Free-range education: Why the unschooling movement is growing
A once-utopian idea – allowing kids to ‘discover’ their own education path while learning at home – goes mainstream.
On a late Monday morning in this rural New Hampshire town, Dayna and Joe Martin’s four children are all home. Devin, age 16, is hammering a piece of steel in the blacksmith forge he and his parents built out of a storage shed in the backyard. Tiffany, 14, is twirling on a hoverboard, deftly avoiding the kaleidoscope-painted cabinets in the old farmhouse’s living room. Ivy, 10, and Orion, 7, are sitting next to each other using the family’s two computers, clicking through an intense session of Minecraft.
It looks a lot like school vacation, or a weekend. But it’s not. This, for the Martin kids, is school. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s their version of “unschooling,” an educational theory that suggests children should follow their own interests, without the imposition of school or even any alternative educational curriculum, because this is the best way for them to learn and grow.
“I don’t even know what grades are,” says Orion, who has never spent a day in school, has never followed a lesson plan, and has never taken a test. (Tests, his mother says, can be degrading to children – an invasion of their freedom of thought.)
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“We live as if school doesn’t exist,” Ms. Martin explains. “People are really brainwashed into seeing things in school form, with life breaking down into subjects. This life is about freedom and not having limits. It’s about really trusting your kids. And it’s amazing what they do.”
Martin says that, left alone to follow their own interests, her children have learned everything from history and ethics to trade skills and math. But what they learn isn’t her concern, she says. She doesn’t much care if her son knows how to read by age 8. She trusts he will read when he is ready to read. Her role, she says, is not to be her children’s teacher or judge, but a facilitator and perhaps partner in helping them follow their own passions.
Martin is the first to admit that her family’s approach to child rearing might seem, at first glance, “out there.” She is also upfront that it has been lonely at times, disconnected from families whose lives revolve around school, as well as from traditional home-schoolers. But in recent years she has noticed something: She and her family are a lot closer to the mainstream than they used to be.
Over the past decade, the number of children home-schooling has skyrocketed, along with the number of families practicing some form of unschooling. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of children learning at home jumped from just over a million in 2003 to 1.7 million in 2012. But since there is no federal registry of home-schoolers, and many home-schooled children are counted as being in the public school system, many researchers believe the true number is somewhere between 2 million and 3 million, if not higher. To put that in context, the US Department of Education estimates that 2.3 million children were enrolled in charter schools in 2012-13.
Meanwhile, although data are sketchy, some surveys have found that as many as 50 percent of home-schoolers embrace some variety of unschooling – a category that might range from the Martins’ extreme hands-off approach to that of other parents who incorporate many ideas of self-directed learning but still set some limits and goals for their children’s education.
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The rise of unschooling parallels a growing dissatisfaction among American parents about the country’s public education system and its focus on standardized testing. It also tracks an increase in alternative educational philosophies, such as the Montessori method or the popular Reggio Emilia theory, both of which are based on the idea of children as “whole,” curious beings whose education should be guided by their own natural interests and inclinations.
But the blossoming of unschooling also reflects something more. While it once was considered a hippie, countercultural practice, experts say that unschooling now taps into changing mainstream values surrounding children and parenting, institutions and individuality, and the best way to seize the American dream.
It also, says Michael Apple, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, taps into a growing national sentiment that “safe” and “responsible” private institutions of all kinds are better than public ones that can sometimes be “messy and violent.” Although unschooling has many critics – those who worry about the educational philosophy behind it, those who worry that it reflects a narcissistic culture obsessed with self-fulfillment, those who see it as adding to a disturbing segmentation of American society – it is increasingly accepted as a viable educational option by everyone from soccer moms and urban hipsters to rural Evangelicals and suburbanites.
“I see a shift in the types of people who contact me,” says Martin. “I get calls from doctors, lawyers. I have talked to [professional] rugby players, and low-income people living in trailers. This is not a small subculture anymore. This is a movement.”
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The idea of unschooling is not new. The Massachusetts author and educator John Holt first coined the term in the 1970s as a play on the popular 7-Up “Uncola” advertising campaign. Holt believed that children learned best when given time and resources to follow their own passions outside schools, which he saw as prisonlike institutions that worked to squash inquisitiveness and produce homogeneous industrial cogs.
As an alternative, he suggested parents stand back and let children decide what they wanted to learn. This meant that some kids might never learn algebra, which he believed was just fine; those kids might find their passion in art or cooking. Other children might love math, or marine biology, or architecture, or farming. Although unschoolers follow Holt’s teachings to different degrees of faithfulness, they share the idea of letting children take a central role in how their lives are organized. They typically wake up naturally, have unstructured days, and delve into topics that they have chosen. Parents might act as guides – helping children find information on, say, veterinarian care and then setting up an internship at a local vet clinic – but they are typically followers rather than leaders when it comes to subject matter.
“Unschooling takes learning out of the realm of the school,” says Patrick Farenga of HoltGWS LLC, which works to continue the late educator’s mission. “It’s ‘What do you want to learn today? How do you want to set this up?’ Educators still don’t get this. They have bought into the idea that the only learning that matters is the learning they can grade in school.”
From its beginning, unschooling attracted a small but steady band of followers. “It has had some bohemian chic for 40 years,” says Stanford University sociologist Mitchell Stevens, who wrote the 2001 book “Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement.” “It was out-there cool when John Holt championed it in the 1970s. It’s always getting rediscovered.”
But increasingly, Professor Stevens and others who have studied unschooling say, the practice is losing its rebel, alternative ethos. Although regulations differ state by state (one reason why accurate statistics on the movement are difficult to pin down), unschooling in some form is legal everywhere in the country. And the families who do it are increasingly mainstream, middle-class, and educated.
In a survey of some 5,500 home-schooling families, filmmakers Dustin Woodard and Jeremy Stuart, whose documentary about unschooling, “Class Dismissed,” came out in 2014, found that the vast majority of unschooling parents (almost 89 percent) were married, and 91 percent had at least some college experience. Almost half live in the suburbs, while the rest are split fairly evenly between urban and rural areas. Almost all say they are satisfied or extremely satisfied with their choice to unschool their children – whether because they have more time as a family, are able to travel more, or see their children learning successfully. While many unschoolers say they are opting out of the national obsession with college admissions and standardized test scores, literature about unschooling regularly mentions how unschoolers are often accepted into top colleges.
All of this, education experts say, means that unschooling is becoming a less risky choice for parents and increasingly represents a viable alternative to a public school system that has Free-range education: Why the unschooling movement is growing - Yahoo News: