Unschooled

Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

Kerry McDonald, Peter Gray

• Verlag: Chicago Review Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781641600668
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Inclusive Education

Education has become synonymous with schooling, but it doesn't have to be. As schooling becomes increasingly standardized and test driven, occupying more of childhood than ever before, parents and educators are questioning the role of schooling in society. Many are now exploring and creating alternatives. In a compelling narrative that introduces historical and contemporary research on self-directed education, Unschooled also spotlights how a diverse group of individuals and organizations are evolving an old schooling model of education. These innovators challenge the myth that children need to be taught in order to learn. They are parents who saw firsthand how schooling can dull children's natural curiosity and exuberance and others who decided early on to enable their children to learn without school. Educators who left public school classrooms discuss launching self-directed learning centers to allow young people's innate learning instincts to flourish, and entrepreneurs explore their disillusionment with the teach-and-test approach of traditional schooling.

1

Playing School

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”

—Henry David Thoreau1

“IF YOU DON’T STOP TALKING, I’ll throw you out the window!” my first-grade teacher shouted at me. My small, six-year-old body froze. I swore she was serious and shut my mouth. I waited in terror until the final school bell rang. Then I leaped onto the school bus and ran home as fast as I could from the bus stop to the comfort of my mother’s arms.

“Oh, she didn’t really mean it,” my mother explained, trying to soothe my shaken nerves. “She just wanted you to listen and pay attention and not chitchat. She would never really throw you out the window. It was just an expression.”

Hyperbole though it may have been, I was wounded. At that moment, the reality of schooling became clear. Those previous play-filled days of part-time preschool, the innocence of morning kindergarten to gain social skills and academic readiness were a setup. They didn’t really want us to be social and ready; they wanted us to learn quickly how to sit down, stay quiet, follow orders, and conform. They wanted us to lose ourselves—to lose our natural childhood exuberance—in the name of education. It was for our own good, they told us. Resistance was futile.

So I learned. I learned quickly to lick my wounds and get good at playing the game of school. I realized that to succeed at this game I needed to become adept at obedience. I did what the teacher told me to do. I raised my hand, followed instructions, colored in the lines. I stopped talking. I listened, memorized, and regurgitated to the satisfaction of the teacher and the test. I was a good girl. I also already knew how to read which, once past the window incident, made me a teacher’s pet—someone she could send off to the corner to do advanced worksheets while she labored away with the “slow kids” and yelled at the troublemakers. By the end of first grade, I had this school thing down flat. Heck, I even liked it.

From then on, it was very clear to me what I needed to do to gain the teacher’s affections, to get the GOOD JOB! sticker, to collect the As and accolades, to win. I learned the rules. Game on. As Robert Fried writes in The Game of School: “The Game begins when we focus on getting through the school day rather than actually learning.”2

As so often happens when we reach adulthood, and especially parenthood, we realize how much we don’t know. I realized that I might have been successfully schooled, but I didn’t feel well educated. When I reflect on the approximately fifteen thousand hours I spent in K–12 public school, I think of what a waste of time most of those hours were. What else could I have been learning in those hours? How much more genuine could those hours have been if I wasn’t spending so much time playing the game, but actually exploring, reading, doing?

As Americans, we seem genuinely willing to embrace—even fight for—freedom for most people on our planet. Yet, we place children in increasingly restrictive learning environments, at ever-earlier ages and for much longer portions of their day and year than at any other time in our history. We place the vast majority of children in schooling environments that are much more controlling and unpleasant and unhealthy than we grown-ups would accept in our own lives and workplaces. We allow children’s bodies and thoughts to be managed by others, and we dismiss institutional side effects, like bullying, obesity, anxiety and depression, a decline in gross motor skills, and a rise in ADHD and other mental health disorders. Actions that would be criminal offenses in our adult workplaces are tolerated and expected in our children’s schooling.

It is no wonder that under these oppressive institutional conditions—characteristic of the rise of the Industrial Age—most children have the life force drained out of them. The parent of even the most inquisitive toddler witnesses the steady erosion of his natural curiosity and wonder as the child moves through his schooling. This is axiomatic, as American schooling was designed to strip the joy of natural learning—of following the human will to explore and discover—in favor of conformity and compliance. On the subject of forced schooling, acclaimed War on Kids documentary filmmaker Cevin Soling writes: “Learned helplessness is a vital feature and takes place very early when children discover that they will never be permitted to follow their passions. Every aspect of student life is controlled, including their surroundings, what they can do, how they can act, and what and how they may think.”3

Most of us think that declining childhood creativity is just a natural consequence of growing up. Yet young people who have never been schooled, or who learn in self-directed education environments, consistently demonstrate that humans’ curiosity and capacity to learn and synthesize do not diminish with age. The industrial schooling framework dulls them, but creativity and a zest for knowledge can be retained and reignited within a natural learning environment.

I recently asked followers of my Whole Family Learning blog’s Facebook page to reflect on their own K–12 schooling and share a word or phrase that sums it up. The responses were disheartening: boring, waste of time, low self-worth, pressure, anxiety, prison, opportunity cost, bullies, stress, shame, wasted opportunities, torture, hide, one-dimensional, hell, long, repetition, scary, inauthentic, abusive, authoritarianism, tedious, forced, glad it’s over. Would you add anything to this list? While certainly not an unbiased sample, these responses reinforce the sentiments and findings of many students, educators, and policymakers. As Noam Chomsky says, “The education system is supposed to train people to be obedient, conformist, not think too much, do what you’re told, stay passive.”4

For many young people this “system of indoctrination of the young,”5 as Chomsky calls mass education, leads to deep and penetrating wounds, as their spirit dims in the name of conformity. Those of us who do well in the mass schooling model are the ones most capable of quickly burying our wounds and learning to conform. We accept the confusion of schooling with learning, and dutifully obey. For many children, the harm of compulsory schooling is obvious. Many are at a disadvantage right out of the gate, and those disadvantages are amplified and embedded as their schooling continues. Others are bullied, labeled, tracked, or medicated.

But beyond these obvious harms are the subtler ones. Most schooled children, myself included, become conditioned to value and seek extrinsic rewards and superficial achievements. We don’t see value in our work or ourselves unless someone else affirms it. We lose creativity and individuality as we conform to arbitrary curriculum demands, teacher expectations, and institutional mores. In Kirsten Olson’s book Wounded by School, educator Parker Palmer discusses “the hidden and long-lasting wounds that result from the structural violence inherent in the ways we organize and evaluate learning, wounds that range from ‘I found out that I have no gift of creativity,’ or ‘I learned that I’m no good at sports,’ to ‘They drained off my self-confidence,’ ‘I emerged feeling stupid,’ or ‘They put me in the losers’ line and I’ve been there ever since.’ Equally sad and profoundly ironic is the wound that may be the most widespread of all: the eagerness to learn that we all bring into the world as infants is often diminished and even destroyed by our schooling.”6

So while it may seem that some of us made it through mass schooling unscathed—and even on top—I believe that few, if any of us, really do. We don’t know how else we might have spent those fifteen thousand hours: to follow our curiosities, to reveal our interests, to pursue our passions, to read, and read, and read some more. We don’t know how well-educated we could have become in our youth if we hadn’t spent so much time sitting, memorizing, repeating, forgetting, and otherwise playing school. How might your life be different now if you were granted the freedom to pursue your passions as a child, rather than spend so many hours following someone else’s schooled agenda?

Of course, as a first grader, and throughout my years in K–12 public schooling in a predominantly white working-class suburb of Boston, I didn’t realize it was a game. I just knew that it was school. It wasn’t until years later when I uncovered that school, as we know it, is a relatively recent social construct. For most of human history, and most of our time in the New World, formal schooling didn’t exist for most people. And yet, we survived and thrived, passed on our knowledge and skills to the next generation, and became highly literate and numerate. Education as synonymous with schooling is a fairly new idea.

Narrowing Education to Schooling

When the Pilgrims arrived in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, they brought with them a sense of duty to educate children to be literate and numerate. The clear understanding was that parents had the moral and civic obligation to educate their children, and there was an implicit belief within the community that clergymen and elders would ensure that children were educated. For the Pilgrims, family was sovereign. As historian Milton Gaither writes: “It is common knowledge that many British settlers moved to New England to build a holy commonwealth, a ‘city on a hill’ that would shine its light on the darkness of British decadence. But what is less well known is that the masonry being used to build this holy city was the family. The Pilgrims and many others came to the New World to build a family state.”7

Just over two decades after the Pilgrims’ arrival, Massachusetts Bay Colony legislators passed the colonies’ first compulsory education statute. The General School Law of 1642 required families to ensure the “good education” of their children. The law strayed from English precedent by shifting education oversight from clergy to selectmen. This early law emphasized a developing state interest in compulsory education, but it was not yet narrowly focused on schooling, and parents remained responsible for their children’s education.8 Education was separate and distinct from schooling.

Five years later, in 1647, Massachusetts Bay passed its second compulsory education law, the “Old Deluder Satan” bill. It said that children should be educated enough to read the Bible and understand how to avoid evil and vice. This second and more consequential law required towns with fifty or more families to hire a teacher, and towns with one hundred or more families to open and operate a grammar school. These schools were not compulsory in the sense that schooling is today; rather, it was the town that was compelled by the state to offer such a school for any families who wanted to use it. Towns, not parents, were punished for not complying with this early compulsory education statute. The implementation and enforcement of these initial compulsory education laws were scattered, with many towns refusing to comply and instead paying a fine.9

Over the following decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, similar compulsory education laws spread throughout the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies. As the population grew, more schools were erected and parents could choose whether to send their children there, when to send them, and for how long. The family remained the primary institution of early America, and parents retained full control over the upbringing and education of children.

While parents were responsible for their children’s education, they were not the only ones teaching them. They often hired tutors and relied on apprenticeships. As schools emerged in the early settlements, local parents were frequently the ones responsible for hiring, housing, and firing teachers. Colony schools complemented the ways children learned at home, and early “dame schools” freed parents of young children to do chores and tend to the household. But school was never seen as a replacement for the education provided by parents at home and managed by parents using the wider resources of their community.10 As historian Carl Kaestle declares: “Society educates in many ways; the state educates through schools.”11

The conversation around compulsory education continued through the Revolutionary era, as the Founding Fathers grappled with the understanding that ensuring liberty in a thriving new democracy required an educated citizenry. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, recognized the essential connection between education and freedom, writing in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”12 Still, the institution of the family prevailed over the interests of the state. Jefferson advocated for a highly decentralized system of education, locally controlled by parents in small districts, or “wards” as he called them, with little government involvement. He also believed that parental rights and individual liberty outweighed mandatory compliance. In 1817, Jefferson wrote, “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”13 Make education accessible, highly treasured, and free for the poor, Jefferson proposed, but don’t mandate it under a legal threat of force.

In the mid-nineteenth century this all changed. The population grew larger and more diverse, and state institutions concentrated government power in a more centralized way, weakening the once dominant role of the family. Horace Mann, a Massachusetts legislator and state senate majority leader, played an instrumental role in this growing institutionalization of society in the 1800s. Mann, the proclaimed “father of American public education,” also has the distinction of creating the nation’s first mental institution in 1833, shortly before turning his full attention to centralized schooling.14

Mann became enamored with the Prussian model of compulsory schooling. It was orderly and efficient, and it facilitated the inculcation of a uniform set of moral values. The Prussians, who lived in a broad area that now includes modern-day Germany, were among the first in the ...