Unschooling on Good Morning America

ABC TV did a segment about Radical Unschooling on its news show, Good Morning America, and it was pretty negative. However, since response was so strong the producers decided to do more on the topic tomorrow. They have invited the Biegler/Yablonski family featured in the story to be interviewed live in the studio and I'll be chiming in from Boston via remote hookup. I'm told our segment will air around 8AM EST tomorrow.

Radical Unschooling, Good Citizenship, and The Fun Theory for Learning

Some short bits of news to end this week:

1)   ABC TV contacted me for some background information on a story they are doing about Radical Unschooling. It will air some time between 7 and 9AM, EST, on Monday April, 19, 2010 on Good Morning America.

2)   The legal rationale for compulsory education is that school will produce good citizens. The results for producing good citizens who went through the K-12 level of school have been poor, as evidence from low voter turnout, public disgust with politics, and civic and social disengagement among graduates continue to show. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has studied what happens when these students continue into college, and the results aren’t pretty. According to AOLNews:

“Half of the 14,000 incoming freshmen tested failed the 60-question multiple-choice test, getting just half the questions right. Worse, they barely know any more when they graduate, with seniors scoring 54 percent correct. No school, not even Harvard or Yale, got above a 69 percent average among seniors. Worse still, in some schools, students did worse coming out than going in.”

Can homeschooling, unschooling, alternative schooling, or just a do-it-yourself attitude produce more involved and knowledgeable citizens than schools do? Test your own civic knowledge by taking the test.

3) I learned about The Fun Theory recently and thought how useful it can be for learners. The Fun Theory, sponsored by Volkswagon, aims its efforts at changing social behavior, but I think it can easily be applied to teaching and learning in a significant way. Of course, putting autonomy, joy and fun into learning makes it quite suspect to most educators, so I don’t see it coming to our schools any time soon. However, unconventional learners can create our own versions of these initiatives and perhaps one of them will catch on with conventional schools. At the least, harried parents who are tired of asking their children to clean up their rooms might be inspired to try the project entitled "Give parents some peace!" on the Fun Theory page.



British Homeschoolers and The War on Kids

Two interesting things happened to me in the past two days: I went to a screening of Cevin Soling’s documentary, The War on Kids and I learned that British homeschoolers were able to help defeat legislation that would have severely curtailed their rights to raise and teach their children as they wish. The connections between these events for me are the strategies and tactics being used to control both kids and parents who don’t conform to school regulations.

The War on Kids documents many of the major problems children face just by attending school, from zero tolerance policies to the extreme overuse of drugs to control their behavior. I watched the movie on DVD on my own earlier, but seeing it with an audience is a different experience, and one I’m glad I had. First, I got to hear and speak with the director, Cevin, who is an extremely articulate and thoughtful man. His descriptions about his own education, and how he learned so much more outside of school than in school, were honest and interesting. Second, I got to hear some audience reactions to the subject matter of the film. Most of the college students in attendance—it was screened at Tufts University—seemed interested in the material though not particularly moved to action by it. I got the sense that many felt the problems presented in the movie did not apply to them and their schooling, though it seemed to resonate with a few. Waking people up to the real issues of schooling—they are about how we treat children, not how we teach and grade them—is nearly impossible because we’ve all been schooled and learned helplessness in the face of authority as a result. As a homeschooling mom wrote in the 1920’s, “You can’t learn democracy in a place that doesn’t practice it.” Fortunately, we can deschool ourselves and unschool our children or, if you can afford to and want to, you can find private schools or other alternatives that allow for more personalized learning. However, as the recent brouhaha over homeschooling in Great Britain shows, we in the US may be in for serious challenges to our homeschooling freedoms on the grounds of psychological, educational and physical abuse.

In the late nineteen eighties I became aware of a new psychological illness that was noted in Britain, School Phobia. I can’t remember the book title, but Holt Associates/Growing Without Schooling sold a book from Britain that challenged that diagnosis at the time. This diagnosis is now used in the US. Since then I’ve heard about homeschooling parents and children who, when they get belligerent in the face of authorities who challenge their homeschooling, are told they have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Further, Graham Badman, the man whose report spurred the restrictive homeschooling legislation in Britain, remarked that he felt many homeschooling mothers probably suffered from Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. He also noted that homeschooling parents are twice as likely to be child abusers as non-homeschooling parents. Apparently one does not need to provide any data to make such claims, just evidence that the child or parent disagreed with you in an excited manner. Why use a certified psychiatrist to make these judgments when they’re so evident and easy to do yourself?

Indeed, Dr. Peter Breggin and other professionals interviewed in The War on Kids, make the point about how easy it is for a child to be diagnosed and put on behavior modifying drugs in the US. I read an article about “smart pills” in The New Yorker last year; Ritalin is considered to be such a pill because it enables the user to stay up late and focus narrowly on their work. Ritalin has become a drug of choice for many college students as a result, and they don’t need a black market to get it. Students interviewed in the article noted how easy it was to pretend they had attention deficit disorder in order to get the doctors to prescribe Ritalin for them.

As homeschooling grows there will be more “push back” from the education establishment, including from homeschoolers who share many of school’s assumptions about how and why children learn. Apparently one of the primary cheerleaders for the Badman Report in Britain was a homeschooler who didn’t think other homeschoolers were doing it the correct way, i.e. like conventional school. Homeschoolers, and unschoolers in particular, need to be acutely alert to the dangers of teachers, politicians, and social workers applying psychological diagnosis to people just because they do not use conventional education.

It is shameful that psychological problems that are very real for some people are being used as a rationale to force or shame healthy people into staying in school or to punish them for trying something different for their children. Yes, there is a War on Kids occurring, and I urge you to see this movie to learn more about it (Disclaimer: I appear in this movie). However, there is also a War on Parents occurring, and both wars are attempting psychological warfare to subdue parents and kids.



Do you ask real questions or do you just quiz kids?

First, I want to share some homeschooling humor that was shared with me earlier today. This is from the Onion:

"WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home."

Next, I want to thank everyone who helped put on the OHEN conference in Tigard, OR on March 20. What a great time I had at the Oregon Home Education Network conference. It was a packed day for me – a keynote plus three workshops – but the camaraderie and energy that were present on-site made it an exciting day. Plus, the event ended with a professional magic show for all ages that left us amazed and upbeat, making it a unique experience for me because I especially enjoy magic performances. I had to get back to Boston to be at work on Monday, but I hope to visit Portland in a more leisurely manner some day. The “underground” tour of the city sounds pretty interesting.

My first two talks ran over their allotted time due to me departing from my written comments and technical difficulties. Arden, a tech-savvy teenager, and Pat Nystrom, a homeschooling dad, helped me keep the audio-visual aspects working throughout the day, but neither they, nor I, could figure out why all but one video played correctly in my presentations. Of course, that one video made the whole program crash and quit each time! I summarized the videos in my own words at the conference, but I’ve uploaded the Holt video here so you can hear John Holt himself talk about the differences between a question and a quiz.



“I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for four talks I’ll be giving in Portland, OR on March 20 (click the sidebar if you want more information about this engagement). I wanted to include some new videos and perspectives for these talks and I started rummaging through my files from my days with John Holt and found a bunch of video and cassette tapes of talks by John. I’ve started watching one, a four-hour VHS tape of John speaking to homeschoolers in Spokane, WA. I’m not sure of the date, I think it is 1983 or 1984, given references John makes to some of the kids who came into the office then. I hope someone who views this, or some of the other segments that will be posted, will remember at least the year. Let me know if you have any guesses or ideas that would help date this video.

I am about two hours into this video and I’ll certainly post more of it as I watch it and become more adept at extracting video from tape and then uploading it to the web. However, there are so many classic John Holt lines, and some surprising comments John makes, that I couldn’t wait any more to start sharing it with people. I think for much of the public there is a perception of John Holt as a wide-eyed radical who romanticized childhood. I hope this, and future clips, will show John as the quiet, plainspoken but deeply thoughtful man he was. This short segment also shows Holt’s deep empathy with children, a quality that is sorely lacking in all our discussions of education today. John’s analysis of how children struggle with pronouns is radical when you consider how few current day teachers would recommend, as John does, to leave the children alone and let them figure it out for themselves. Indeed, in my mind I hear a chorus of educators clamoring as to why they must intervene instead of following Holt’s advice:

“They will develop learning delays!”

“They’ll fall behind their class!”

“You are guilty of educational neglect because you should be making your children learn how to correctly use pronouns!”

Of course—and I see this in this particular clip—John could be quite passionate about certain things, in particular about how children learn and what parents and other concerned adults can do to help them learn. As you will hear John say, “I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

This particular lecture is in a setting John enjoyed being at: speaking with a group of parents and children in a comfortable setting. In much of the tape I’ve seen so far you can hear lots of babies babbling and children playing in the background and, often, John will stop speaking and comment on what he sees or hears from the children in the audience.  I also found cassettes of radio interviews John did with NPR and the BBC, as well as tapes John made of himself playing the cello or speaking in foreign countries. The cassette tapes are usually very good quality recordings, either professionally done or recorded by John himself, who was quite an audiophile. However, the video tapes aren't the greatest quality. Nonetheless, I decided to work with them to get them online because there just isn't much video of John and I hope people can look beyond the grainy images and scratchy sound to experience, or re-experience, John Holt and his observations about children. I look forward to sharing these with you as I move more of these recordings into digital formats.