Systems :: School (Part 1)

If you get our blog updates in a reader, you have not seen our sidebar updates, but the rest of you surely have noticed on the right my list entitled "how our children are learning." We do what is called unschooling. Here in our home we just call it living... learning.... following our interests.

We know that most of you readers (grandparents especially) have a serious interest and concern that we don't screw things up for these two and their education :-)
So that's really why I'm typing. Hopefully this post about what unschooling is (and isn't) will give everyone a taste of what's going on and also some confidence that Todd and I haven't lost our marbles. Please know I am no expert. Click on all the sidebar links for a better explanation -- this is just a summary of what it is like for US.

First the back story has to be told so you know what a journey we've been on to become the extremists we seem to be. I'll try to keep it brief and not bore you with every detail, as there are indeed many, and I'm sure this will be long regardless.

We have been on this homeschooling path since Evan was about four. We were able to shrug off most of the pressure to put him in preschool -- most folks were fine with it when they said to themselves, "oh, well you're a teacher, so...."

I had taught preschool for a couple years and never liked the feel of it all. Actually, I never saw myself being my own kids' teacher. I'm sure that works for many families but it felt foreign to me since all along they had taught themselves so many things already -- it just came naturally to them to be curious and learn. I figured, why intervene unless they asked me to.

When we committed to keeping Evan at home at least for Kindergarten I started wondering what I was supposed to do. I asked a long-time homeschooling mom at our church what she did for kindergarten, and she very briefly said, "Get 'Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons.' That's the only book you need."

This floored me since I expected to be diving in headfirst to the unfamiliar world of curriculum and she suggested only one book?? And the only part of that entire year that mattered was reading? This got me thinking. Maybe doing this at home wasn't as complicated as it seemed.

We never got that book. (I'm sure it's a great book.) We never bought any books at all. (I'm sure there are great books to help all kinds of families do this in their own way.) We just kept using our library card. (That was what was working great for us.) And you know the rest of the story: Evan learned to read with minimal input from me.

So the Kindergarten year passed and Evan was obviously still curious and learning constantly. His never-ending stream of questions fueled his need to learn more. And I was right alongside him as he explored.

But I still wondered about reporting things to the state and all the legal jazz that overwhelmed me. How would we convince anyone that an education was indeed happening? I knew that we could keep him out of 'the system' till he was eight. So that was enough to keep our preferred and effective natural learning going for at least another year. We'd just have to figure out a "system" for reporting to the state how we would do second grade in 2011-2012. And like most people we believed we would have to buckle down and "do school" for third grade and beyond since that was when all the meaty stuff came into the picture. This worried me.

Around this time a friend of mine told me about Charlotte Mason -- a woman who did a natural type of homeschooling over 100 years ago. This was intriguing and I soaked it up -- all about nature and literature as the basis for all learning. After months of researching the Charlotte Mason method, it still seemed a bit too 'schoolish' for me so I took notes on what I liked and ditched the rest. I found a book during that time called For the Children's Sake by Susan Shaeffer Macaulay and loved it -- it was about looking at education differently than I ever had. I started asking myself important questions and realized what we had been doing all along felt so much more right for us.

This was the turning point.

I decided to immerse myself in books on learning and homeschooling. In the process of searching for a book (not at my library) called Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto, I found out about John Holt. This was it. I read his book Teach Your Own and knew we were on the right track. Everything he said rang true in my heart. He summed up our teaching 'method' in one brief sentence. Trust children.

Amen.

I read several of his other books (all that my library had) and began researching "unschooling" on the internet. It began to seem possible that natural learning could work all through the school years, not just the beginning. He gave success stories that opened our eyes and lifted our spirits even more. We had finally found our match. (And once I found out how to do the reporting so that the school board wouldn't question our method, we had sealed the deal. The trouble was in telling others about it. This unschooling thing is not well-received :-) We still call it homeschooling -- that way no one questions it -- but we know it's not school at home for us in any way. It's life. Learning happens all the time. It can't not happen. Try to go a day and NOT learn something.

By the end of summer 2010 (before his first grade year began) I realized how much learning had taken place without any help from a "teacher": Evan had been playing with numbers in his mind so much that he had taught himself how to multiply most numbers up to at least 10x10. He knew about the inner workings of the human digestive system. He knew the names of the planets. He could talk about a space shuttle launch and the parts of the shuttle itself. He knew how to care for our cats and had a responsibility for them each day. He could describe and name dozens and dozens of plants (fruits, vegetables, trees and flowers). He knew the characteristics of the four seasons. He had a rock collection, a shell collection, a feather collection, a dried leaf collection. He knew exactly how the suspension of an automobile goes together and can build a model with technic legos.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of where his ideas and interests have led. I have tons more things he has learned in my mind right now that would take hours to write.

He is self-taught.

Will he learn everything the "average first-grader" learns? Nope.
Will he skip right over things like American history or fractions or other subjects most adults find boring? Probably.
Will he decide to learn them if they are important to him? You bet.

We trust him.

It is a proven fact that people only retain in their memory what has personal significance to them. Isn't that how your brain works? Children are people too :-)

Unschooling doesn't mean leaving kids to themselves and hoping for the best. It means making their environment stimulating and being an available resource and a learner alongside them. Most importantly it means trusting them, that they know what they need to learn when they need to learn it.

We want to give our kids the childhood we ourselves felt robbed of. Freedom to dream. Freedom to wander. Freedom to question. Freedom to play. Freedom to think. Freedom to become themselves.

The end



(And you're thinking, oh my... this was just part 1?!! Yeah, next time I want to post a list of other books to read and links to follow for more info. It'll be shorter, I promise)


If you have any questions about any of this (now or at any time) feel free to inquire. I will do my best to answer :-)