unschooling: the new class of learning

Unschooling is getting attention in Europe and this video profiles three unschooling people/families including two Americans, Dale Stevens, of Uncollege fame, and the Emerson family. Also mentioned in the story is the German group playducation.

Unschooling: the new class of learning - YouTube:

In Berlin, we meet a young American who turned his back on school by the time he was 11-years-old. Dale J. Stevens is writing a book that he describes as "a practical guide to learning the skills that school doesn't teach but are requisite for success in the real world". It is based on his experiences as an unschooler but also incorporates the stories of other people who found success in non-traditional ways.

In Paris, we meet the Stern family. André Stern is a well-known name in the world of music but he never went to school. He was raised in a household where passion is considered to be the perfect learning medium and the secret behind competence.

In New York state, the Emerson family are also embracing unschooling. They shun a formal curriculum in favour of encouraging their 12- and 9-year-old children to follow their passions and interests.

Video is also available here, at EuroNews

related 

• The Benefits of Unschooling: Report I from a Survey of 231 Families. (my.psychologytoday.com)

celebrating john holt

John Holt's writing has a deceptively simple eloquence that is not easy to achieve. In essays like "Schooling and Poverty" and "Deschooling and the Poor" or "Schools Against Themselves" from Freedom and Beyond, Holt grapples with the same issues that surface today in pieces like Dana Goldstein's shock bait "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids" where Goldstein advises parents to ignore the progressive activism of the past 30 years as well as their own child's needs in support of ed reform. (Perhaps we should stop growing organic and remain within the industrial food model, too.) Holt long ago wrote about these dilemmas with clarity and he offered a simple method any family could use to move outside mass institutions and toward a more humane way of relating. Homeschoolers have since changed the laws in almost all 50 states.

April 14th was John Holt's birthday and Lefty Parent has a very nice tribute to Holt up at his blog:

Happy Birthday John Holt – “Patron Saint” of Unschooling | Lefty Parent: 

"I think Holt is still the “patron saint” of the homeschooling movement to many parents and others in the progressive community. He framed the movement broadly as applying full human and civil rights to children, not just as an alternative venue for school. He represents a continuing thread in our culture carrying forward ideas of more egalitarian rules of engagement between adults and youth from his philosophical predecessors, including A.S. Neill, Homer Lane, Will Durant and Bronson Alcott. 

Here is Holt counseling parents on how to homeschool their children (and a bit of Nancy Wallace, as well), from 1984, in that bastion of left-wing extremism, Mother Earth News:

How to Home School: Home Schooling Requirements and Information - Modern Homesteading - MOTHER EARTH NEWS: "Find out what your state laws say about school attendance, the legal alternatives to it, the possibilities of home instruction or tutoring, and the requirements for setting up a private school. There are several ways to get this information, all of them good." 

One method is to look up the laws yourself. It's easier than you think. Most good-sized public libraries, or law libraries, or lawyers will have a set of all the laws of your state. Look under "Education" in the index of one such collection . . . most or all of what you want will be in this section. Read carefully and copy, if possible, everything dealing with attendance, home schooling, private schools, etc. Also, read and copy everything in your state constitution concerning education and the rights of parents and families.  

Looking up the law yourself is a good exercise. It will help cure you of thinking that the law is a mystery known only to lawyers. Also, since you'll know the regulations yourself, you can speak to school officials with the authority of an expert and can correct them if (as often happens) their incorrect or incomplete version of the law fails to mention some of your important rights. 

And this:

You may also wonder, particularly if you did not do well or go far in school yourself, whether you know enough to help your children with their learning. Again, in my journal you will hear from people without much schooling who are doing a wonderful job of helping their children, mostly because they have been able to discover from the children themselves what the schools have never been able to realize: It is the interest, ingenuity, and activity of the learner, not the teacher, that is primarily responsible for creating learning. 

Another interview with Holt is linked to at the end of the Mother Earth News article:
John Holt: Homeschooling Advocate:

The truth is the home-schooling movement is good for the schools. We provide, among other things, extremely important educational research. Besides that, if-in the long run schools are going to have a future, they will eventually have to function as learning and activity centers which more and more people come to voluntarily . . . and the sooner our institutions begin to move in such a direction, and some community schools already are moving that way, the better off they'll be.

Home schooling is good for society as a whole, too. Most young people come out of high school today with feelings of alienation, self hatred, bottled-up anger, and the sense that life is useless. Such emotions constitute a largescale and potentially dangerous social problem. I don't entirely blame the schools for this situation, of course, but they have pretty well demonstrated that they can't change it . . . and I don't expect home-schooled teenagers-since they've grown up in contact with serious adults who take young people seriously-to have the same problems.

John Holt: Unassuming Reformer «: "By the early seventies, Holt was reluctantly coming to see that the school reform he had so fervently worked towards for so long was not ever going to come because the system was fundamentally flawed. Inspired by his contact with Ivan Illich, author of Deschooling Society, Holt’s books from this period show his thinking moving from the classroom and school system to an analysis of children’s place in society. School reform, he said, was “doomed from the start, simply because nobody really wanted to make the schools better. You can’t believe how much I hated facing that truth.”" 

John Holt by Sandra Dodd
A Reluctant Guru by Wendy Priesnitz
John Holt and the Origins of Contemporary Homeschooling: by Pat Farenga



Partial Transcription/Summary
In this segment, Holt talks a lot about teachers. Holt recounts the frenzy about math and science and back to basics ...  he mentions the closing of small schools to make big ones ... he talks about howreforms have the result of "reducing the independence, the authority, the autonomy, and the responsibility of the classroom teacher, and more and more making the teacher into a factory worker"  ... "we run education as if it was a quasi-industrial process" .... "as if we were running a bottling plant and the kids are like empty bottles" ... "all these assumptions are wrong, learning is an activity carried out by learners" ... "the only experiments that will ever improve education are the experiments done by teachers in their own classrooms" ....  "learning can't be quantified ... it can be observed .... but you can't measure it in numbers" .... Holt is critical of testing and merit pay ....  the lack of reading happening in schools ... he discusses possible changes ...  "and it wouldn't cost more money" (Holt thought the sums spent were outlandish) .... "cut down the non-teaching personnel"  .... "I do think a decentralization of power and authority is essential"  .... "it's a day jail for kids, preventive detention"  ....  "school is basically a machine for putting winner labels on a few and loser labels on the rest" ...  "as long as schools have those tasks [day jail, grading and labeling, and ... teaching them that life is tough, they aren't going to do anything else]  ... it ends with Holt saying "I am a teacher."

education for a new economy

David Korten at Yes! magazine has an article on The New Economy Challenge:  Implications for Higher Education.  Here are some other specific recommendations for our universities:

1. Take down the walls that separate the university from the community. Engage university faculty and students in the social learning processes by which locally rooted human communities are learning to align themselves with the structures and processes of their local ecosystems. Place less focus on degree programs and more focus on continuing, lifelong learning.
2. Break down the disciplinary barriers and reorganize as interdisciplinary teams engaged in the study and design of critical institutional systems.
3. Teach history as an examination of large forces that have shaped history, in search of insights into how large-scale social change happens.
4. Replace existing economics departments with departments of ecology. Include ecological economists in these departments, but put the focus on the ecology. Invite the conventional economists who currently staff most university economics programs to retire, retrain as ecological economists, or be assigned to teach economics as one of a number of courses on the intellectual history of the 20th century and where it went wrong.
5. Feature courses on human developmental psychology that explore how the pathways to a fully mature human consciousness are shaped by differing cultural and institutional experiences.
6. Replace the metaphor of the machine with the metaphor of the living organism as the defining intellectual frame. Staff biology departments with new biologists who strive to understand life on its own terms rather than through the dead-world lens of Newtonian physics.

educational rights

From the Aero website, a keynote by Ron Miller that is quite interesting, about building an educational rights movement from the diverse alternative education movements. He says at one point:  "We are socialized into a way of thinking."  This is quite true as we now have several generations entirely socialized within a coercive public school system and our penchant for authoritarian government and endless wars seems a result to me.  There is a comment about our system of child apartheid that is quite accurate and homeschoolers will be familiar with advantages of a social life that is diverse in age as well as the ways families enjoy spending time together.

About Miller from the website:

Miller has been involved in alternative education for 25 years, first as a Montessori teacher, then as an activist scholar and publisher (Holistic Education Review and Paths of Learning magazines and several books), and most recently as a member of the Education program faculty at Goddard College. Currently he is founder and director of a new program at Goddard designed for homeschooling teens. He has written or edited eight books, including Creating Learning Communities and Free Schools, Free People, and many articles, and has spoken at conferences in various parts of the world. He helped start the Bellwether School in Williston, Vermont for his three sons, but also sent one of them to a Waldorf school, and has recently been homeschooling another. Ron holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, where he pursued an intensive study of the cultural roots of American education and the origins of alternative education movements.

Ron's keynote address was:
Building an Educational Rights Movement
I will talk about the challenge of building alliances among the many diverse and scattered alternative education networks and movements, and propose a vision of education for the new society that is beginning to emerge.