·      

An Inquiry Into Unschooling In Our Home

This is part of a qualitative inquiry I did last year on unschooling, as it applies to our family!  

I'll post more interesting stuff next time!  (I think!)

O and J are making paper train tracks.  J has superior cutting skills, so he takes on that job. O supervises and explains how he wants the paper train tracks to look.

Inquiry question:

    How will Julian’s focus and understanding grow without the use of shaming methods to manipulate his behavior and by allowing him to be in control of his learning and time?

Sub-Questions:

·      What will he decide to focus on?

·      What will his learning look like?

·      How deep will his understanding be, and will it be measurable?

·      Will I be able to step back fully and trust him to learn on his own?

Once I developed my wonderings, I began voraciously reading homeschool accounts by homeschooling parents and students.  I learned many different ways people homeschool, and how their methods worked, or didn’t, for them and their children.  These sources included books by homeschooling families, books about homeschooling with anecdotes from homeschooling parents and children, and blogs about homeschooling written by both parents and children. 

Through my readings, I quickly learned how diverse the homeschooling population is.  Some essentially have “school at home” while others are devout “unschoolers” – a term coined by John Holt in the 1970’s in an attempt to describe “learning and teaching which does not in any way resemble school and which does not necessarily have to take place in one’s home”  (Farenga, 2003, p. 61).  John Holt was at first a proponent of school reform, but after many years of frustration with a public education system that seemed to only give lip service to what he considered to be positive change, he decided the best way for children to learn would be in the home, no matter how good the schools were.   

I have been encouraged when reading anything by Holt, as this inquiry is, in a way, an inquiry into unschooling as it applies to our family, and specifically to Julian.  But there were some materials that I read that didn’t support what I was attempting.  As I read Looking Backwards: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother by Joyce Swann (2011), I honestly sank deeper into my chair and took faster and deeper breaths out of shame for wanting to let my kids learn whatever they wanted.  Swann begins by chronicling how she began homeschooling her oldest child, developing her own curriculum at first, with her children eventually using schools that gave accreditations and degrees through correspondence distance learning.  All of her children had Masters degrees by age 16.  Their family basically did school at home.  Swann (2011, p. 3) says, “If you are going to have a successful homeschool, you must understand that without clearly defined school hours, your school will fall short.”  However, it is assured and broad statements like these that have always been troubling to me.  That was true for her family’s homeschooling, but when I thought about changing our homeschooling style to something rigid and mandatory, it sounded dreadful, like everyday would be a chore to get through. 

Most of the homeschooling books I read didn’t specifically espouse a structured homeschooling environment, but described different environments that many homeschooling families find to be effective.  Some of these books include Homeschooling 101: The Essential Handbook by Mark and Christine Field, The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When it’s Right for Your Family by Lisa Rivero, and The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 88 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices by Linda Dobson.  

Closer to the other end of the spectrum (if there is a homeschooling spectrum) might be someone like Penelope Trunk.  On her homeschooling blog - http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/ - she often talks about how her kids do almost whatever they want, and how great it is for them.  On one of her most recent posts, High Achievers Have lots of Playtime, Trunk (2013) states

So often people tell me that I need to force my kids to learn stuff they hate and I need to force my kids to sit still for long periods because this is what adult life requires. But I think it's the opposite. You need to make sure your kids have enough play time so they grow up and are early risers because they know the importance of having time for self-expression.

The idea that children (and even adults) need time to play to be healthy, productive members of any society isn’t new.  In the article The Play Deficit: Children Today Are Cossetted and Pressured in Equal Measure. Without the Freedom to Play They Will Never Grow Up in Aeon Magazine, an online publication, Peter Gray – a psychologist and research professor at Boston College - cites Karl Groos, a noted philosopher.  In 1901, after writing The Play of Animals, Groos wrote The Play of Man, documenting how humans play and how it is vital to their proper development.  Groos talked about the role adults should take in children’s play saying, “Adults have three important tasks in this direction which are imperative – namely, general incitation to play, encouragement of what is good and useful, and discouragement of injurious and improper forms of play,” (1901, p. 402). 

Essentially, he says to mind your children.  They should be playing, but they are still very young and will need some reminders of what is ethical in their society.  Gray (2013) declares, “Play deprivation is bad for children. Among other things, it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and loss of creativity. It’s time to end the experiment” (The Play Deficit).

While it was encouraging to read Groos and Gray’s work, I really loved reading the blog I’m Unschooled.  Yes, I Can Write.  The author, Idzie Desmarais, is a self-declared “unschooling vegetarian animistic green-anarchist feminist hippie child.” She grew up being unschooled and is now a well-spoken, intelligent, informed young adult who finds satisfaction following her passions.  

Some of the literature supporting our homeschooling life discusses unschooling within a school setting.  Examples are in the towns of Reggio Emilia, Italy and Matamoros, Mexico.  These cases will be examined further in the Trusting the Child section of this paper.