Unschoolers Will Not Learn To Do Things They Don't Want To Do

I think the unschooling segment I appeared on with the Yablonski/Biegler family on The Good Morning America TV show probably caused more heat than light today. There were so many important points to make—schooling is not the same as education, lack of curriculum is not lack of instruction, how and why different scopes and sequences for learning work—but, in the total 4 minute segment, it was all I could do to mention that children are natural learners from birth. As you can see, today’s interview didn’t have the negative edge of yesterday’s presentation, so at least that’s an improvement.

But yesterday's damage is done; unschooling is just a version of hookey that produces uneducated kids to those viewers, not a genuine way to help children learn and, as the host kept implying, it should be more regulated. If only we could have spoken about how kids can do serious work without being coerced into doing so, how learning can be rich and non-linear when it occurs outside school, how unschooled kids fare in college and the world of work. There are plenty of books and videos and studies we could have discussed, but instead it all got bogged down in the refrain, "Isn't it the job of the parent to teach the child to do things that they don't want to do?" What a negative way to think about learning and work: "I have to do things I don't want to do only because someone with power over me tells me I should." So much for self-starters, questioners, think-out-of-the-box employees; no, according to this concept we want to primarily educate our children to become adults who Obey. The world is full of opportunities that teach us how we must sometimes do things we don't want to do in order to accomplish something we do, so I don't think that's a lesson parents, or schools, need to endlessly drill into kids. I think the job of parents is to show how joy for life and love of learning can be sources of discipline and hard work, not fear, bribery and misery. Children do help out with chores around the house, cooking, and more without bullying them into it. In fact, I read about a study that shows altruism is inherent in children as young as 18 months; kids really want to join in and help and we can work with that ability instead of quashing it so they'll only help when we command them to do so. There's much more to say on this topic, but I'll get off my soap-box now.

On another note:

I recently listened to a podcast entitled John Holt: Libertarian Outsider, by Jeff Riggenbach. It is an interesting portrayal of Holt’s work, with some excellent quotes from John’s books, particularly Freedom and Beyond. Sponsored by the Mises Institute, the 20-minute presentation often makes John seem like Captain Ahab, pursuing the education whale with monomaniacal intensity. As a result, Riggenbach neglects to mention Holt’s other causes and interests, such as music, fiction and ecology, but this is a minor matter. If you want to learn more about John’s work and speculate about why Holt didn’t become a “capital L Libertarian,” as John used to say or, as Riggenbach notes, a “Movement Libertarian,” this is a good place to start.



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.



All homeschoolers would qualify for asylum

The Christian Science Monitor printed their story about the German homeschooling family who received political asylum in the US yesterday and it contained two rather interesting nuggets of information. The first is the decision, if upheld on appeal, will grant asylum to any sincere homeschooler. From the article: “Homeschoolers are a movement of sorts,” says Peter Spiro, an expert on international immigration law at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. “The immigration judge looking at this claim said there is a coherence to this group ... and that denying the rights of this group [to homeschool] is persecution.”

The article claims Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has already been contacted by other German homeschoolers who want political asylum. Here is where the second interesting nugget turns up, when Mike Donnelly, an attorney for the HSLDA, is paraphrased:

"Donnelly says his group is not directly affiliated with a Christian church, but his website mentions staff members’ faith. He also said the homeschooling movement in the US was not just Christian – the National Center for Education Statistics says only 36 percent of homeschooled students are kept home for religious reasons."

It has been well noted that as homeschooling has surged in growth—74% in less than a decade—it has also significantly diversified, thereby diminishing the influence of evangelical homeschooling leaders. However, to read that HSLDA is downplaying its religious orientation a bit, or at least downplaying it for this article, makes me feel even more that we are entering a stage where inclusive and global homeschooling associations are the next stage of development we face.