'Unschooling' lets children lead their own education

http://www.herald-review.com/articles/2004/12/05/news/local_news/1004373.txt

Herald & Review.com
Central Illinois
Saturday, December 4, 2004 11:49 PM CST

'Unschooling' lets children lead their own education

This article isn't new, but it quotes Richard Prystowsky, and because of that I'd like to have it here where others can find it.

Here's that part of the article, but the whole thing is brief and good.

Professor Richard Prystowsky, department chairman of math, science and engineering at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Calif., has written several articles on homeschooling, and he and his wife homeschooled their two younger children. Because they had chosen a family-centered lifestyle, neither felt comfortable in sending their children to strangers to be educated in what he calls an "impersonal" system.

"I am not opposed to public education," he said. "I am opposed to the systemic nature of public education. That's a crucial difference."

The current system of schooling, he said, developed with the industrial revolution and is too autocratic. If teachers and children had the freedom to be creative, to let students take the initiative, and if standardized tests and curriculum were abolished, public schools could better serve students' needs.

He's especially critical of segregating students by age and expecting small children to sit at desks and all learn the same thing.

"What in the world could be further from the real world?" he said. "People talk about socialization, but is that how you want to train somebody, segregate them by rank and age and pay attention to one thing for 42 minutes at a time? What professional do you know who spends his days like that?"

School reform, he said, must begin with completely changing the current system.

"Reform that does not address the systemic nature of the problem is not going to address the problem," Prystowsky said. "I want to see teachers in public education free and creative to do the work they need to do. I want to see students free to help direct their own learning path."

If all children weren't expected to learn the same material at the same rate and could instead pursue subjects they were truly interested in at their own pace, he said, there would be far fewer discipline problems.

"In my tradition, the Jewish tradition, we have an important teacher, Rabbi Hillel," Prystowsky said. "He used to teach that you begin with the learner, where the learner is. You go to the learner and you start (teaching) from there."

a new film, short and very sweet

Different Take Films

Human Development and Learning

This was posted to an unschooling list. The same principles holds throughout life!

In the course of researching an article about crawling (of all things), I can across some absolutely beautiful words by Dr. Alan Green, pediatrician:

"This is our goal: to provide a nurturing environment where a child can develop at his optimum pace. We don't want to hurry him; we do want to encourage him. We also want to identify anything that may be an obstacle in his path."

He then advises a concerned grandmother to "observe your grandson's spontaneous play. This will give you the best clues to the developmental tasks that are important for him to learn next. Children tend to be most excited about skills they are on the brink of mastering. If you try to engage him in an activity that is beneath his developmental level, he will quickly get bored. If you try to interest him in something that he is not yet ready for, he will become upset. (Note: babies don't tend to cry when they fail, but rather when the activity isn't at the right developmental level)...Provide situations where he can teach himself through playful exploration. Forced teaching hinders development."

(source: www.drgreene.org/body.cfm?id=21&action=detail&ref=354)

I know he wasn't talking about unschooling, but the words seem so, so applicable!

Jenny

New article on Fraser Insitute Report

The Fraser Institute: Home Schooling Improves Academic Performance and Reduces Impact of Socio-Economic Factors
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=777310

Home schooling appears to improve the academic performance of children from families with low levels of education, according to a report on home schooling released today by independent research organization The Fraser Institute.

This is my favorite part, though there are lots of good parts:

"Poorly educated parents who choose to teach their children at home produce better academic results for their children than public schools do. One study we reviewed found that students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentage points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels."

The report is from 2001 and can be dowloaded free or for $5 here:
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/commerce.web/publication_details.aspx?pubID=2592

"Un-School Days," in Tulsa KIds

http://www.tulsakids.com/editors-choice/2007/oct-1.html

Un-School Days
by Cindy Webb

For a kid who never went to school, Matt Moyer is doing pretty well. Matt is currently a junior at the University of Tulsa on a full academic scholarship (a result of earning a 33 on the ACT) and has already received an offer from TU for a scholarship to complete his master’s degree. His future plans include moving to Washington D.C. so he can pursue a career in computer security with an intelligence agency. “I’ll also finish a Ph.D. in computer science somewhere down the line,” says Matt.

What makes Matt’s story even more interesting is that, unlike other traditionally home-schooled children, Matt had no formal schooling at all until he was 16 years old and requested it. He then attended TCC taking algebra and calculus through a concurrent enrollment program offered to high school age students.

But just because Matt wasn’t formally schooled doesn’t mean he wasn’t educated. Matt’s parents chose a different educational approach known as “unschooling.” . . .

The article is thorough and interesting (seems to have been written by someone who really cared and understood), and there's an extensive book list and link to resources.

Great article; worth saving a link, and I hope they keep it there for a long time.

Added on Friday:
Here's a longer-term version with working links on all the resources and booklist. zamozo, thanks!! http://liberatedlearning.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/featuring-leslie-moyer/

Radio Free School

Radio Free School's blog is worth a bookmark of its own.
http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/

This week's news is an interview of Grace Llwellyn, by Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko who does some great interviews!

http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/2007/09/radio-free-school-interview-grace.html


And here's an older piece, in which someone else interviewed Beatrice herself. It's really great:

http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/2006/12/devil-in-details.html

The beginning....

How long have you been doing Radio Free School? How did you start doing it?

We're into our fifth consecutive year of Radio Free School. I had done a social justice and environmental spoken word show on campus/community radio for a few years, and love the medium; we thought that it would be fun to do a show with our kids. There isn't much radio featuring children, especially shows that have kids as primary agents; we applied for a half hour spot on CFMU and got accepted.

How many people are involve with each episode?

Sometimes as few as two people, interviewer and interviewee, sometimes more, like when we go to visit a science lab we take along some friends, there might be ten people or more. The way the show developed over time is that producing it became a family project primarily.

Could you talk about the distinction between Free/Un schooling and homeschooling, and I guess what the show is about; why you do it?

We started radio free school as a way to follow our childrens' interests and give them a forum to be heard. Since we weren't sending them to school, the show was a way to pursue anything and everything we wanted, very free form,while enhancing their experience of the world. This nicely aligned itself with the philosophy of unschooling which doesn't impose set courses to follow, but follows naturally the child's interest. It is a challenge as people like myself who grew up with schooling (my dad was a public school principal) to realize that we don't need schools as the model for learning,in fact, the way schools are structured they actually kill initiative and the joy of learning in many many children. My permanent record at highschool probably reflects my innate rebelliousness against arbitrary authority, and I really don't expect my kids to be forced into such a position.

Read the rest to learn more about this wonderful and long-running project.

Trashing Teens

Although this isn't a homeschooling article, it discusses schools and school-related problems in ways that will be very revealing and freeing for homeschoolers.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM (Hara Estroff Marano): Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20070302-000002&print=1