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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It’s a Tuesday morning. As children throughout the Region are waking up, packing their bags and heading toward the school bus, Adele Schiessle turns to her children and asks them if they wanted to spend the day playing on a 6,000-square-foot indoor inflatable play area at Jump Central.

Collin, 6, and Amber, 7, agree that would be a pleasant way to start the morning. After they played on the bouncy furniture, they headed back to their home in St. John, where they spent the rest of the day watching TV, navigating XBox, working on art projects and playing games. It’s just another day in the Schiessle household, where the children learn through a branch of homeschooling called unschooling.

While the definition of unschooling varies, it generally reflects a concept of child-led learning.

For Carol Pozos’ oldest child, it meant self-taught reading at age 4.

For 18-year-old Abby Stewart of Chicago, it meant the news last week that she had won early admission to Princeton.

“It’s an awareness that learning is always happening because it’s part of living,” said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. “It’s almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in.”

Unschooled children don’t go to school, but unlike many other homeschoolers, the unschoolers don’t necessarily learn through workbooks, educational guides or study sources. Instead, the children are free to pursue what interests them. The unschooling concept has been around for decades, but it’s been slow to catch on, as initially most parents shy away from letting their children have such control over their own education.

“I’m trying to get rid of the idea that learning happens at a certain time in a certain place,” Van Stelle said.

And while homeschooling students far exceed unschoolers in terms of numbers, the unschooling movement appears to be slowly increasing. There aren’t any statistics on unschoolers yet, but their popularity is reflected in the number of unschooling message boards on the Internet, in the abundance of unschooling clubs, in the frequency of unschooling conferences and in the slow but steady movement of unschooling into the vocabulary of educators.

Part of the increased attention on alternative education may be the rebellion against educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. It was one of the reasons Janna Odenthal of Chesterton embraced unschooling for her child.

“The testing doesn’t do any good,” she said.

The focus on alternative schooling hasn’t been missed by the media, who have featured unschoolers on the talk show “Dr. Phil,” and in a recent report in the New York Times. In a 2003 survey by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of children educated at home nationally was 1.1 million, an increase of 29 percent from the previous study in 1999. The study didn’t ask about unschooling specifically, but homeschooling parents continue to strive for other educational methods, with unschooling becoming a more popular second to traditional homeschooling.

Ten-year-old Seth Odenthal has been unschooled since he was about 5. He went to preschool, and tried going to kindergarten, but dropped out after a few days because he preferred being at home. He even tried going to school for a few days in the first grade, and then in the second, but he continued expressing interest in staying at home, so his mother researched the unschooling methods.

“I went ahead and gave it a try, and I fell in love with the things we could do together, the flexibility in our schedule,” Odenthal said of unschooling her only child.
When Seth took an early interest in cooking and baking, Odenthal embraced his curiosity, and the two of them cook together. She even signed him up for a local cooking class. Seth never formally learned math, but Odenthal said he excels at it because it’s a natural progression from his cooking interests.

“He learns all about math and science through a lot of cooking that we do,” said Odenthal, a writer who occasionally freelances for the Post-Tribune.

The state of Indiana doesn’t require the unschoolers to do any standardized testing, and parents are allowed to give their unschooled children high school diplomas when the parents believe the children are ready to graduate. Since education laws in Indiana are loose, the unschooled parents can take different approaches to learning. But most tend to have a few commonalities.

They don’t sit at desks to learn, as the parents believe learning happens all the time. And while they aren’t taught how to read or write or do science; the children usually ask their parents enough questions that they eventually learn on their own.

“My oldest was reading on her own without being taught before she turned 5,” said Carol Pozos, who unschools her three children in her Michigan City home. “I did not do anything except read to her, and she soaked it up and was reading full sentences. I thought to myself, ‘Obviously, this works.’ ”

While Pozos has a degree in elementary education, there were many aspects of traditional schooling that disgusted her. She said many schools care more about the business and the money involved with schooling, instead of focusing on the individual needs of the child. Pozos enrolled one of her children in preschool because the child had been begging her to go to school since she was 3. But when her daughter refused to return to school halfway through the year, Pozos decided to try teaching her children herself.

Her children are 8, 7, and 4, and other than a half-year of preschool, all three have been learning at home their entire lives. They also have chores they’re required to do every morning. And once they finish their chores?

“We do whatever we want,” said 8-year-old Isabel, who spent a recent afternoon on the floor of her living room flipping through a picture book with her 4-year-old brother. On Thursday mornings, the children attend an art class, filled with unschoolers and their parents. “Books are out, and if they want to draw, they can draw,” Pozos said of the class. “If they don’t want to participate, they can go off in the corner and play.” The point, she said, is to encourage them to do whatever interests them and makes them happy and inquisitive children. The same applies to the unschooled children’s higher education and career goals.

Schiessle said she was a college graduate, and her husband wasn’t. But even after all that schooling, Schiessle still feels like her husband has more knowledge about the world than she does. “I looked back to my schooling, and yeah, I was an A honor student, but what did I know? I was just memorizing for the test. I was so focused on that grade,” Schiessle said. When she teaches her children, “They’re not being measured as a person by that absolute number.”

Traditional school does teach children to memorize complex mathematics scenarios and scientific equations, and Schiessle said if her children decide they want to go to college, she’ll buy the books to help them learn the advanced information that they may not necessarily learn through her. But only if they want to go to college and want to learn about algebraic equations and the periodic table.

And some do. To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, 18-year-old unschooler Abby Stewart bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted knockout scores: an overall SAT of 2,350 out of 2,400. Not all unschoolers or home-schoolers have Abby’s scores, but on another popular college admission test, the ACT, test-takers who identified themselves as home-schoolers have scored a notch above the national average for the last decade. This year, they averaged 22.4 on a 36-point scale compared with a national average of 21.2.

At Harvard University, admissions director Marlyn McGrath Lewis said, unschoolers without transcripts can submit college admission scores, and then “tell us what they have done in the way of academic preparation for college, and we’ll take it from there.” But just like traditional schoolers, not all unschoolers want college.

Pozos said she’d be happy if her children went to college, but she’s also be happy if they didn’t, as long as her children were happy with their decision. “I’m not one of those people who says, ‘I want my son to be a doctor and my daughter to be an attorney.’ I just want them to be happy. If Armand wants to be a stay-at-home dad, and Isabel wants to be a marine biologist, that’s just fine.”

Isabel, who was listening as her mother explained the philosophy, turned and asked her, “What’s a marine biologist?” Pozos answered, teaching her child without her daughter ever knowing she was being lectured.

Some children, however, aren’t as inquisitive as Isabel, making unschooling difficult, said Marilyn Haring, professor of educational studies at Purdue University. She said that while the unschooling movement is valuable because it questions aspects of traditional schooling, it is not without problems.

“With regard to unschooling, I believe this is best described as utopian,” Haring said in an e-mail. “A miniscule few youngsters may have the high intelligence and motivation to inquire broadly and also learn how to learn. The vast majority, however, have no idea what might be learned and why it is important.”

Schiessle contended unschooling parents can still guide their children without forcing education upon them. She often reads books to her children about a variety of topics, from ancient Egypt to farming, and if her children express an interest, they can explore that idea further. “It’s not that I don’t lead, but I don’t make the decisions for them,” Schiessle said. “I look at it like I’m their guide. I’m there for guidance for everything.”

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Unschooling isn’t a technique – it’s living and learning naturally, lovingly, and respectfully together. The Unschooling Unmanual features 11 essays by 8 writers: Nanda Van Gestel, Jan Hunt, Daniel Quinn, Rue Kream, Kim Houssenloge, Earl Stevens, and Mary Van Doren. Through engaging personal stories, examples, and essays, the writers offer inspiration and encouragement for seasoned and prospective unschoolers alike.

Click here to purchase

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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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We’ve had so much going on recently that I thought it would be nice to show a week in my unschoolers lives, instead of just one day. Enjoy!

Making pillows they received for Christmas:

Playing basketball:

Going to Girl Scouts:

LOL….getting tickled:

Going to the Museum of Natural History, for the Amazon Voyage exhibit, with friends:

Helping dad make yummy sauce:

Making Gummi Bears (more in another post):

In between these pictures was a lot of playing Guitar Hero on PS2, reading the Twilight series, writing stories about fairies, playing Golden Compass on wii, phone calls from friends, internet surfing, day dreaming, playing Scattegories, going to the park with friends and much, much more.

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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.

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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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