Varieties of Unschooling Experience

Unschooling is not just for secular, white people with alternative lifestyle demographics. The ideas about learning that John Holt developed over the years speak to people in school and out, to children and adults, to conservatives and liberals; Holt’s work is translated into more than 14 languages now.

However, when we speak about unschooling we are speaking about an idea, not a program, and people need to incorporate ideas into their lives to make them real. Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I recently read A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling by Suzie Andres. She writes:

“Unschooling has been the easiest and most comfortable fit for my family. I knew it was right for us, because it was the educational approach that chased away my fear and spoke to me of love. I could really appreciate St. Theresa’s words when she wrote to her older sister in Story of a Soul, ‘No word of reproach touched touched me as much as did one of your caresses. My nature was such that fear made me recoil; with love not only did I advance, I actually flew.’

“Then I heard an echo of her words when I read John Holt. John, like Therese, is articulate, sure, and passionate. He concludes the revised edition of How Children Learn:

‘Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?’

“He wrote, too, of fear in education, and how ineffective a tool it was. I thought of my own education and agreed. He wrote of children’s natural love of learning and desire to master the world around them. Again, I knew from experience he was right . . . when I read John Holt I felt the same deep peace I felt when I read St. Therese. Their message to me has been essentially one and the same: Replace fear with trust. Since this is exactly what Jesus taught, I knew it was good advice.”

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 While speaking in Chicago I learned about Finding Joy: A Christian’s Journey to an Unschooled Life by Julie Polanco (it is available from lulu.com). Polanco ends her short book with questions and answers; here’s her reply to a criticism unschoolers often get:

Q: This sounds like all you do is have fun all the time. Life isn’t about having fun. How do kids learn that life is rough?

A: Why shouldn’t life be fun? Why shouldn’t people make money doing something that they find and fulfilling? Sure, all of us experience hardship and tragedy at some point in our lives and our children often experience those things in the course of their lives, too. Their best friends move away or begin to exclude them from the group. The family dog dies. Grandma gets sick and is hospitalized. Dad loses his job. If your children don’t experience any of these things, they will feel the pain through someone they know.

Doing service together often exposes them to the realities of life. When they visit a widow or bring a meal to a new mother, when they make Christmas boxes for Samaritan’s Purse, when they bring new clothers and food to the neighbor whose basement flooded, or when the befriend the immigrant family down the street, they will experience all the ups and downs that life has to offer. Learning should not be among those things that are difficult and unpleasant for children. Learning should be joyous, wonderful, and anticipated with fervor and zest.

The Competence of Children

Here is another example of how homeschooling helps children find work worth doing and lives worth living. This  11-year-old boy, Birke Baehr, has the confidence to stand before a large crowd alone on-stage, address what sounds like a large audience, and deliver a very persuasive argument in favor of using locally-grown food. So as critics decry the lack of social skills and social concern among homeschoolers, despite evidence like this (and I know of at least 30 years of additional evidence, both research-based and anecdotal, that I can add to this), I hope that those interested in what homeschoolers are actually doing in the world are inspired by this. Birke also makes a very strong point early in his talk, about how marketing to kids is so insidious and prevalent; I'm very glad to know that there are children like Birke who, at 11, know when they are being sold a bunch of crap and are willing to say so.

Free Range Learning

Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything by Laura Grace Weldon is a welcome addition to homeschooling literature. Starting from the point of view that “Natural learning happens all the time,” Weldon cites many familiar, and some new, books, research, and data to support that claim. This information can be useful to present to skeptics, if they are open-minded, but it is probably most useful to any parent wondering how much teaching they need to do with their child at home. In short—don’t teach unless the child asks a question. If you create a relaxed, open atmosphere at home the questions will flow from the kids, as the families in this book show and the parents of healthy, pre-school-age children can attest. Dr. Raymond Moore used to say that he could determine a good learning situation by who was asking the questions: if the teacher is asking the questions, it isn’t good; if the children are asking the questions, it’s a good learning situation.

Most important, Weldon fills this book with first-hand accounts by homeschooling parents and children that not only add much meat to the research bones presented, but also add much humanity. Rather than issuing lists of “do this but don’t do that” to fit your homeschooling into, Weldon lays out a full palette of options that families use, often stories told in their own words, and asks the reader to mix and match them to develop their own homeschooling palette.

The first half of this book is an overview not just of natural learning, but also of many related philosophies and theories about learning, such as Flow, authenticity, play, technology, interpersonal relationships, and community building. Her last chapter in this half of the book summarizes her idea that “homeschooling changes everything” and she does a very good job of showing the reader why that is so. I particularly enjoyed her section on “Homeschooling as a right,” because she steers clear of calling for laws or professional groups to protect homeschooling (both laws and professional groups are constantly subject to revision based on who is in power and their agenda) and instead calls for us, the citizens and parents, to protect our rights ourselves by not giving that power up to others. We currently, and always have had, the right to homeschool in the United States, subject to local laws and regulations if they are present. But Weldon is sharp in noting that corporations seeking to make money from homeschooling often help shape legislation or regulations that allow state funds to flow to their companies in exchange for “homeschooling” children enrolled in their programs (typically computer-based, distance learning programs). She writes:

We cannot permit entrepreneurs selling education as a product through our school districts to co-opt our hard won freedoms or use the term “homeschooling.” We must continue to define homeschooling ourselves.

No matter what changes are made to the educational systems in the wider culture, the right to homeschool must be protected. This is the oldest and most successful form of learning known to mankind. It’s also the most natural form of learning. Children playing, learning and growing up with close family ties in a community where they gain experience among people of all ages—this is how nearly every one of our ancestors learned. This works. Learning does not have to be regulated and legislated. It does not have to be a for-profit venture. If we don’t defend homeschooling, our right to define homeschooling for ourselves can be lost.

Most homeschoolers embrace the freedom to use whatever works for their children to learn and, as you’ll read in the second half of this book, there are many, many different ways to help children learn besides computer-based instruction. In this part, Weldon provides not just first-hand accounts of learning all the standard school subjects, and lists of resources and books to help you along the way, but also sound advice for getting children into the world by using adventure travel, field trips, volunteerism, spirituality, and current events not as secondary offerings—as they are so often in school, if they are there at all—but as the primary course for helping children grow and learn. If you are considering homeschooling, or are in the thick of it, this book will inspire and help you. If you are a teacher or a parent with children in school, this book will show you many new ways to think about learning and how you can help children.

John Holt Speaks to Swedish Teachers About How Children Learn

Though there aren't many videos of John Holt, there are numerous audio tapes of him speaking since John was an audiophile who recorded most of his own talks, as well as Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsals (he had permission) and many other daily sonic events. This is my first effort at transferring an analog cassette tape to digital format; I had to further format it to fit into YouTube's 15 minute limit. I also added a few photos so you aren't staring at a blank screen for an hour while John talks.

This is a talk John Holt presented to Swedish teachers in Gothenberg, Sweden on March 22, 1982. As John notes here, he was revising How Children Learn during the time he was doing his Scandinavian tour, so these are pretty fresh thoughts and ideas that John was working with in light of his connection to homeschoolers (I didn't hear him say "unschooler" at all in this talk, FYI). What else is noteworthy is how Sweden, in 2010, banned homeschooling on the grounds that a professional education was available from the state and families therefore had no need for homeschooling. As Holt notes forcefully on this tape, unasked for teaching actually impedes learning, particularly for young children, a lesson confirmed by research that Holt notes in 1982 and quite recently confirmed again by new research cited in the Boston Globe (Front page, 3/29/11). However, a point often lost among today's unschoolers is that when a child of any age asks to be taught then "Go for it!" John provides an example of how a baby or toddler might ask for or invite teaching from an adult.

Like most of the audio tapes I have, this was recorded by John while he spoke, so the quality is a bit rough. I've removed as much hiss as I could, and the entire speech is here, though part 4 ends abruptly during the Q&A section. However, you are able to grasp John's final point, one he made often: schools should be more like public libraries, in spirit and in organization.

In Memory of Jean Liedloff and The Continuum Concept

I learned that Jean Liedloff, author of the groundbreaking book about her work with the Yequana Indians of the Amazon basin, The Continuum Concept, died on March 15, 2011. This book was championed by John Holt during his life, and we continued to sell and support it until we closed our bookstore in 2001. Holt wrote:

This seems to me as important a book as any I have ever read. In it Jean Liefloff says and shows that babies grow best in health, happiness, intelligence, independence, self-reliance, courage, and cooperativeness when they are born and reared in the "continuum" of the human biological experience, that is, as "primitive" mothers bear and rear their babies, and probably always have born and reared them through all the millions of years of human existence.

We interviewed Jean Liedloff in Growing Without Schooling 70. You can download a PDF of the two-page interview here. I hope you enjoy reading the interview.