For the Martin family, the usual morning ritual of getting ready for school and onto the school bus, is a foreign concept.
They live as though school doesn’t exist. They’re at home all day, but they’re not being homeschooled. They’re being “unschooled.” There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.
“Just picture life without school. So, maybe a weekend. We wake up, and we have breakfast, and we just start pursuing what we’re interested in doing,” said Dayna Martin, a mother of four in Madison, N.H.
We unschooled our three children up until this year; it doesn’t seem to have harmed them. Our eldest is writing a PhD dissertation on music theory at the University of Michigan; our middle child graduated from college last spring and is working in academic administration; our youngest tired of our family’s precarious nomadism and asked to go to boarding school for the rest of high school, where she is thriving.
I just wish I could work with more of my undergraduate and grad students (and, in the past, especially seminarians) on a basis informed by unschooling. Follow your interests, consult me for advice and guidance, and when you’ve shown (by way of paper or examination or other accountable evidence) that you have attained competence/fluency in my subject, I give you a vote of confidence and off you go. Learning that grows out of genuine interest is much stronger, deeper, and long-lasting than knowledge that comes along the conveyor-belt of an instructor’s schedule and a curriculum’s exigencies.
There are lots of objections; I don’t have time to address all of them, and after twenty years of unschooling I’m tired of trying. But the peculiar modern notion that the right way to encourage learning is by segregating people by age into cohorts who all study the same topics at the same time at the same pace seems quite counterintuitive to me.
It seems that the “unschooling” is still homeschooling with a twist. As for the lax parenting I think that takes it way too far. Only doing what I want to do is not a feature of anybodies life and is a flat out wrong way to train a child to think.
Isn’t this also called the Montessori Method?
A discussion on this came up at another blog. The consensus from those who do unschool or know other parents who do is that the report was very slanted and not an accurate piece. The idea is not to stop schooling but to expand it beyond the classroom.
i don’t know. seems to me that children are very narrow minded with their interests and they need to try new things. they need structure even as lax as society has gotten with social graces there are still confines that they need to know about.
kids need boundaries and structure in order to develop. I am pretty certain the societal effects of unschooling, if implemented widely, would be disastrous.
Ha- “live in the now.” Rabbits and jellyfish “live in the now.” What makes people unique is that we can consider the past and the future.
Interesting. It takes the worldview that humans are inherently good, that all of their desires are inherently good, and that denying oneself is inherently bad. I would think this perception would have a large impact on one’s theology. Who needs a savior if you are already all good? Is there any sin that wants for redemption (perhaps only the “sin” of keeping your children from their momentary desires and urges?) I would be curious to know how these children grow up and what their relationship to God is/becomes? Seems desperately unfair to the children to me, as learning to deny yourself is a critical skill in character formation.
It sounds as though the case for unschooling was poorly presented, for which I am sorry; both unschoolers and their critics do better when a case is carefully made than when they trade in stereotypes, assumptions, and premature conclusions.
I have never heard it referred to as “unschooling” but I am assuming that “unschooling” and the Montessori method are similar or synonymous. If I am inaccurately conflating those two concepts, I apologize.
It has been my experience in the workplace that students who come from this Montessori model have a very hard time adjusting to the corporate or factory model of employment. This method may work for them if they are going on to higher education or research jobs or other fields where they are not being closely supervised. However, I believe the Montessori method does not train students very well for workforce jobs where they are expected to punch a clock and have various tasks assigned to them with deadlines. I have noticed they also tend to lack the social skills necessary to be a team player or to perform well on tasks that do not interest them.