The Unschooling Channel

Dr. Carlo Ricci, an education professor at Nipissing University in Canada and the founder of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, interviewed myself, John Gatto, and many other speakers at the  Alternative Education Resource Organization conference in June, 2010. He asked us all the same questions about unschooling and the variety of responses is interesting. You can view my interview below; to view the others, and I urge you to do so, visit Dr. Ricci's Unschooling Channel on YouTube.

Child-driven Education

In 2008, in an earlier version of this blog, I wrote about the research of Sugata Mitra whose "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown, “in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity.” Dr. Mitra has a new TED video (see below) where he explores this concept in more detail by conducting further experiments using children, computers, and the Internet.

Mitra interviewed Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author, who says to Mitra in the video, “When you have interest, you have education.” This pretty much sums up Mitra's position about learning.

Naturally all of this sounds incredibly familiar to unschoolers and others who support self-directed learning, but Dr. Mitra and the audience he reaches seem genuinely surprised and delighted by these findings. Indeed, I felt as if I were watching a parallel universe emerge as Mitra discussed his concept of creating SOLEs, self-organized learning environments and enlisting British grandmothers to read and speak English with school children in other countries by using an Internet connection. Echoes from the work of Paul Goodman, John Holt, and Ivan Illich abound in Mitra's findings, but the connections are not drawn in either of these videos.

Mitra's work is focused on technology and children, but as unschoolers and alternative educators such as A.S. Neil have shown for generations, children can teach themselves and others far more than we believe they can, if provided with access, time, and kind, not overbearing, adult support. I really like Mitra's attitude about how the adults need to get out of the way and let the kids have ample time and equipment to self-organize their learning.

As can be seen in these videos, the technology Mitra uses is not the sort of expensive computer learning labs our schools would insist on building before implementing any such program. The consumer off-the-shelf products Mitra provides the students with in these videos contain as much involvement and content as any custom-designed, age-appropriate, aligned-to-standardized-testing computer program. In fact, since the tools the kids are using are the same that adults use—Google, common Internet browsers—they probably have even more appeal to children than programs designed just for use in the classroom.

At the very least, Mitra's work can be cited by unschoolers as further support for the self-directed learning their children do. I hope at some point Dr. Mitra will expand his inquiries to consider other places and ways that children self-organize their learning besides using technology to do so. For instance, in addition to those authors mentioned earlier, examination of the work of Bill Ellis, who was inspired by E.F. Shumacher; Ron Miller's work about alternative schools, particularly The Self-Organizing Revolution: Common Principles of the Educational Alternatives Movement (Psychology Press, 2008); Roland Meighan's The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers are trailblazers (Education Heretics Press, 1997), and the growing literature from unschoolers about how their children learn from and about the world without formal instruction all support Mitra's ideas about teaching and learning. There are other books and studies that can be cited, such as Letter to a Teacher from the Schoolboys of Barbiana, wherein Italian children who were flunked out of school in sixth grade banded together and taught themselves what they needed and wanted to learn, but I'll stop here.

Mitra ends his talk with a slide that displays these words:

Speculation: Education is a self organizing system (sic), where learning is an emergent phenomenon… It will take five years and under a million dollars to prove this experimentally.

Mitra seeks to prove, experimentally, something that some parents, teachers, and children have long known and leveraged: that children have much greater abilities to learn and grow than our current conception of schooling can even dream of or allow. I wish him well in his experiment, but there is no reason for anyone to wait for him to "prove" this before it can be used by people.

As homeschoolers and unschoolers we know that no matter how much research is shown to support our position, the conventional wisdom of the day usually trumps it. So even if Mitra can prove his speculation we are not going to see school officials stop harrassing parents and teachers who aren't using conventional school techniques. But that's no reason for us to stop helping our children learn in their own ways; indeed, Mitra's work, even without such proof, is an inspiration for us to continue doing what we've been doing and saying for years.



Celebrity Unschoolers

The good folks at Home Education Magazine—Mary Nix in particular—helped get 25 complete issues of Growing Without Schooling (GWS) uploaded online. The issues were reformatted from text files we stored on floppy disks over the years, with all the ads, directories, and other dated information excluded. I'm currently exploring ways to get the entire archive of 143 GWS issues online exactly as the originals appeared, and am enjoying the process. So I've been re-reading issues from my complete set of GWS and am struck by the timelessness of much of the information, as well as many other things I will comment on in coming posts. However, this little extract from GWS 14 should give heart to many who feel their children won't be prepared for adult work if they don't follow standard school procedures.

CELEBRITY UNSCHOOLERS

From THE BOOK OF LISTS (by Wallechinsky, Wallace, & Wallace):

15 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER GRADUATED FROM GRADE SCHOOL: Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Buffalo Bill Cody, Noel Coward, Charles Dickens, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Edison, Samuel Gompers, Maksim Gorky, Claude Monet, Sean O’Casey, Alfred E. Smith, John Philip Sousa, Henry M. Stanley, Mark Twain.

20 FAMOUS HIGH-SCHOOL OR SECONDARY-SCHOOL DROPOUTS: Harry Belafonte, Cher, Mary Baker Eddy, Henry Ford, George Gershwin, D. W. Griffith, Adolf Hitler, Jack London, Dean Martin, Bill Mauldin, Rod McKuen, Steve McQueen, Amedeo Modigliani, Al Pacino, Will Rogers, William Saroyan, Frank Sinatra, Marshal Tito, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright.

20 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER ATTENDED COLLEGE: Joseph Chamberlain, Grover Cleveland, Joseph Conrad, Aaron Copland, Hart Crane, Eugene Debs, Amelia Earhart, Paul Gauguin, Kahlil Gibran, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Abraham Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harry S. Truman, George Washington, Virginia Woolf.

13 FAMOUS AMERICAN LAWYERS WHO NEVER WENT TO LAW SCHOOL: Patrick Henry, John Jay*, John Marshall*, William Wirt, Roger B. Taney*, Daniel Webster, Salmon P. Chase*, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Clarence Darrow (attended one year), Robert Storey, J. Strom Thurmond, James 0. Eastland. (* - Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.)

Unschooling the University

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of High Education by Anya Kamenetz is a fantastic examination about how college has become so expensive and extremely over-rated, yet remains the ultimate goal for nine out of ten high school graduates. Armed with solid research and statistics (“…the United States has fallen from world leader to only tenth-most educated nation. The price of college tuition has increased more than any other good or service for the last twenty years. Almost half of U.S. college students don’t graduate; outstanding student loan debt totals $730 billion.”), Kamenetz marshals her arguments cogently to show not only how we got into this mess but provides ideas for how we can get out of it as well. 

I was pleased to see her use and cite the work of Holt and Illich, as they were early and vocal critics of the university but they are now remembered primarily as critics of K-12 education. One of my favorite photographs of John Holt is of him refusing an honorary degree. The Associated Press printed a photo of Holt with his fist pumped into the air on June 11, 1970 with this caption:

REFUSES HONORARY DEGREE. Author John Holt, critic of modern education, refused to accept an honorary degree as he spoke recently at Wesleyan University, saying that colleges are among “the chief enslaving institutions” in America.

Kamenetz is a lot less harsh in her comments about college than Holt and Illich were, but her call for change is as earnest as theirs.  After writing about the historical, social, and economic history of college in America she writes about several new directions higher education can take to transform itself. DIY U provides you with new technologies, Open Education programs, self-learning and other examples of college-level independent study that anyone can benefit from. Some of the insights she makes regarding the future of college are quite striking, such as this:

Brian Lamb, an educational technologist at the University of British Columbia, sketches out for me a potential vision: “ For universities, here’s the nightmare scenario. Imagine Google enters a partnership with two or three top educational publishers, builds on the existing open-educational resources already released, uses the reach of Google to coordinate discussion and peer-based networks and develops a series of tests that they also certify. What then?”

Teenage homeschoolers and unschoolers and their parents would benefit from reading DIY U in particular, if only to give them pause before going to college. After years of learning without attending elementary or high school, homeschoolers and unschoolers who decide to continue learning in their own unique ways without going to conventional college will find DIY U a valuable resource. Indeed, the last section of the book is a very useful resource guide for creating your personal Do It Yourself University. 

Unschooling Math

Susannah Sheffer edited Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine longer than any of her previous or subsequent colleagues did, including John Holt himself. During her time at GWS Susannah created several small packets and booklets on specific topics that used material exclusively from GWS. I’ve been going through all my GWS documents seeking material that hasn’t been used before for the creation of some new books, articles and materials I have in mind. However, when I rediscovered this little pamphlet by Susannah I thought it could be immediately useful to people who are uncertain if math can be learned by children without formal textbooks, lessons, and wheedling and needling by parents to finish their homework.

I scanned the original booklet and am providing it as a free download in Portable Document Format (PDF), so you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it. If you would like to read it and comment on it, please visit my download page and click on “Unschooling Math.” I would appreciate your comments and thoughts about it, particularly if you would like to see or share more material on the subject of unschooling math.

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