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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Kids Take School Into Their Own Hands:
Some Home-School Families Are Opting for a New Approach to Curriculum; Unschooling
BY Claire Scheumann

From stock whips to ballet, Dungeons and Dragons to NASA, some Berkeley students say they are studying subjects they would not have access to in a traditional setting by pursuing a new kind of education called “unschooling.”

Teaching children at home has a long history, but in the past decade, families have been engaging in a learning philosophy which allows students to dictate the curriculum.

Sam Fuller, 12, joined the 10 percent of home-schooled students participating in unschooling nationally when he began his education seven years ago.

“We kind of have phases of learning,” said Sam, who lives with his family on the border between Albany and Berkeley. “We learn what we are interested in.”

Sam’s mother, Pam Tellew, was a teacher before she got the idea of unschooling at a teaching retreat shortly after Sam was born. Sam’s 7-year-old brother Nicky has also begun unschooling.

Unschooled students do not engage in traditional classroom learning, instead pursuing a hands-on approach in museums and outdoor settings.

Skeptics say unschooling may not expose students to necessary subject matter because they follow no required curriculum.

“I want educators to make decisions about what kids need to learn,” said school board member Shirley Issel. “If you only open the doors that interest them at first, they may have a limited range of options available to them when they want to go on to higher education and employment.”

In California, there are approximately 10,000 families a year that file requests declaring themselves as a private school, which allows them to specialize curriculum.

Parents of home-schooled students in Berkeley say their choice was not determined by the quality of the city’s public schools. Rather, an interest in a variety of cultural and learning resources contributed to their choice.

In the Berkeley Unified School District, 129 students participate in the independent study program, which allows them to meet with teachers for only 30 minutes per week, pursuing other interests in the meantime.

District officials say they do not know the number of students in the city who opt for home schooling.

Advocates for unschooling insist the approach creates greater student engagement, leading to deeper learning than traditional methods.

“Personally, my sons outgrew what the public schools could offer them,” said Livermore parent Cyndy McClay, a representative of the California Homeschool Network. “I loved my neighborhood schools, but my kids didn’t always fit there.”

Results of studies examining homeschooled students show, on average, they score 15 to 30 percentile points above public school students, said home education researcher Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

There is limited research on the long-term success of home-schooled adults, but studies have shown that the students tend to earn their college degrees at a slightly accelerated rate and become more engaged in leadership throughout their adult life than their public school counterparts, Ray said.

One study showed that achievement did not differ between home-schooled students who learn in a traditional setting and unschooled students, Ray said.

In addition, home-schooling typically does not impair students’ social skills, he said.

Sam Fuller has become involved in the Junior Ranger program, which provides outdoor education for children ages 9 to 12, and a fair organized by families with home-schooled students to raise money for charity.

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