unschooling rules

This post has a player and Clark Aldrich reading the Introduction to his book Unschooling Rules.  The brief reading is a good one and Clark's book is, too.  He captures in brief language the rules of unschooling akin to Michael Pollan's Food Rules.  I like the comparison and I think it is fitting. Many people cannot believe you can grow vegetables without poisons especially farmers themselves.  Many people no longer remember what reading instruction was about before processed phonics curricula. Many people do not realize how much community involvement the majority of people had before cars and suburbs became the rule. Anyway, Clark gets all this and puts it into an easy format:

But the education landscape is finally getting some diversity. Just as followers of Michael Pollan are no longer relying on the industrial food complex to provide them their sustenance, so too are a growing number of homeschoolers and unschoolers questioning the assumptions of today’s industrial education. 

They are striving to evolve new approaches, not from the once-removed vantage of politicians or board members or even smart individuals grinding through the Sisyphean task of trying to get a few policies changed, but by abandoning the model and starting over. 

Perhaps the hardest part of this revolution, however, is parents realizing how ingrained the traditional school habits of teaching children are. Homeschoolers and unschoolers have to adopt the genuine best practices of schools, while leaving behind ineffective legacy processes and industrial conceits, and then fill in the gaps. This book, whose name is both an oxymoron and a double entendre, is the result of my research to identify and frame the guidelines that these home and unschoolers are uncovering in childhood education. 

Clark is probably realistic in his expectations that education will not change fast.  But I live in areas where poverty is a real and persistent problem and there are parents who need schools to become accessible and open community resources to keep their kids from becoming criminalized and thrown into the school to prison pipeline. Schools are the elephant in the room, a resource that cannot be restricted in communities already strapped and facing steep increases in hardship in an economic situation industrial academics cannot seem to fix. Apparently, it wasn't on the test.

We may not be able to figure out how to provide everyone a good job but we can open our schools to providing resources and classes for kids.  This is one way to de-stress communities and families and ensure we start getting kids out of the school-to-prison pipeline.  It is not a matter of a zillion more dollars (though why we need to spend on 6 wars I'll never know), it is a matter of understanding why schools work as one-size-fits-all work camps instead of community learning centers.

Tough financial times? Keep an eye peeled: Clark sometimes offers the book for a .99 download price. Better yet,  request that your library buy a copy.

Related articles

• Unschooling: Maybe They're on to Something? (timesoftexas.com)