This is quite a long piece (over 7000 words) weaving a narrative thread through my young life that I think illustrates a key principle of unschooling. That principle is that the natural desire and capability of a young human being to learn and the opportunity to take a “deep dive” into the subject of interest results in a profound degree of broad learning and development beyond the perhaps narrow area of exploration. Note that though the subject of my youthful interest was the “art of war”, the impact and benefit of my learning pursuing that interest was much broader than the narrow and arguably non-progressive subject matter. Also note that very little of this tale involves anything that I learned in school (beyond learning how to read and basic math).

As far as I understand it, the premise of sending kids to school is that they will be given an opportunity to learn things, and in particular, the things that the larger community feels are important for kids to learn to become successful and productive adults. For many if not most people, behind that premise is the assumption that left to their own devices, kids would not learn these important things, and instead will just “get into trouble”, “stare at the TV”, “read comic books”, “play games”, etc.

Certainly in a lot of conventional thinking, kids “free play”, motivated by their own personal developmental needs (whatever they might be) is considered secondary to the formal learning that society generally compels them to undertake. And for the older youth, “playing games” is considered a waste of time better spent learning or doing something more “important”.

That assumption seems to persist in our culture despite what an observant parent or person who has studied child development will tell you, that young people are naturally motivated to learn and develop, interested in the world around them, and if not constantly redirected or otherwise kept away from those interests, continue to explore and learn voraciously. I suspect that many of us adults see our own lives as all about doing what we have to do rather than what we want to do, so whether we are projecting or applying some sort of convoluted logic, we figure that kids are not really interested in doing what they are supposed to be doing (that is learning) either.

As a parent of two now young adult kids, I certainly saw how much they were “learning machines” who loved to dive into things of interest to them. One of the main reasons their mom and I let them leave school and “unschool” during what would conventionally be their high school years, was because school (and particularly all the homework after school) had managed to turn most learning into a chore for them, rather than a passion.

Sure I had gone to school when I was a kid, including to a conventional high school as an older youth. But somehow back then in the 1960s and early 1970s it wasn’t so psychically draining. Maybe because there wasn’t nearly as much homework and there was none of the current standardized test obsession. Though in a mostly white middle-class university town there was the assumption that most kids would be going to college, I don’t recall my parents or my friends’ parents constantly trying to stage-manage our young lives toward that end. Also at my high school I don’t think they even took attendance, because I selectively would leave school during the day and miss one or more classes, but none of the school staff or my mom ever said anything about it.

For me as a kid, my life revolved around the things I did outside of school, and without the pursuit of those things that really interested me, my young life would have been mostly an exercise in compliance at school and perhaps boredom (or worse) at home. One of those compelling self-directed interests that weaves itself through my childhood, older youth and young adulthood was my fascination with the history and the “art” of war.

And that… is my extensive unschooling narrative that makes up the bulk of this piece.

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As a follow-up to my previous piece, “Unschooling Rather Than Highschooling”, I want to bring you up to date on my two kids’ unschooling sagas as they continue to choose to chart their own course as young adults. Neither Eric or Emma has chosen to go to college (though Emma has taken several community college and university extension classes). Instead, they have continued to launch their own projects, some successful and others significant failures, but all profound learning experiences moving them along their developmental paths.

It’s ironic that neither has chosen to enroll in higher education given the family pedigree. Their four grandparents all have college degrees, including one PhD. Their mom has two Masters, one in public health and a second in marriage and family therapy, while I have two Bachelors, one in speech and the other in computer science. Aunts and uncles are highly schooled as well. Certainly their parents and the entire extended family had the expectation when they were born that they would go to college. My partner Sally’s parents even starting significant college funds for them when they were born.

Trying and failing… some people say there is no better way to educate oneself. Yet we have a conventional education system for our youth built around externally orchestrated programming for success. Educators and savvy parents collude to prepare students for successful testing to get into the best possible college to guarantee the best possible chance for success on the job.

Both our kids have chosen not to go with that program. Here are some of the projects they’ve undertaken during what would conventionally be college years for many of their peers.

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The Internet is our most dynamic new societal institution, developing quickly over the past 25 years from “Web 1.0” (providing static web pages with existing content) to “Web 2.0” (providing interactive environments for building connections between people, facilitating other societal institutions, and the “marketplace of ideas”). I think this is a good example, a good metaphor, for the direction we are moving (and should continue to move) in our entire society and its institutions, from top-down dissemination and control, to a more egalitarian exchange between a circle of equals.

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As I have mentioned before, I’ve been involved in an ongoing email “forum” over the past five years with fellow members of the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). Topics revolve around youth, learning, and our societies educational institutions and possible alternatives to those institutions. Admittedly, we forum participants can be guilty of arguing perhaps from more of an ivory tower rather than from the trenches at times, but then again you have to be able to see the entire forest at times to best take care of all the trees.

One of the topics that keeps coming up and engenders a lot of impassioned prose on our forum is the reality of compulsory education for youth and the possibility of making it non-compulsory instead. The opinions on what would result from this change run the gamut, even among this self-selected group of alternative educators and other supporters (like me) of learning alternatives. Some of the forum participants (like me) take a more left-libertarian position and argue that our schools and the formal education process in general would be transformed for the better by shedding coercive elements of compulsion. Other list colleagues think that though in some ideal world this would be the way school should be, in our all too real and non-ideal world ending compulsory school attendance would be a disaster, and particularly for poor families that live in dangerous neighborhoods with little other infrastructure to offer youth.

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Elaborating in responding to comments to my recent blog piece, “When I Stopped Rewarding My Son for Good Behavior”, I expressed the opinion that most kids could readily learn to read and do basic arithmetic, even mostly on their own, if they were not required to learn at a set externally mandated standard age, but instead undertook the effort on their own internal developmental timetable when they were ready and interested in acquiring that skill set. One of my thoughtful commenters took issue with my position, saying…

You think a kid is going to learn long division on her own? Why would she? How could long division ever be interesting enough to typical children that it would at any moment be the most interesting thing they could be doing with their time?

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One of the best features of the educational path that is becoming known as “unschooling” is the opportunity for “deep learning”, that is, delving into something of great interest with all your mind, heart and soul, to whatever extent your inspiration and/or need takes you, instead of being told it is now time to learn something else. Even more so than her pursuit of learning the French language (see my post “The Unschool Pursuit of French”), our daughter found the opportunity to deep learn when she got involved in an Internet-based role-playing game community over the course of several years.

Starting in the fall of 2003 at age 14, in the midst of ninth grade (what would turn out to be her last year of school), her older brother Eric turned our daughter Emma on to a “massively multi-player online role-playing game” (or MMORPG) called “Never Winter Nights” which was his favorite among several such games that he had played. This is one of those games where you create a character and the avatar (representation) of that character which you then navigate through the various environs of a fantasy world, along with or encountering other avatars controlled by other people logged into and playing the game. You communicate with other players by typing, and little dialog bubbles appear above your avatar’s head.

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Trying and failing… some people say there is no better way to educate oneself.

Yet we have an education system for our youth built around externally orchestrated programming for success. Educators and savvy parents collude to prepare students for successful testing to get into the best possible college to guarantee the best possible chance for success.

Our son Eric chose at age 14 to abandon this programmed path of schooling for success in favor of his own self-directed path that some critics of unschooling would call the road to failure. It did turn out to be the road to failure, failure of a major self-initiated project, but in terms of real learning, a bonanza for our son. We called it his “unschool graduate school”.

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The recent piece on Good Morning America featuring a mom and dad who were unschooling their two kids, and the negative, rather than inquiring tone, that it was framed with, made me recall our own decision to let our son Eric unschool, rather than go to high school. I wrote a piece about it in January of 2009, “Unschooling Instead of High Schooling”, and I have reworked that piece below, based on additional thought, more feedback from Eric, and more water under the bridge…

We pulled Eric out of school in February 2000 at age 14 because it had become clear that he hated going to school every morning and had a profound incompatibility with the conventional instructional academic environment. We had been considering doing it for a while, and Eric’s mom had done a fair amount of research on homeschooling on the Internet. After pulling Eric out, which removed the most acute of his issues, Sally and I had tried initially to build a home curriculum that included the four standard academic areas – English, social studies, science and math. Eric, as it turns out, had other ideas. (more…)

Following up on my recent “School Alternatives 101” post, I want to share some quotes from three great educational innovators who were “parents” (in this case, all “fathers”) of the three types of educational alternatives I talked about in my post. I want to focus on their visions’ of who drives the educational process, which I believe is a key way to distinguish these three approaches from each other. This may seem like “education-wonk” stuff to some of you, but I think it is really important, even from a parent’s point of view, when considering educational options for your and other kids. (more…)

In January of 1982, already under the wings of Toni and Judith, my new feminist mentors, employers, hosts and patrons (though they were women the word “matrons” just doesn’t have the appropriate connotations) I plunged willingly into a new deep end. Toni was in charge of setting up the Los Angeles office for the last-ditch ERA Countdown Campaign effort to attempt to get three more state legislatures to ratify this proposed U.S. constitutional amendment, the focus of the mainstream women’s movement of the time. She had put together a four-person staff (all women) for the office, but one of the people she had slotted had dropped out at the last minute. To fill the gap she decided to broaden her gender horizon and offered the job to me, as I had previously proved myself as a volunteer. (more…)