School is the first institution, the landscape on which the young mind is taught not to trust itself, its family, its community to know what is important, or how to succeed or be productive or happy or acceptable. As an activist for social change and a fanatic for freedom and autonomy, of course unschooling was going to help define our approach to education.
But most folks seem to come to unschooling from the different direction. Exasperated people, fed up with the effect schools were having on their children or with the bending and molding and coercing of children into sturdy cogs in the machinery that keeps our socio-economy running like a fast train into god(ess)-knows-where. Unschooling is a model for raising children that turns many peoples perceptions up-side down...
So for me, unschooling is just that. NOT schooling. And schooling, well that mostly consists of training. i am not interested in a well-trained people. So, I figure, everything in the world that is not schooling is unschooling. Done. I don't care if folks make their children brush their teeth or limit sugar and whether or not this or that is unschooling. I am not worried about it because I think unschooling is better as a part of a worldview than part of an identity. I became tired of discussing unschooling almost as quickly as I tired of discussing potty-training, children's media, vegetables and meltdowns earlier in my parenting career. I just wanted to connect freedom loving parents.
I recently was gifted a book called, "Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-directed Learners." It would be more precise had it been titled the other way around, "Mentoring self-directed learners with project-based homeschooling." It is a simple book with a lot of good information. If your already comfortable with the concept of letting children direct their own education, you could probably scan over about 90% of the first chapters and 40% of the rest - all the parts designed to coax parents into letting go of control, handing over the power to the kids. The rest is well-written and easy to navigate...a super awesome reference book that you need not read from cover to cover. It is the first book in a very long time that fits seemlessly into my parenting and living style. Mentoring self-directed learners. I highly recommend it.
They even have a website and forums to join. I just did. I am jotting down notes about my daughter's compulsions, passions, daily activities, pondering how to use the information to understand my role in her education. She hasn't yet delved fully into any sort of project, but I am taking it slow. Working from the ground up, not pushing, practicing mindfulness, observing, and trusting that when I stop suggesting and stop bringing home activities and curricula for her to do, and start giving her my time and support with no strings attached, in whatever she does, it will come. I am sure it will. And I will write about it.
I once studied in a school in Oaxaca that was largely set up the same way. It was called Universidad de la Tierra, co-founded by Gustavo Esteva, a friend of Ivan Illich....
And I have already noticed myself change my approach. A friend of Ramona's came over to bake cookies. They made a couple mistakes that I saw coming from a miles away. But I didn't interrupt and I let them make their mistakes and they will probably never make those same mistakes again...because learning doesn't just happen in schools, it happens in life, the whole of society. We as a culture keep learning, or trying to learn finally, that really there often isn't a static right and wrong way to go about things. And I close with the opening paragraph of Illich's "Deschooling Society:"
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
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