I’ve had a few requests for an entry about my education and my ideas about homeschooling. I think it’s going to take two entries to explain where I’m coming from and what I think about education for my children. Today, I’ll let you in on my personal path thus far. Here’s my schooling history in a nutshell:
-I went to public school kindergarten.
-After that year, my parents pulled me out and enrolled me in a private Montessori school.
-I attended that school from age six through ten, when I made the decision to go back to public school for fourth grade (I wanted to ride the school bus like other kids, and the Montessori community was beginning to seem a little too familiar, with the same small group of kids, year after year).
-I stayed in public school, earning excellent grades and a reputation as “the good student” until halfway through seventh grade, when I took my parents up on their standing offer to try homeschooling.
-During my first year of homeschooling, I just brought home the school textbooks and worked through all of them much faster than I could have at school.
-And then I read The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn and began unschooling in earnest. What’s unschooling? I’ll say more about that in a moment.
-When did I finish unschooling? I don’t know. I probably haven’t. I never earned a high school diploma or took the GED, yet I have been able to enroll in college and maintain a 4.0 GPA. Go figure.
Ah, unschooling. I can only paint a picture of my own unschooling education, but there are probably as many different brands of homeschooling and unschooling as there are homeschoolers and unschoolers. If you’re interested in sampling some of the myriad possibilities, The Teenage Liberation Handbook is a good place to start. In any case, here is what unschooling meant for me:
As an unschooler, my days were unregimented. There was no “classroom” in our house, and no school schedule. At the beginning of the traditional school year, I would submit a portfolio to the superintendent of the school district. The portfolio was created entirely by me (with my parents acting as editors and encouraging me toward well-roundedness) and consisted of my goals and plans for the year. At the end of the traditional school year, I would create another portfolio, trumpeting all of my accomplishments. Lest you get the wrong idea, my curriculum was not overseen by the superintendent. As far as I know, he/she never cracked the covers of all those portfolios, and I never received any feedback at all. I was pretty much off the grid.
Just a few of the things I talked about in those portfolios were…
…lengthy reading lists, and perhaps a few book reports.
…creating and running a cottage business with my sister, wholesaling homemade fairy crowns to children’s museums and toy stores.
…teaching music lessons to younger homeschoolers in the area, individually and in groups.
…apprenticing with a local artist (even tagging along when she was an artist-in-residence at local schools!)
…volunteering as a marine docent, teaching museum visitors about the marine ecosystem on the New Hampshire coast.
…touring the US and Europe with a world music ensemble.
I had a busy schedule of volunteer jobs, apprenticeships with experts in varying fields, music lessons, band rehearsals, field trips, and outdoor recreation. I was an avid correspondent, keeping in touch with over fifty pen-pals from around the world.
Most importantly, all of this was chosen and initiated by me. My parents and I believed that I already had the all of the foundation that I needed in order to continue my education on my own: excellent reading and writing skills, basic math, industriousness, and -- most importantly -- curiosity about the world. My parents had three basic rules about my education: 1) doing nothing was not an option; 2) that I keep an eye toward well-roundedness; and 3) that I create those portfolios to present to the school district twice a year. Other than that, I was free to do as I chose.
I wholeheartedly feel that unschooling saved my life and broadened my world. I have no regrets whatsoever about the unusual path that my education took. What are my thoughts and feelings about my kids’ education? Tune in next time!
6 comments:
What an amazing experience. I am so glad you posted this, and I can't wait to hear part 2!
I can't wait to hear part 2 also. I am just facinated by your experiences. Your post made me so excited that we've chosen to homeschool our kids. It's funny because I always thought that yes you could unschool in the younger years but wouldn't work in the later years. Obvously I am wrong. Thank you! I am going to send this link to my friend Tracy since she is unschooling and I think she'd be interested in this.
Your post was so inspirational. It's such a leap of faith to unschool the kids. I honestly have no idea where learning will take us, but it makes me feel better to know that it will be somewhere happy and successful. I'm just wondering at what age you started to be in charge of your own portfolio. I wonder if my 6 year old will be able to put something together for next year. :)
Thanks for sharing. I'll pass this on to my more skeptical confidants.
Tracy
The mother of this unschooler didn't want Haley and her siblings to spend 12 years or so waiting for their real lives to begin and in the process becoming accepting of the idea that someone else will decide what they needed to know, and when they knew enough about that thing, and then telling them how well they did in that area. Haley would have been the kid focused on the A's and not necessarily the learning itself. She would have seen organized education as the game it is and then figured out the best way to win at it: excellent grades and excellent behavior. Smart kids can get very lazy and prematurely cynical in this system.
Unschooling was a way in our family to get everyone used to listening to his or her own wise self early on instead of always waiting for permission/praise from some higher authority... including me.
We wanted the world to be bigger than school for our kids but knew many homeschooling parents whose aim was to make the world much smaller than school, very regimented, very narrow... an effort to protect their kids from certain ways of thinking and certain kinds of information.
We were so successful at our BigWorld project that all our kids left home for their solo adventures and walk-abouts earlier than most. We were surprised by this turn of events and missed them very much. We worried about them as they criss-crossed the planet, and held our breath waiting to hear from them on many occasions. They had their close scrapes and near misses, but they also had incredible confidence and sophisticated problem-solving skills.
So this restlessness/eagerness about the universe is something to be prepared for if you plan to encourage curiosity and actually put your kids in charge of satisfying it. It can get a bit scary for a mother when the kid actually decides to take her up on her offer to get out there and have a real life.
We're pleased with the results of the experiment. We never wonder whether Haley can take care of herself or whether she'll be able to pop to the top in the crunch. But best of all is the fact that she sees her education as the unending journey that it is.
Lizzy
PS: I think it's important to let a kid have the experience of school... especially the early stuff when it's mostly about learning how to negotiate life in a large group of peers. And I always think the kid should have the option of school if they want it. Haley had a lot of schooling experiences and made her own decisions knowing what the alternatives were.
I agree 100% with my mom's commentary here. Even before I became a mother myself, I've always been impressed when I look back on my childhood and teenage years and recall that my mom constantly encouraged me to stretch myself just a little bit beyond what I (and most likely she) felt prepared for...and guess what! It always turned out OK! Now that I'm a mom, I know that it couldn't have been easy for her to do, but I think that her strategy really helped me develop confidence in myself and my place in the world. I also think that it made our mother-daughter relationship stronger and gave it the longevity it has. When the time came to fly, I didn't really have anything to rebel against or break away from -- I was able to stride forward into my own life without the trauma, hurt, and breakdown of communication that so many families go through as their teenagers stake their claims on their own lives. I very much hope that I can find a similarly appropriate mix of unconditional love and nudging-out-of-the-nest as I parent Orrin.
Post a Comment