Unschooling

I've been off at Indiana University, visiting with some professors and grad students, and they had me give a talk. I met some really cool people, amazing idiosyncratic and humble innovators. Even though I was there to talk about my research, there was a surprising amount of interest in the doings of TeachTheFacts.org, too, in private conversations. Let's just say ... there is an assumption among people at that level, highly educated researchers and scientists, that the viewpoint supported by TTF is the correct one. We may find a commenter who wants to insist that this means that the universities are filled with liberals, but of course the easier explanation is that the universities are filled with smart people.

It seems particularly significant that so many of the "culture wars" battles have taken place within the arena of education. Public education is a great service that local and state governments can provide. It used to be a cliche to say that "knowledge is power," and it used to seem rather hackneyed to talk about how important education is -- everybody knew it was important. It was like taking your vitamins or getting fresh air, something everybody knew was good for you.

Yet somehow, over recent decades, we have seen an anti-intellectual climate build up within the United States that has resulted in intentional and sometimes unintentional undermining of the institution of public education. Not only have there been crises and conflicts over the teaching of evolution and sex-education, the re-writing and re-defining of history and science and the censorship of literature, but trends such as home-schooling and the push for charter schools and vouchers have led to a weakening, at least, of the public trust in its educational system. Remember, last year the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention nearly voted to pull all of their kids out of public schools.

The New York Times had a cheerful item this weekend about a new trend in home-schooling that, I'm sure you will agree, is bound to result in a brighter, more skilled, more disciplined America in the twenty-first century.

Some people are just letting their kids run wild.

On weekdays, during what are normal school hours for most students, the Billings children do what they want. One recent afternoon, time passed loudly, and without order or lessons, in their home in a North Side neighborhood here.

Hayden Billings, 4, put a box over his head and had fun marching into things. His sister Gaby, 9, told stories about medieval warrior women, while Sydney, 6, drank hot chocolate and played with Dylan, the baby of the family.

In a traditional school setting, such free time would probably be called recess. But for Juli Walter, the children’s mother, it is “child-led learning,” something she considers the best in home schooling.

“I learned early on that when I do things I’m interested in,” Ms. Walter said, “I learn so much more.”

As the number of children who are home-schooled grows — an estimated 1.1 million nationwide — some parents like Ms. Walter are opting for what is perhaps the most extreme application of the movement’s ideas. They are “unschooling” their children, a philosophy that is broadly defined by its rejection of the basic foundations of conventional education, including not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums and textbooks. Home Schoolers Content to Take Children’s Lead

Sure, it sounds like fun. But don't you wonder what they learn? What are the chances that these kids at some point are going to want to stop marching into things with boxes on their heads and learn algebra?

Last summer at a school board meeting discussing whether to include materials from "ex-gays" and other nutty groups in the public school curricula, a board member said to MCPS staff: "I'd like to see if you guys can provide the answer on what criteria is being used to accept certain fact-sheets from certain organizations and reject certain other ones. What is the criteria for that?"

And ... well, several things struck me about the question, but the most important thing is that the answer should be quite clear. The school district should support education, and it should give preference to fact-sheets from organizations that represent highly educated people. It just seemed obvious to me. Uneducated people may make up a majority of the country, but when you come to making decisions for the school district, I think they should support ... education.

Is there something wrong with that reasoning?

There is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students. There is not even reliable data on how many people are unschooling, though many experts suggest the number is growing.

Here in Chicago, a group called the Northside Unschoolers has 100 families registered on its online list. There are similar organizations coast to coast, including the San Francisco Bay Unschooling Network, Unschoolers Unlimited in Guilford, Conn., and the Unschoolers of the Ozarks, serving Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, although accurate figures for the number of families they serve are hard to come by. Adherents say the rigidity of school-type settings and teacher-led instruction tend to stifle children’s natural curiosity, setting them up for life without a true love of learning.

“When you think about it, the way they do things in school is mostly for crowd control,” said Karen Tucker, a mother of three boys who is an unschooler in Siloam Springs, Ark., and belongs to the Unschoolers of the Ozarks. “We don’t duplicate the methods of school because we’ve rejected school.”

OK, I can see that. American public schools have become mainly crowd control. Raising the next generation of Budweiser customers doesn't really require a lot of self-discipline and work, but you do have to keep them off the streets until they're old enough to buy the stuff.

Now, I'm wondering, as you are, what kind of people these are. I have come to associate home-schooling with strict religious beliefs, where -- for instance in the case of the Southern Baptists -- people would keep their kids out of school so they are not exposed to worldly and corrupting influences.

But these people ... it reminds me of a couple I used to know who lived in a VW Microbus and camped up and down the coasts of California, surfing and letting their kids run around naked exploring the beach. Is that what we're looking at here? Neo-hippies?

Ah, OK, The Times has a paragraph on the next page about that...

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, unschoolers tend not to be religiously motivated. They simply do not approve of ordinary education, and have decided to rearrange their lives around letting their children explore their worlds, unencumbered by the usual pupil-teacher relationship.

And then another thing I wondered about...

Much of the basic mathematics that Ms. Walter’s daughters have learned so far, she said, sprung from their desire to calculate how much allowance money they would have to earn to buy dolls featured in their favorite toy catalog.

Each child gets a small weekly allowance that is deposited directly into her own bank account, then the adding and multiplying begins. The lessons have inadvertently, and painlessly, extended to taxes, shipping fees and postage, which she sees as another benefit of unschooling.

“It’s more real-world stuff,” Ms. Walter said. “How many kids get out of high school and don’t know how to balance a checkbook?”

Mmm, sure, and how many unschooled kids know how to find the area of a circle? How many of our future engineers are going to have been unschooled?

(By the way, it's not often you catch the NYT making a grammatical error like this, using "sprung" instead of "sprang" as the past tense of "spring".)

Finally:

Peter Kowalke, 27, was unschooled as a child and went on to earn a degree in journalism with a concentration in math three years ago from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

“You don’t know everything, and there are definite gaps in most unschoolers’ backgrounds, but you cover most of what you need,” he said. “And if you find out that you need something that you haven’t studied, you’ll have much more drive to actually learn it.”

Let's say this is the norm. Let's say that kids who stay home and play with boxes on their heads all day do just as well in college as kids who sit quietly at their desks and take notes and fill in their agenda and go home and do homework instead of playing, year after year after year.

You could draw one of two conclusions from that, I'd think. You could conclude that education of children is a waste of time, no value added. Maybe education is just -- what'd they call it? -- crowd control, a way to get kids out of the house so mom and dad can go to work.

Or you could conclude that American education is a waste of time. You can go online and see comparisons of the education levels, the test scores and achievement rankings of students in countries all over the world. And where do you figure we rank? Well, not at the bottom, unless you're just considering the developed world. No, the US typically ranks in the middle on most topics, below most of the European and Asian countries -- the Wikipedia chapter on the US says The United States ranks 24th out of 29 surveyed countries in the reading and science literacy as well as mathematical abilities of its high school students when compared with other developed nations.

So it may be that our schools have reached a point that it's just as good to stay home and play, and get serious when it comes time to go to college.

Of course, that's assuming that the example of Peter Kowalke, unschooled math-and-journalism-major, is representative. I'm guessing it's not.