089107290X
Learning At Home: A Mother's Guide To Homeschooling
by Marty Layne
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0968293824
Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow.: Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love
by David H. Albert
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1567513700
Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery
by David Albert
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1567512321
Better Late Than Early
by Raymond & Dorothy Moore
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0883490498
School Can Wait
by Raymond & Dorothy Moore
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0842513140
Coloring Outside the Lines
by Roger Schank
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0060930772
(sort of anti-homeschooling, but its message was pro-homeschooling in my opinion!)
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise & Other Bribes
by Alfie Kohn
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0618001816
The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School
by Valerie Fitzenreiter
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0972941606
Growing Without Schooling: A Record of a Grassroots Movement
by John Holt, Susannah Sheffer
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0913677108
The Day I Became an Autodidact
by Kendall Hailey
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0440550130
The Book of Learning and Forgetting
by Frank Smith
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/080773750X
Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence
by Nancy Wallace
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0943914051
Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously
by Nancy Wallace
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/091367706X
And the Children Played
by Patricia Joudry
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0912766166
With Consent: Parenting for All to Win
by Jan Fortune-Wood
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1900219247
Deschooling Society
by Ivan Illich
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0714508799
************* PERIODICALS *************
Home Education Magazine: http://www.homeedmag.com/index.html
Live Free, Learn Free:
http://www.livefreelearnfree.com/
Life Learning: http://www.lifelearningmagazine.com
************* WEBSITES *************
Unschooling Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
Unschooling.com:
http://www.unschooling.com (See "Library" & "Message Boards")
Car Talk Guys:
Education: The Learning of Skills We Will Never Need?
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/ATC/
The Education Forum
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/ATC/Education/
The New Theory of Learning
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/ATC/Education/r-rlast15.html
The Education Forum II
http://www.cartalk.com/content/features/ATC/Education/index2.html
Autodidactic Press:
http://www.autodidactic.com
Libertarian Unschooling:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6529/index1.html
Unschooling Undefined:
http://www.midnightbeach.com/hs/UnschoolingUndefined.html
Home's Cool A to Z:
http://www.gomilpitas.com/homeschooling/methods/Unschooling.htm
Sandra Dodd:
http://sandradodd.com/unschooling.html
Child-led Natural Learning:
http://www.alternative-learning.org
Delight-Driven Learning:
http://home-educate.com/unschooling/index.shtml
Family Unschoolers Network:
http://www.fun-books.com
The Natural Child Project:
http://www.naturalchild.com/guest/earl_stevens.html
AHA Information Page:
http://www.americanhomeschoolassociation.org/info.html
Amy Bell's Natural Learning:
http://home.rmci.net/abell/
Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/articles.htm
Search Google for thousands more unschooling resources!
http://www.google.com |
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