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.
Continue reading →
Tag Archives: Unschooling
Techies
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”.
Continue reading →
Taking Eric out of School
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. Continue reading →
Education Alternatives 102: Mann, Dewey & Lane
Community Organizer
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. Continue reading →
Camps, “Cons” & Compasses
I continue with my unschooling theme and my quest to convince people who are skeptical that this is a valid learning path for some as an alternative primary educational “engine” to formal schooling. Just to recap, our son Eric left school in the middle of eighth grade and our daughter Emma after ninth. Eric has had no “formal” schooling since then. Emma has taken several French courses at community college along with a six-week French language immersion school in Montreal, Canada. The many things they have learned since then have been in the context of “real life” and some tutors that Emma has hooked up with along the way to help her learn dance, piano, art, and now continue her study of French.
Anyway… on with the post! Continue reading →
Short Order Cook
During my last several years in Ann Arbor, (between 1975 and 1978), I got a job at a very popular local restaurant, “The Cottage Inn”, as a cook. I was 20 at the time, and had no professional experience in this field, but their “chef” was willing to train me and the other young men they had hired to prep food and cook “short-orders”, including burgers, sandwiches, omelets, and their featured food, pizzas. Beyond learning how to make coleslaw and cook a hamburger medium-rare without cutting it open, I learned some basic project management skills, including the concept of identifying and taking account for the “critical path” to minimize the time it would take for project completion. Continue reading →
JLO
Before Jennifer Lopez’s fans laid claim to this three-letter combo, it was the acronym for the unique youth theater group I participated in from 1970 to 1975, playing a role either backstage or later onstage in over twenty musicals, comedies, dramas and children’s theater. During the years I was a member of “Junior Light Opera”, it was a group of some seventy youth, ages five to twenty and just two facilitating adults – my speech and stagecraft teacher Michael and a school orchestra teacher named Sue. Continue reading →
Avalon Hill
Avalon Hill is a company that developed and marketed a series of historical war and other board games, including games that simulated historical military conflicts in World War II, the US Civil and Revolutionary Wars. When I was 10 years old I bought their “D-Day” game, which covered the Allied invasion of France through the defeat of Nazi Germany. Continue reading →
Unschooling Instead of High Schooling
Lisa Stroyan commented on my “School Decision Makers… Revisited” post that she has a son who was in public school through fifth grade, but is now homeschooling, and moving toward the more unschooling end of the homeschooling spectrum. As an initial suggestion, I think she should check out www.unschooling.com, for some information and provocative thoughts on that educational path.
Lisa said she was also interested in my own experience with my kids’ homeschool/unschool journey during their teen (normally high school) years, maybe how or whether an unschooled kid learns traditional academic subjects like algebra. So here goes…
Eric’s Story
We pulled our son Eric out of school in February 2000 at age 14 because it had become clear that he hated going to school, and had basically become allergic to the conventional instructional academic environment. (See my earlier post on “Thoughts on Emily & Middle School Issues”). We had been considering doing it for a while, and my partner Sally (Eric’s mom) had done some research on homeschooling on the Internet. Sally and I had an initial strategy to attempt to guide our son in a homeschooling strategy including the four conventional academic subjects – English, social studies, science and math. Eric, as it turns out, had other ideas. Continue reading →