1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting?

For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning that truly means something to an individual. Learning has nothing to do with passing or failing, dividing the world up into subjects or taking a standardized test. That’s not learning.

Education is not telling students that it’s June 1 and today is the day you need to learn about dolphins. Also, when you’re done “learning”, you’re going to be tested to see if you can regurgitate all the facts back. And if you do, bingo!…you’ve learned!

For me, seeing the learning in everything and not dividing the world up into educational and not educational has been very helpful. In Guerrilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn she says;

“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again. School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”

2) And what are the unexpected benefits you find along the way?

For my children, one of the unexpected benefits is how they (especially my youngest) are starting to question things more. They’re interested in knowing things. They’re curious. They’re starting to see that learning is not something you do just to pass a test. For me, an unexpected benefit was how much I would change through this journey.

3) How has homeschooling helped your children blossom?

Unschooling is allowing them to be free and they’re blossoming in that freedom. They’re starting to become more sure of themselves, which isn’t hard to do when you’re not in school. There’s nobody telling them that they’re failures so their confidence in themselves is soaring. They are starting to see that life is not sectioned into educational and not educational and that they’re interests take them places that school could never dream of.

**originally posted in 2007**

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Elizabeth and Teddy Dean are learning about the Italian scientist Galileo, so they troop into the kitchen, where their mother Lisa starts by reviewing some facts about the Renaissance. Elizabeth, 11, and Teddy, 8, have never gone to school.
Their teachers are primarily their parents, which puts them into what is believed to be the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. education system — the homeschool movement.
For their science lesson, Teddy and Elizabeth are joined by three other homeschooled children and their mother, who live down the street in their suburb midway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Before the lesson starts, all five kids change into Renaissance costumes — long dresses and bonnets for the girls, tunics and swords for the boys. “We definitely have a lot more fun than kids who go to school,” Elizabeth said.

Nobody is quite sure exactly how many American children are being taught at home. The National Center for Education Statistics, in a 2003 survey, put the number that year at 1.1 million. The Home School Legal Defense Association, which represents some 80,000 member families, says the figure now is quite a bit higher — between 1.7 and 2.1 million.
But there is no disagreement about the explosive growth of the movement — 29 percent from 1999 to 2003 according to the NCES study, or 7 to 15 percent a year according to HSLDA.

This growth has spawned an estimated $750 million a year market supplying parents with teaching aids and lesson plans to fit every religious and political philosophy. Homeschooled children regularly show up in the finals of national spelling competitions, generating publicity for the movement.

Parents cite many reasons for deciding to opt out of formal education and teach their children at home. In the NCES study, 31 percent said they were concerned about drugs, safety or negative peer pressure in schools; 30 percent wanted to provide religious or moral instruction while 16 percent said they were dissatisfied with academic standards in their local schools.

“I wasn’t sold on the idea of institutionalized education. It’s a factory approach — one size fits all,” said Isabel Lyman, author of “The Homeschooling Revolution,” who taught both of her now-grown sons at home.
“The schools take all the joy out of learning. They don’t take account of a particular child’s interests, needs and development. The whole system is anti-child,” she said.

Regulation, instruction varyDifferent states take widely varying approaches to homeschooling. Some, like New York and Pennsylvania, require that the parents submit lesson plans four times a year and regularly test the children.

Others, like Texas, basically leave them alone. So there is little reliable data on how they are doing, said University of Colorado education professor Kevin Welner.

“There are popular myths that homeschooled children are socially inept, cloistered kids and that they are either illiterate or academic wunderkinds. Anecdotes aside, we simply don’t have the data to make such generalizations,” he said.

“Some children will get top-notch instruction. Others will get poor or minimal instruction. Obviously it will vary by parent,” he said.

Even the cliche that the majority of homeschooled children are evangelical Christians is outdated, if it was ever true.

The movement remains overwhelmingly white and middle class but it is growing fast among black and Hispanic families and becoming more politically and religiously diverse as well.

Some parents follow an educational philosophy known as “unschooling,” where the children are encouraged to follow their own interests rather than adhering to a fixed curriculum.

Laura Derrick, president of the National Home Education Network, has followed this philosophy with her 14-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. “My son learned to read before he was 3 and I realized then we were working better than any school program ever designed,” she said. “Children are born wanting to learn.”

Lisa Dean, who was a lawyer before she became a mother, said homeschooling her children was tremendously rewarding but also very exhausting. “It’s a long day with the kids. I look forward to when my husband comes home,” she said.

She also has backup from a local group of 70 homeschooling families who organize group field trips and extracurricular activities. Her children both take lessons in Celtic music on the fiddle, play soccer and basketball and have tried classes in art, hip-hop dancing and kick boxing.

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In the article, Sarah Spooner, senior admission counselor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, was asked if unschoolers succeed in college and later in life.

“These students are really well motivated, have done their homework and done their research,” she affirms. “They’re the type of students who excel when they get on a college campus because they can keep themselves in check and make sure they’re doing well and succeeding.”

Later on in the article, the mom was asked if she considers WoW to be part of her kids’ educational experience?

Everything is educational; learning happens all the time. Anything one does or doesn’t do adds information to her body of knowledge, no? For us, WoW has led to many interesting conversations and research. For instance, one time my son and I played with a couple of guys from Brazil. One of the guys only typed in Portuguese; the other guy would translate. We got to learn a few Portuguese words, look up Brazil, check time zones. We got to make a connection with stories from my husband about the time he was in Brazil (seeing shanty towns and eating the most tantalizing coconut pudding).

You can read the rest of the article here: Horde Of Unschoolers.

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Sara Sengenberger lives in Oxford but was brought up and schooled in the US. She delayed formal education for her daughter Catryn, 7, but has found home education suits Catryn so well that she has no plans to send her to school.

“I came across a book published in the 1970s by Raymond Moore called Better Late than Early, which claims that many biological and psychological factors make 8 to 10 the best age to begin structured learning. Young children learn a great deal through play. I don’t require Catryn to do any formal academic work at all. At the age of 6 she decided that she wanted to read; she had been resistant to the idea before then. Because she started on her own initiative she learned very quickly.

“We follow an approach called Autonomous Education, or ‘Unschooling’, pioneered by John Holt in the US. The idea is that children are given the freedom to follow their interests, on the principle that they learn better that way. Just as I didn’t teach my daughter to walk and talk when she was a toddler, she doesn’t need me to direct her learning now. We make materials available to Catryn and she decides what she wants to do. She does an astonishing amount of arithmetic every day without us having to make her sit down and do worksheets. It is a very relaxing approach. Because we never force Catryn to do anything we live a very harmonious existence.

“At some point she may decide that she wants to go to school, and that’s fine by us, but for now home education is serving her far better than school would.”

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For those who’ve never heard of deschooling, it’s the process one goes through after leaving an institutionalized schooling environment. Your child has probably their natural desire to learn squashed and will need time to recover from that. With a parent’s help, they can gain back most, if not all of what they lost and begin to see the world as a place where learning is enjoyable and all around us.

So, what can the parent do to help? We have to work on changing our own preconceived notions about education, learning and school. I hear about many parents taking their kids out of school, recreating the same forced learning environment at home, only to have it come to a crashing halt with the mom feeling like a failure and the kids being miserable. Maybe, if they would have given themselves, and their children, some time to deschool, it would have turned out different for all of them.

My husband Billy & I started reading John Taylor Gatto even before removing our children from school. That was the start of my deschooling. I started to become aware of my thoughts on public school, real learning and education. And I started to question those thoughts. Thoughts that I had always accepted, without question because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

I had been a “good” student (except in high school when all hell broke loose), meaning I did what I was told and made good grades. I wasn’t picked on, I had friends and got along with the teachers. But it was the thoughts about real life and real learning that I got from school that did the most damage.

I remember having to take a cooking class in junior high school. I hated it and got a very low grade on my report card. There it was, in black & white…I failed at cooking. Surprise, surprise…today, I hate cooking and have no confidence in my ability to cook something edible. (Although this serves me well because Billy does 99% of the cooking-lol). Someone, who never met me, decided it was time for me to learn to cook, and because I wasn’t interested at that time and found it boring, I was labeled “poor” in cooking. I never gave it any thought until I started deschooling. It wasn’t like it crushed me when I got my report card. Rather it confirmed that the reason I must have found the class boring was because I wasn’t good at it.

I began questioning why we, as parents, allow the school system to continue having control over our children when the school day ends. I’ve had teachers give me weekly lists of things for my children to do at home. I’ve heard many parents tell their kids “You can’t go out (or play) until you do your homework”. Suppose I want to do something with my family and homework is interfering with that? Why are they telling my children what to do when they’re in their own home?

I questioned why we’re expected to live by school policy at home. There had been many times when my children come home, the day before the standardized tests, and let me know that the teacher told the class to tell their parents that they need to eat a good breakfast the next morning. And then hand me a list of what exactly the school’s version of a good breakfast consists of. Why does the school system think they can dictate what parents and children do at home? Because we let them do it. Yes, WE LET THEM.

Once these thoughts started swirling around in my mind, there was no going back to my old way of thinking. I also started to become aware of other people’s thoughts about learning and education. Soon after I removed my kids from school, we ran into a friend and her son. It was close to the end of the school year and the mother asked if we “take a break for the summer”. I explained that we learn all the time and that learning is all around us. I went on to say that it would be like taking a break from breathing. As they walked away I heard her say to her son , “See, they have to do school work every single day, even in summer!”.

*sigh*

I recall a parent, of a schooled child, asking me how my kids do P.E. being they’re not in school. Who in their right mind would depend on the public school system for physical activity? It’s as if physical activity is only a subject, to be taken just at times that the school dictates. Ridiculous!

I also did a lot of reading during that first year of deschooling. My two main sources were the message board at unschooling.com which are now closed and Sandra Dodd’s site. I read almost everything on both sites and I could feel my thoughts and perspective changing as I read more and more.

Although that was back in 2004, I feel like my deschooling is a work in progress. I’ve learned so much about myself that it became more of a spiritual awakening than anything related to school. School-speak seems like a foreign language to me now. I see what REAL learning is everyday with my children.

It looks nothing like school.

*originally written in 2004: updated in 2008*

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Customer Review:
You won’t find this book on a school library shelf–it’s pure teenage anarchy. With the exception of a forwarding note to parents, this book is written entirely for teenagers, and the first 75 pages explain why school is a waste of time. Grace Llewellyn insists that people learn better when they are self-motivated and not confined by school walls. Instead of homeschooling, which connotes setting up a school at home, Llewellyn prefers “unschooling,” a learning method with no structure or formal curriculum. There are tips here you won’t hear from a school guidance counselor. Llewellyn urges kids to take a vacation–at least for a week–after quitting school to purge its influence. “Throw darts at a picture of your school” or “Make a bonfire of old worksheets,” she advises. She spends an entire chapter on the gentle art of persuading parents that this is a good idea. Then she gets serious. Llewellyn urges teens to turn off the TV, get outside, and turn to their local libraries, museums, the Internet, and other resources for information. She devotes many chapters to books and suggestions for teaching yourself science, math, social sciences, English, foreign languages, and the arts. She also includes advice on jobs and getting into college, assuring teens that, contrary to what they’ve been told in school, they won’t be flipping burgers for the rest of their days if they drop out.

Llewellyn is a former middle-school English teacher, and she knows her audience well. Her formula for making the transition from traditional school to unschooling is accompanied by quotes on freedom and free thought from radical thinkers such as Steve Biko and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And Llewellyn is not above using slang. She capitalizes words to add emphasis, as in the “Mainstream American Suburbia-Think” she blames most schools for perpetuating. Some of her attempts to appeal to young minds ring a bit corny. She weaves through several chapters an allegory about a baby whose enthusiasm is squashed by a sterile, unnatural environment, and tells readers to “learn to be a human bean and not a mashed potato.” But her underlying theme–think for yourself–should appeal to many teenagers.

Click here to purchase

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Imagine waking up on a Monday and driving up to Berkeley to check out a new art gallery opening. That night you play some video games and crack open a book before hitting the hay. Think this sounds like a day off for a college student? It’s actually the school day of a 9-year-old. No, it’s not a fantasy Ferris Bueller-style: It’s a daily reality for thousands of young learners who call themselves “unschoolers.”

Unschooling. Some call it a counter-culture, but others just call it natural learning. It’s an offshoot of homeschooling coined by educational philosopher John Holt, but it varies from traditional homeschooling in the sense that there is no curriculum. None. No math, no English, no science, no history. You just live.

It’s the freedom to express yourself in any way at any time,” said Kevin Greene, a 15-year-old unschooler. “If you’re an artist you can paint, you can let your mind wander.” It may sound difficult to wrap one’s head around — to just live and fill a life with knowledge? This is shocking to most Americans who have attended school their entire lives. But for those who practice unschooling, it’s not that crazy. The idea is that people have a natural curiosity and can learn from living, and this is what will fill up children’s days. “It doesn’t really seem necessary to have people be in an institution to learn,” said Pam Tellew, mother of two unschoolers. “I think libraries are about a zillion times more important than schools.” The Internet is a tool that is especially supportive to unschoolers, Tellew added.

So what does one do all day if there’s no school? The question may be flawed. “You sound like you’re talking about learning about one specific thing… That’s not really what we do,” said Jesse Boss, an 11-year-old radical unschooler. Radical unschoolers like Boss often have no limits on what they study, how much dessert they get and no bedtimes. “There is no typical day,” said Annie Twist Lubke, a mother of two unschooled boys, Cortland and Caedan. “[One day] we’re traveling up to the city, San Francisco and Berkeley, to get together with other unschoolers. Another day we’re over chopping wood at [the boys’] grandparents house so we have fire. Our days really go wherever the interest is and whatever’s on our schedule.”

Another idea behind unschooling is that all information is interconnected. It’s not that the children aren’t learning, parents say; it’s just that information is not divided up into a curriculum. “The thing is that we don’t create it as this big subject,” Lubke said. “It’s not this big scary thing — it’s just part of our day.”

She explained that her sons, for example, learned multiplication figuring out the square footage of a shed. Unschoolers and parents insist that this sort of learning will make education pleasurable, as opposed to creating fears of inadequacy. “It’s been really interesting because it just confirms what I’ve felt all along — anything is an avenue to learning, anything that engages you teaches you something,” Tellew said. This can be anything from soccer to the video games which one of her sons plays avidly. And for television fans everywhere, 11-year-old Boss had this to say: “I’m pretty sure my little brother learned math watching television.”

The theme of interconnectedness does not stop at pedagogy. Unschooling expands to breed an idea of jointness throughout life, information and social systems. It’s simply about knowing how to live. “So much of the focus on schooling is academic information. I’ve come to understand that, yes, all that’s good, but the critical thing is that you know how to learn, how to think, how to communicate,” said Mike Boss, Jesse’s father. Boss considers unschooling more of a form of parenting than just an educational philosophy.

Parents play multiple roles in unschooling. They are not just teachers, but facilitators in a system foreign to most of them, since almost all attended school. At a large gathering of unschoolers in Boulder Creek, only one parent had been unschooled. The revival of this movement is just now seeing its oldest off to college. For parents, it’s a struggle at times to maintain an open mind. “Every once in awhile I get a bug in my head saying, ‘Gosh, I don’t think I know that this is out there in the world,’” Tellew said. “I started telling them about math and they didn’t really care.

Pushing that kind of stuff is what gives people that resistance.” She would rather her children follow something that excites them. In this case, parents act as the school themselves — many families often register with the state of California as a private school in order for their children to receive credit for their education. Others work with the local school board or with the HomeSchool Association of California (HSC) in order to get their requirements squared away with the state. Studies have shown that this type of learning as a family dynamic has proven effective. Dr. Doris Ash is an assistant professor in UC Santa Cruz’s education department and has researched science learning in informal settings like aquariums and zoos.

“The family for me is a stand-in of a social unit that can collaborate together,” said Ash, who watches families as they interact and learn from their environment. “Some kind of exquisite mix happens between what people already know and the activity they’re learning. What kind of knowledge does [the family] build collaboratively? It’s always the case that they know more together than alone.”

Unschooling and home schooling have been growing in popularity during the last few decades. An average conference of unschoolers can pull in as many as 700 to 800 individuals. Other alternative educational systems have gained popularity as well — notably Montessori Schools, which emphasize self-directed child activity, and Waldorf Schools, which stress interdisciplinary learning. These schools, and unschooling, are an antidote to what some see as the rigid standards surrounding education and evaluation. Dr. Ron Glass is a philosopher and an associate professor in UCSC’s education department. Much of his research focuses on the moral and political philosophy of education and the ideology of education.

“The notion that learning should somehow follow human nature has been around since the time of Rousseau,” Glass said. But the schooling we’re all now familiar with, he explained, is relatively new. “The school system that we have now was invented in the late 19th century and had very explicit models: factories, railroads and the army,” Glass said. “So they took features from each of those areas and created a school system. The school was designed to basically rank and sort people into the economic, social, ideological order.” But the 21st century is a very different time than the Industrial Revolution, with few remaining factories. “Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.” Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.

”Many are beginning to react against the current schooling system. The change, however, is slow. “I think schools have become so tightly connected to economic, political and social opportunities, and because of that people aren’t willing to abandon the standard model,” Glass said. Still, he continued, people are beginning to push back. Unschooling and the revival of home schooling are two examples of such a change. “[People are] trying to find a way to have schools be of good quality and give people real opportunities, but without hurting people along the way,” he said.While these new options are helpful, Glass pointed out that for the time being they are mostly available to families of solid socio-economic ranking. Children with two working parents must attend school.

While questions about lower education are soothed, many still worry about college. How will children transition into the real world? How will they go about applying to college? The reality is that it’s not so difficult. Many unschoolers begin to attend community colleges around the age of 15 or 16, and others have specialized in areas of interest, something looked upon favorably by many private schools. Much also depends on personal goals. “If [the kids] decide that they want to go to college, they’ll get themselves ready for it,” Tellew said. “What I’ve also seen is people growing up this way and saying, ‘You know, this isn’t what I want.’ It’s more about finding something that’s meaningful to them and meaningful to the world. They don’t care as much about the trappings of [societal definitions of] success.”

But the unschoolers themselves aren’t worried. In fact, they see things a little bit differently. A group of unschoolers met last week for a campout in Boulder Creek sponsored by the Homeschool Association of California (HSC) for all homeschoolers in California, where they found good luck with weather — they camped out under the first week of sun in almost a month. When asked about the perks of unschooling the kids counted friendliness, ease in communication and vivacious curiosity among the benefits.

“Not getting caught up with everything,” said 16-year-old Teamo (pronounced “te amo”) Gregori. “You can just learn and figure things out your own way.” “Another advantage is getting up a little later,” Jason Ramos said. What time did he wake up that day? 2 p.m.Ramos stood among a group of boys aged 8 through 16, all of whom were enthusiastic, well-spoken and appeared to be having a great time. Inside, children and adults were walking around together, playing outside or sitting engrossed in card games. A man playing cards wore a blue shirt proclaiming the famous Mark Twain quotation “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

It’s clear that something has begun, and the kids know it too.

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When my daughter Jacqueline was seven years old, she asked if I could buy some stories that explained math. She was becoming more and more interested in how math fit into her world and had started to take notice of it in movies, TV shows and by watching my husband & I. She had a basic understanding of addition and telling time but she was more interested in math as a whole, not broken down into subjects.

After a few online searches, we bought Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi and The Grapes Of Math. All three books are visually appealing, creative and fun.

It wasn’t until I started to understand how unschooling works that I saw math in a different light. School has a way of making so many children think they’re failures in math, when in fact, they’re not. They’re just not learning it the way school is teaching it.

Now, at nine years old, she has no fear of math. She wants to learn calculus after watching Apollo 13. She invests in the stock market and has her own Ameritrade account. She found out that the calculator on our PC has a scientific mode and loves to play around with it. She wants to understand E=mc2. This, from a child that has never been forced to learn math. She just thinks it’s fun to learn this stuff. It’s interesting to her.

Collection of Thoughts on Unschooling Math:

I’d like to share something that I had saved when I first began unschooling. It’s an exchange (from the old message boards at unschooling.com) between a member who was having some concerns (whose posts are in italics) and Joyce Fetteroll. Be warned…..it’s very long, but for those who are interested it has lots of great info.

**I have a degree in computer engineering from MIT and there are definitely prereqs. in math that I think my son would need for most math, science, engineering, or computer majors.**

Joyce: I have a degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. I certainly agreed with your assumptions about math when I first started reading about unschooling. I, too, was a victim of contextless, rote-learned math. It really seemed the only way. There were specific ways to do addition, multiplication, division, and on up the math scale that just had to be explained step by step and sat down and practiced ad nauseum. And what child was going to put in all those necessary hours on her own?

It took me several years of reading what other unschoolers had to say but it really wasn’t until I saw my daughter actually manipulating numbers without being specifically shown how that I understood how unschooling could work with math.

The problem with school math, and as far as I’ve seen all math curriculums, is they start kids off immediately with the abstract. A child may be able to see they have one brother and one sister and therefore have two siblings, or one gray cat and one yellow cat to make two cats, but put 1+1 on paper it becomes incredibly abstract. Why would anyone want to add 73+48? The process is meaningless. The answer is meaningless. It has no context.

Many math programs do have kids adding sorting bears or manipulating rods or any number of other hands-on things, but they’re still basically meaningless. The teacher has created the problem and dumped it on the child. Why does anyone want to know how many blue bears there are? Why are the red and blue bears being added together?

Now, on the other hand, my daughter is quite intrigued to find out how many Jurassic dinos she has versus Triassic. How many plant eaters versus meat eaters. (And whatever other classifications she can come up with, limited only by her imagination — versus the 2 or 3 categories of the sorting bears.) How many years separated the various ages of the dinos. The heights and weights of them.

And though counting and graphing M&M’s by number and color seems the same as doing these same things with the counting bears, it’s not. She’s gaining information in the form of patterns and relationships (that are often expressed as numbers) about her own world, things she cares about.

Obviously there’s only so far counting will get you in life but we manipulate all sorts of numbers in her life and I make sure she’s immersed in patterns and relationships between various things in her life for her to examine (or not). Like fractions in cooking and time: “Since the cup is dirty, how can I make 1 1/2 cups?” “The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon but we’re cutting it in half. And a Tablespoon is 3 teaspoons. So what would that be?” “It’s an hour and a half or 3 Bill Nyes until Daddy comes home.” “It’s 20 minutes or a third of an hour until Xena comes on.” Though learning to take 1/3 of 60 is more universally applicable, she can *feel* the 20 minutes wait out of 60 minutes and she can get the feel that fractions are ways of relating one thing to another. Decimals come up with money. Percentages come up with sales, tax, food labels, possibility of winning a contest, shrinking an image in a paint program.

She’s gaining a feel for the contexts the various concepts are used in, she sees me manipulating them and helping her manipulate them. And in the course she’s adding pieces to the puzzle of her world, making new patterns and relationships clearer.

Up until recently we’ve done zero in the way of formal math. Only a few months ago she wasn’t totally consistent on her addition but I asked her if she knew what 8×5 was. She said that was 16 +16 + 8. Not 8+8+8+8+8, which would have been a good answer showing she understood the concept of multiplication, but she manipulated the numbers properly into something she could feel more intuitively.

Recently she has been doing paper and pencil math under protest. Sort of.

She wants to earn money for Pokemon cards. I buy the packs at any where from $4-$6 a piece, pull out the trainer cards and then calculate how much she needs to pay for each Pokemon card. (Or have her do it for a whole card, though that’s still a bit beyond her true understanding even if she does get the answer right.) I suggested all sorts of household tasks for her to earn 25 cents or a dollar or whatever which were met with groans. (She even turned down $2 to clean out the floor of my car! I suggested she do pages in the Miquon math workbooks that have been gathering dust on the shelf at 10 cents per page. Being a low energy child (like her mother she usually opts for the math.

She’s getting much better at the pages, but I can still see a huge difference between what she does on paper versus what she does with the real meaningful numbers in her life. She quickly calculates in her head how much she’s earned and how much she needs and how much she’ll have left over after buying a card, tells me how many 36 cent cards she can get with her $2 allowance versus how many 41 cent ones. (And she does this without drills and without pages of workbook practice, just from messing around with the numbers in her life in a very low key way — the stuff she’s doing in the workbooks is actually much simpler.) She told me the way she figured out 16+16 was it was just 10+10 then 6+6 which is 12 which is 10+2, so that was 10+10+10+2 or 32. She’s discovering for herself how to break numbers apart and play around with them. And she knows why someone would want to do that. If it were taught in a book, it would take weeks and most kids would still be baffled about what the purpose of it was.

Pencil and paper math and head math are different. The pencil and paper math are a new language she’s learning. And yet, I’m quite confident if we had gone on without much pencil and paper stuff (other than the normal things that come up in life) she would have caught onto it way quicker in a couple of years without the agony she was putting herself through.

But that’s obviously a far way from algebra and trig and calc.

Someone pointed out that algebra is just figuring out what you don’t know from what you do know. Now how did I get all the way through engineering school without realizing that insight? Maybe because I enjoyed identifying the problem types and figuring out which methodology to apply to them. It didn’t make any difference whether I truly understood why I was doing what I was doing. The fun was it worked. Because that’s how algebra is taught. It’s all about practicing manipulating different types of equations. It’s not about what those equations mean. Or why anyone would want to write a quadratic equation let alone solve it. It’s all just preparation for potential contexts. But the equations themselves have no context. They’re meaningless. (Unless you’re one of the “good” ones who rise to the surface through this bizarre math-teaching process just because you happen to like to manipulate equations for the sake of manipulating equations.)

Quadratic equations don’t come up in real life often, but I can help my daughter to think algebraically when we tackle real life problems. (I may be doing it already unconsciously, but you’ll have to wait a few years for me to be conscious enough of it to provide real life examples of her using it.

Of course that isn’t enough to get her into CMU. Or into MIT either

Now, given the choice, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have gotten in enough math on my own to get into CMU. So what makes me certain my daughter will?

Well, I’m not certain, but what leads me to believe that my daughter’s outlook will be different is, for one thing, I was the victim of force-fed learning. I needed to be force fed math because I’d always been force fed learning. I needed to be force fed school math because it had no relationship to my own world. I didn’t need it. I can’t imagine learning what I learned on my own because the only thing I have to base my imaginings on are the process I went through.

What I can imagine, though, is being so intrigued by something that the math gets learned because it makes what I’m interested in make sense. I can imagine forcing myself to learn something in order to achieve something else. (HTML comes to mind Though that was more a combination of both of them.)

What my daughter has going for her is a different experience with math. Other than the workbook pages , she’s used to seeing math as a tool. She’s used to using math because she wants the information it can give her. So when she gets to high school, she won’t have the memory of 8 previous years of drudgework associated with math.

She’ll also have a better foundation of understanding what she’s doing. Though she might be behind her PS counterparts in calculation speed, she’ll be ahead in understanding what the processes mean. (But the speed will depend on her. If she feels working around gaps in her multiplication tables is more annoying than learning the tables — and if she knows that drilling them or doing other things will help her (and it’s my job to help her learn to identify when a problem exists and to seek out solutions) — then she’ll learn them. If not, she won’t. (I still have gaps in my tables.)

So she’ll hit her high school years with a different attitude towards math and learning math. (And this really applies to all subjects.)

But will she be able to pick up all the math she needs to get into college just by living? Well, yes and no. This is where it gets hard to explain because our thinking is based on oodles more assumptions.

It’s so easy to project a schooled teen (which includes most of us) as a normal teen and assume all kids given the chance will watch TV and eat concoctions centering on sugar, fat and salt all day and want nothing more in life than 256 channels and a clicker in the hand That behavior is caused by the stress of school (and a lot of other factors. I have another rant about being forced to spend 12 years working towards a vague goal that someone else has chosen for you. But in an environment where the adults and everyone else in the family are curious about life, where everyone’s interests are taken seriously (even the so-called non-educational ones), the kids are actively curious too. There’s no reason for them to want to shut their brains down as a life’s goal. (Which doesn’t mean my daughter doesn’t watch TV. At times she even watches a lot of TV. But she chooses it for other reason than shutting off the world. (Though that’s a legitimate use too. It’s just that she doesn’t have to spend a goodly portion of her free time recovering from 6 hours of force fed learning in a high-stress environment everyday.)

Had unschooling been thrust upon me as a teen, I imagine I would have spent as much time as possible doing nothing. It’s hard to imagine a teen learning on their own something that we ourselves would avoid. It seems obvious that given the choice most teens would avoid Shakespeare or American History or Algebra or whatever school made us hate because we know we’d avoid it. But, given a choice, would we have avoided it because it’s inherently dull or because school made it dull? It isn’t fair to assume the behavior of a schooled teen is normal behavior. The only experience schooled kids have had with most subjects is dull textbooks. The life has been sucked out of all subjects for them. Why would they pursue them on their own? Especially if they assume the only way to learn them in a worthwhile way is the way schools teach them?

There’s no reason for my daughter to avoid learning because she’s never been forced to do it. To her learning is something you do to find out more about what you’re interested in and to become better at it. It’s not something someone makes you do because they tell you you need it.

She will avoid learning in ways that aren’t natural for her or don’t suit her needs. Some kids like workbooks. That doesn’t make them better learners than those kids who don’t. It just means they learn differently. She will avoid learning anything that isn’t relevant to what she wants to do or is interested in. Which makes parents nervous for two reasons:

1) What if she never gets interested? It’s possible she won’t on her own. But it’s my job/pleasure to run as much of the world in front of her as possible. The broader her experiences, the more likely something will connect to something else in her life and be relevant. (Though I can’t depend on when.) Everything is connected to everything else. And everything relevant is inherently interesting.

But it’s also possible she won’t get interested in something “important”. Math? Writing? Chemistry? If she has absolutely no interest in it, then it’s unlikely she’ll be drawn to a profession that needs it to an extent greater than she can pick up by living. Though she won’t leave the house without being able to figure out sales tax or write a letter to a friend or know that baking powder is important in cookies because she’ll have used those. She’ll have enough to get by. But it’s possible she’ll need higher math than she has. Or better writing skills. Or an entire chemistry course. Well, if it’s just chemistry standing in her way, wouldn’t it make sense for her to go down to the community college and take it rather than deciding on a different career just because of one course? And if that’s too much trouble, how much did she want that career anyway?

But math and writing? Well, I hope something I’m saying here helps you see why I believe there’s a middle ground between “no math” and 4 years of high school math from textbooks. And writing I talk about below.

2) And the second reason it makes parents nervous is supposedly there are things kids need to learn that they won’t need until college. And supposedly it takes 12 years to learn them.

But does it? Does it take 12 years to learn math? Or does it take 12 years for schools to force feed a child math (and writing and history, et al) by the methods they need to use to force feed 30 kids at a time? Methods which are also limited to ways that can result in outcomes that can be tested to demonstrate progress. Also limited only to methods that must be progressive along a specific track so the next year’s teacher can pick up where the previous teacher left off. Does math need taught that way? Or do schools need to teach it that way to satisfy the needs of schools as assembly lines?

In a way, school math is rather like learning to spell thousands of words and decline hundreds of verbs of a foreign language without hearing that foreign language spoken. The rationale being that once all the parts are learned, the whole can be built from that. But how many kids survive the rote process? How many kids conclude not before long that the language is useless because the parts have no meaning? My daughter is hearing the language and using it, without formally declining the verbs and learning the spellings. Even if she’d never been exposed to reading it (but already had the decoding skills from reading English) how long would it take her to learn to read that foreign language after having learned it from using it?

Once my daughter has a thorough understanding of what it means to do division, she won’t need umpty gajillion problems to practice. Once she has a thorough understanding of problems with a range of potential solutions (programming and robotics come right to mind), and has encountered and understood powers and negative numbers she won’t need years of practice to grasp algebra.

My job is to make sure there are reasons in my daughter’s environment to need the skills and see them being used. (Just as I talked to her well before she could talk.) Though she finds a lot of uses for the skills on her own, given the freedom to do so. There’s no reason for her to avoid writing or reading or math (until the workbooks) on her own because she’s never been forced to do them. The hard part is waiting for her timescale. I need to wait until these things are internally important to her. I can’t worry, well, she’s 8 now and should be doing … because natural learning doesn’t have anything to do with calendars and time schedules. It has to do with needs.

If she has a goal in mind, she won’t have anything except natural barriers between her and it. She won’t have what someone thinks she needs to get there and someone else’s way she needs to get it standing in her way. If she decides to become a vet, she’ll know what colleges require for her to get there. If her desire is strong enough, she’ll learn what she needs to learn because she wants what the learning can get for her. (Desire is an incredible motivator.) And most importantly she’ll have better resources to achieve it than sitting down with a textbook and slogging through it. (Though that’s an option too. Fortunately she won’t have the history of slogging through textbooks putting up a psychological barrier for her.) She’ll have a good foundation of understanding math concepts and will see it and other math being used (and use it herself) as she explores what it takes to be a vet: taking care of animals, working in a vet office or a horse stable.

**So, if your kids aren’t prepared enough to go to a university, then you assume that they will be motivated to study once they get rejected?**

Joyce: The answer to this one is probably obvious from the above. No, I don’t expect rejection to spur her. I expect wanting to do something will spur her to do something. And perhaps that something won’t even be college. I too had visions of my daughter going onto CMU or MIT. But now my vision has shifted from preparing her to be anything she wants to be to helping her be the best her she can be. Yet I’m not sitting around waiting to pounce on her interests to nurture them. I’m also directing things through her world that I think are important or I think will interest her. When (if ever) she picks up on them is up to her. The more important I think something is, the more likely I’ll keep directing it in her path in a way that will interest her, or connect it to something she is interested in.

** We do provide a very stimulating environment. We have books and materials everywhere. Lots of interesting folks float in and out of our home and office. While my 9 yo son likes to read and mess around with the computer, he wouldn’t ever just open up a math book.**

Joyce: Nor would most kids. For a child to choose the more formal learning in a book requires an interest and need that the book can fulfill. The environment may be there, but he’s not ready to ask the questions that the books will answer for him. Or he may be discovering the answers on his own through self-discovery or talking to people. Unfortunately for nervous parents, you can’t put unschooling on a time schedule. You can’t set up the environment and expect there to be a specific outcome at a specific time. (Though I can just about guarantee that if the innate talent or desire is in him for what the computers and people and books can provide, by the time he’s 14 he’ll have sucked the environment for all it’s worth 9 is way too soon for most kids to be doing more than playing around with things and exploring broadly. They may be delving deeply into some things, but the cognitive development necessary to make them open a math book for information just isn’t there until the teen years. (Of course there’re always exceptions. But do the exceptions mean that the nonexceptions are falling behind? Or are the nonexceptions just learning other perhaps less obvious things? A HS’d friend of my daughter’s has at 8 read all the Little House books and all their sequels and is well into other historical novels. Am I jealous? Well, yeah, of course Yet my daughter is, less obviously, picking up bits and pieces of world and American history. She’s gaining a broad overview of it all, expanding some bits here and there as she finds out more about someone or something she’s heard interesting things about. Is one learner better than the other or are they just different?)

**My son also wouldn’t write anything on paper, which I understand is fairly typical for boys. Writing skills don’t progress overnight.**

Joyce: Who says? Okay, not overnight, but does it take years of practice? Or does it take years of using the skills in ways that are meaningful for the learner?

**Are you saying that I should encourage, but not demand? I am still missing something in terms of how this unschooling plays out.**

Joyce: How well would you learn Hindi if someone decided it would be important for your future because they used Hindi in their lives and so made you practice for the next 10 years? Wouldn’t your goal be to learn as little as possible to satisfy them? But if you were moving to India, then wouldn’t learning Hindi take way less time?

What your son needs is being immersed in an environment where it’s important to communicate his ideas. He also needs to see others using communication in a meaningful way and to read and hear others communicating in various ways. When he needs to communicate using the written word, he will.

In the meantime, you can make sure he has access to the skills. Listen to a variety of things: conversation, books and books on tape, comic books, movies (reading the scripts of favorites is really cool), plays, puppet shows, poetry, folk tales, nonfiction, cereal boxes, TV Guide, political talk shows, lyrics, ministers, magazine articles, Nintendo magazine, science shows, letters to the editor. Anything as long as he’s interested. He needs to hear good (and bad) literature so his ear can learn the rhythms of language. I’ve pointed out to my daughter why it’s tough for me to read the Magic Tree House books outloud to her and she can now pick up on parts that sound awkward. (It wasn’t a lesson, just an outgrowth of a natural discussion. Which is probably the heart of unschooling: just talking naturally about things that happen along. Despite the fact that I’m not a great talker, some amazing things have come up in conversation.) It has probably inadvertently sowed the seed of her being more conscious of there being a range of how well written things are. She would have learned that anyway though perhaps unconsciously.

(That “happen along” part of unschooling is misleading. It’s not that I’m leaving things to chance, nor am I deliberately bringing something in as a lesson. I direct a lot of things her way and just from experience know that from the wealth of things, there will be unexpected learning. Nothing I can plan though. She learned more than anyone would imagine from a few weeks watching Gilligan’s Island.

Writing is just talking on paper. You’re trying to see where someone mentally is relative to where you intend your words to take them and then you plan out a course to get them there. Talk to your son. Ask him to explain what he’s doing and ask questions to help him learn to order his thoughts and learn to see from the point of view of who he’s communicating with rather than from his own position. (But only ask if you’re interested. Kids have good radar for lessons masked as conversation

Unless someone has gotten the idea that writing is hard by being forced to write before they are ready or need to, or being forced to write in ways that aren’t natural to them, once they realize it’s just talking on paper, that little extra step is hardly any step at all. There’s additional skills they can learn, like how to organize their thoughts for something longer, but it’s not a skill that needs 12 years of practice. (A schooled friend of my daughter’s came over to play with my daughter and they decided to make books together. The schooled girl told her there were all these things you had to do: title page, a plan, and some other things. My daughter said “Oh,” and just made books. The schooled girl never did finish. Merely an anecdote that may mean nothing, but it is a piece of data.)

I think it only takes years to learn to write when people are forced to write things they don’t care about. Where does most writing practice end up? In the trash, right? Real writing should make a difference in people’s lives. Sure there’s project reports and documentation to write, but do we need to force kids to write boring stuff so they’ll be prepared to write boring stuff?

High school is when it’s more common for kids to feel the need to put words on paper. But, again, they need real reasons. Perhaps letters of complaint about a product, letters to the editor, a family newsletter, a pen pal, email, message boards, an article for the local paper, or one of the websites out there that kids can submit their writing to.

But many of these things can be “laying around” for him right now, suggested when it’s possible he’d be interested. And dropped when he’s not or carried as far as his interest carries him. As long as he sees writing as purposeful, then there won’t be anything other than natural barriers between him and putting words to paper.

**Studies I have read show that certain windows open for certain math concepts at specific times. There seems to be accumulating evidence for a certain scope and sequence for math too. I am talking primarily about getting skills so you can do higher level math.**

Joyce: The studies, of course, are based on kids whose basically only exposure to math is in school. Math to them is artificial, irrelevant to their own world. How many parents are helping their kids use the math that’s all around them? Math, to most kids (and adults!) is just the stuff in math books.

But, my daughter *is* being exposed to math right now, using it in ways that are meaningful to her. She’s using the skills she needs right now. I’m not sitting around waiting for her to pick up a math text.

So, yes, there probably is a window of opportunity for math knowledge. But there’s no way to miss it if a child’s curiosity is being fed and she is immersed in the language of math. There’s a window for learning to speak too, but the only way to miss that is by not speaking to the child. As long as we speak math to our kids, they’ll learn the parts they are developmentally ready for.

**What if she chooses no math? How do you handle that?**

Joyce: Obviously she hasn’t yet. It is possible she’ll decide to be a painter and won’t need math beyond consumer math and what’s relevant to the science of color. But she’ll have been exposed to fun stuff like Fibonacci numbers and probabilities and algebraic thought. But, honestly, how many people need algebra? Why torment a child with “what if” when it’s more likely to cause them to dislike the subject than to learn it?

**If I tell my wife that I want to try this unschooling approach starting tomorrow, then what we would do at 8 AM?**

Joyce: Sleep? Eat? Watch TV? Go outside and enjoy the sun shining through the trees? Read a book?

**Would my son choose when he gets up?**

Joyce: Unless he stops breathing, he’s always weighing his options and making choices. They may not be the choices you’d want him to make. But, what if you knew your wife had an agenda for you and there were “right” choices in her eyes and “wrong” choices and you knew she was weighing the choices you were making against her idea of “right” and “wrong” and judging the quality of your choices? How would that affect your relationship? I assume there are some things you each do to please the other, but they are *still* choices. The more pressure someone feels from the other to make the choices the other wants them to make, the more strain there is in the relationship.

**Would he choose what he wants to learn? Should we let him mess with the Star Wars games on the computer all day? I am going to go out on a limb and guess you would say that he would eventually get bored and look for something else to do or that I should keep offering interesting tidbits he couldn’t resist?**

Joyce: Yup. If he’s interested, he’s learning. It may be hard to see how what he’s learning relates to what is “important” in life. In fact, it may only be relevant to his life right now. But it is relevant. It’s nurturing the person he is now. I think we concentrate too much on moving kids along to what they should become and preparing them for that.

**What if he says he never wants to do writing ever?**

Joyce: Well, what if? There’s plenty of professions where people don’t need to write. But do you really think that if he loves something that he will choose something else just because he doesn’t want to write?

**We just wait him out until he thinks he needs it?**

Joyce: And why shouldn’t it be important that he write when he thinks he needs it? Why should it be more important that he write when you think he needs it? Wouldn’t that mean when all kids hit 12 months we should make them walk because that’s when kids need to walk, and we all know how important walking is so they should get started when we think it’s important? Unless there’s something physically wrong with them, or their environment discourages it, all kids do eventually learn to walk just because they feel the need to.

If someone made me write an essay on math and kids, it would be as short as possible to make them go away. But since I’m writing this “essay” to satisfy my own need to get all these thoughts in order, it’s as long as it needs to be for me.

**Is it my role to lecture the benefits of the things I have to offer, but to back off if he doesn’t want them?**

Joyce: Lecture? Ick. How important would you feel something was if your wife decided to lecture you about it’s importance? What would come across is her needing to make you feel the same way she does about something. And personally, when someone’s trying to make me feel some way about something, I tend to work up the opposite feelings.

**So sorry. I should have read the whole post more carefully. My wife preached to me about that. OK. That is what you would do. I have a hard time with that one. I don’t think you can play catch up in math and science all that fast. My opinion only.**

Joyce: But I do have the advantage of seeing the same math being learned naturally way easier than it’s being taught and learned in school. I have the advantage of reading other people’s kids’ experiences with unschooling math.

As for science, ah, I have a rant about that too The short version is, I think way too much emphasis is placed on memorizing the answers to questions kids haven’t asked and way too little time on fostering scientific thinking and fostering a wonder about how the universe works. Once kids are curious, they’ll want the facts. Once they want the facts, they go in so easily.

**I need to read a book about the day and the life of an unschooler in my spare time.**

Joyce: Actually a day in the life of an unschooler looks a lot like summer days and weekends for other people. Unschooling isn’t so much in what unschoolers do as in their attitude towards life and learning and how they’re intertwined. Our conversations are our lessons without being lessons. Everytime my daughter spontaneously asks a question or tells me about an observation, that’s a “test” that shows me unschooling is working. She may not be learning a set group of facts that others think are important and can test, but her questions and observations show she’s thinking about what she’s learning. For example, it’s not so important that she learn that sound waves bounce off things because that can go in as a factoid without any real meaning or understanding behind it, but it is important that she bounced a ball off a wall and said that was like a sound wave. She’s making connections.

Related posts

• Unschooling In The News (3)
• How Unschooling Is Changing How We Think Of Learning (7)
• The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (11)
• Deschooling For Parents (13)
• A Week In The Life Of Unschoolers (1)

Kathryn Baptista, who heads the Northeast Unschooling Conferenceand Rue Kream, author of Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life, were interviewed for an article on unschooling for The Patriot Ledger in Boston.

When DROPOUT isn’t a bad word:
Some local teens are thriving by setting their own schedules and learning by doing

Anna Finklestein, a 16-year-old Sharon resident, is learning on her own and is director of Stepping Out Theatre. Her second professional production, “The Laramie Project,” which features actors 14 to 23 years old, is completing its run this weekend. Anna Finklestein left Sharon High School after the ninth grade because she was bored and felt she could put her time to better use. She started a professional theater company for young adults, interned at Boston’s Huntington Theater and took college courses at the Harvard Extension School. This year, she got a part-time job at Ward’s Berry Farm. At 16, she spends her spare time thinking up future projects and how to accomplish them – like starting a coffee shop, a homeless shelter or a baby-sitting service.

‘‘I’m unschooled. I basically control what I do,’’ said Finklestein, whose second theater production, ‘‘The Laramie Project,’’ closes this weekend. ‘‘I would not be doing any of this if I was still in school. I wouldn’t have time.’’

Nationally, an estimated 1.5 million students are being taught at home, with as many as 150,000 considered unschooled. Unschoolers are home-schoolers with no set curriculum. Rather than attending school or following lesson plans set by their parents, they focus on what interests them and learn along the way.

They discover mathematics and science when baking or gardening, engineering when playing with toy cars and astronomy because they just happen to like the stars.

‘‘Learning doesn’t have to be something done in a certain place, on a certain schedule, in a certain way,’’ said Rue Kream of West Bridgewater, the mother of two unschoolers and the author of ‘‘Parenting a Free Child: An Unschooled Life.’’ State law requires children to attend school until the age of 16, or to have a home study plan approved by their local school committee. Finklestein had one before her 16th birthday.

‘‘It was just a normal home-schooling plan that included all of the basic materials and opportunities for cultural enrichment,’’ said Sharon School Superintendent Claire Jackson.

Eight students are currently being home-schooled in Sharon, she said. It’s up to the parent to monitor the child’s progress. ‘‘We certainly can’t supervise minutely what happens to that plan. I don’t think it’s the intention of the federal or local governments to do so,’’ Jackson said. All states allow home schooling. Some require curriculum outlines, and others just mandate a statement of home education, said Kathryn Baptista, a Salem mother who organized a conference on unschooling last spring.

Unschooling Conference

More than 300 families – about 60 from Massachusetts – attended Baptista’s Northeast Unschooling Conference in Peabody last spring. Some, like Finklestein, leave school on their own. Others are encouraged to do so by their parents or are never sent to school at all. Some education experts worry that unschoolers will lack social skills and basic life skills necessary for life.

‘‘Schools provide sort of a liberal arts education. You get well-rounded. Does that happen in an unschooled situation?’’ said Lorne Ranstrom, chair of the division of teacher education at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. ‘‘Who’s in charge of that kind of teaching? Is it her parents? Is she pretty much on her own?’’ Donna San Antonio, a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, agrees. ‘‘The idea behind unschooling is that not everyone is going to be a biologist or a mathematician,’’ San Antonio said. ‘‘The idea is that people can follow the path that their own learning brings them. ‘‘The problem is that we never know where our lives are going to bring us. Some people find themselves in situations where doors are closed because they didn’t have biology or they didn’t have algebra 2 and pre-calculus.’’

That’s what worries Finklestein’s mother, Janet Penn. ‘‘Something came up and somebody mentioned something about symbiosis,’’ Penn said. ‘‘I said, ‘Do you know what that means? What do you think about learning some of the basic principles just so you understand them?’’’ Penn said. ‘‘Her response was typical of an unschooler. ‘When I need to learn it, I learn it.’ ‘‘She has a lot more time than most teenagers to think, think about her life, read things that may not relate to anything, that sort of, ‘Who am I?’ and, ‘What place do we have in the universe?’’’ Penn said.

Home-schoolers and unschoolers do not receive standard diplomas. They can take a GED course or register with online schools. Finklestein was registered last year with Clonlara School, an alternative diploma program based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Movement started in ’70s

The unschooling movement started in the 1970s when teacher John Holt published ‘‘How Children Learn, How Children Fail’’ and founded a magazine called Growing Without Schooling. The movement has had a second wind in recent years, after the publication of Grace Llewellyn’s ‘‘The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education,’’ which encourages teenagers to leave full-time school and let their curiosity guide their learning.

In 1996, Llewellyn founded the Not Back to School Camp for home-schoolers and unschoolers 13 to 18. Finklestein attended it last summer. Finklestein said Llewellyn’s book was an eye-opener. She went to work on her parents and after some prodding and debate they decided to let her take a year off from school.

‘‘She said, ‘I am not happy in school. I don’t think I’m learning in school. I don’t think I’m learning how to learn in school. And you always taught me to go after things that I believe in and am passionate about,’’’ her mother said. Her parents insisted that if they were not happy with her progress, she would go back and repeat 10th grade. But after a year, they saw her blossom. She became more articulate and started reading voraciously, rather than watching television, Penn said. ‘‘I saw her getting passionate and excited. She was clearly not engaged in high school,’’ her mother said. ‘‘What I see is a young woman who’s very thoughtful. She’s respectful. She’s using her time well. It’s been incredible as her mother to watch.’’

Out before kindergarten

Jennifer Harnish of Natick took her son out of school before kindergarten. ‘‘He’d shown an ability to really learn on his own without needing a teacher or me to teach him,’’ Harnish said. ‘‘I just couldn’t imagine him sitting in a classroom or sitting at the kitchen table, making him do work every day.’’ Now he is 7 and spends his days at home, at the park with other home-schoolers or at the zoo or a museum or local organic farm. ‘‘It’s real life learning,’’ Harnish said. ‘‘It’s amazing to see the math concepts he picks up without us having to teach him anything in particular. For example, with recipes if we’re making cookies and we have to double the batch then he’s working on multiplication or fractions.’’

Cassia Gordon, 17, of Norton, a lifelong home-schooler who recently switched to unschooling, said she got sick of the structure and having to get a certain amount of work done every day. ‘‘Unschoooling, in my mind, is doing what you’re interested in and what you feel would be best for you. It’s more self-directed and generally less planned and less scheduled,’’ said Gordon, an actor in Finklestein’s play.

Not for everyone

Unschooling isn’t for everyone. In well-educated families, ‘‘It probably doesn’t do the children any harm,’’ said Charles Glenn, interim dean of Boston University’s School of Education, who had a few children of his own drop out of high school and go on to college. ‘‘Unschooling is ideal for all children, but not for all parents,’’ said Kream, of West Bridgewater. ‘‘Unschooling parents need to be enthusiastic about life and learning themselves, they need to want to be very actively involved in their children’s lives and they need to be caring, supportive and respectful parents. They also need to believe that the desire to learn is intrinsic to human beings.’’

Finklestein generally wakes up between 8 and 9:30 a.m. and goes to bed by midnight. She’d like it to be earlier. Some days, she works in the morning and then heads to driver’s ed and then to rehearsal. Other nights, she stays home and reads or hangs out with friends, takes a walk or visits with her grandmother. She just finished ‘‘Memoirs of a Geisha’’ and reread ‘‘A Wrinkle in Time’’ and Llewellyn’s ‘‘The Teenage Liberation Handbook.’’ She’s taking an American history class and plans to take two or three courses in the spring.
Finklestein is working toward a two-year college degree through credits at Harvard University, but doesn’t plan to go to college until she’s ready. ‘‘I won’t have a conventional-looking transcript, so I’m kind of staying away from the mainstream college frenzy,’’she says. ‘‘If I feel like I’m ready to spend $40,000 to talk and learn things, but I feel like first I need to do some more soul-searching. ‘‘I’m really interested in sort of spreading my wings some more and leaving Sharon and exploring things on my own. I’m very independent.’’

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It is common knowledge that our educational system is in dire straights. Children graduate high school without knowing how to read while students are driven to violence by the brutal social climate of school. In “Instead of Education”, John Holt gives us practical, innovative ideas for changing all that. He suggests creative ways to take advantage of the underused facilities we already have. Reading this brilliant educator revolutionizes our thinking about what schooling is for and what we can do to accomplish its true goals.

“Be clear about this: Instead of Education, although less widely known than his more famous titles, is John Holt at the top of his game. If you are one of the millions of walking wounded still staggering from your own encounter with forced institutional schooling, and trying to spare your own kids from its damage, this book will be your guide and a good friend”.
- John Taylor Gatto, Former New York State Teacher of the Year

“John Holt was a prophetic voice in the educational wilderness who vividly explained why our system of schooling often frustrates genuine learning. He made this quite clearly indeed in his groundbreaking work Instead of Education. It is as radically relevant to the educational challenges of our generation as it was to his”.
- Ron Miller, Ph.D. Author of Free Schools, Free People

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