The First Three Minutes of Unschooling

Posted in DemEd in Real LifeParenting on Oct 26, 2009 - 12:06 AM

Even though we went to mediocre public schools and are the products of lovingly conventional parenting, my wife and I are trying to create our own family quite differently by embracing attachment parenting and, more recently, unschooling our children.

We want our two young boys to remain the wise, compassionate, and engaged souls they are today. We want them to avoid the coercive, limiting regime of schooling we experienced which might, as with us, render their learning passive and repress their will to freedom and self-expression.

At four years old, after weeks of talking over educational options, my oldest son Ezra decided he wanted to go to pre-school. After visiting several, we chose a Waldorf-inspired school in an adjacent town. His experience was ok, not great. He then enrolled in kindergarten at a nearby Waldorf grammar school. Fantastic program, great teachers. While sort of bored with the routine, Ezra seemed ok with it all. It would have been easy to say "mission accomplished!" and send him on through 8th grade. But something wasn't quite right.

We weren't convinced that his adapting well was a satisfactory indicator of a good educational fit for him at all, and for one subtle reason in particular. He never acted excited. The impassioned story-telling and giddy show-and-tell of his early learning experiences out of school were simply not part of his new learning life.

In fact he could usually only muster the enthusiasm to tell us that he "played." His sighing at being asked what he did at school started to sound foreboding, like somewhere inside his heart his inner fire hissed mournfully as it was being ever-so-slowly extinguished.

We simply had to help him keep his options open and his sense of freedom alive. So, my wife and I decided to open up the discussion about unschooling with him again.

Here's what happened:

I picked Ezra up from school on a bitter-cold March afternoon. In the car I asked him if he still thought he might want to come back this school for 1st grade.

"Yup!" he said, without hesitation. He wanted to play with his friends every day and play the recorder.

When I asked him if he ever thought he might like to home school (the term our family uses) he, just as convincingly as his previous "Yup!", gave an assertive "Nope."

Again, it would have been very easy to just leave it at that. He clearly wants to go to this school and things have been going pretty well so, if it ain't broke don't fix it! Case closed. Right? Not quite.

I pressed on, "Well, what kinds of things do you hope to learn about?"

Ezra is an avid and tenacious self-learner so he quickly rattled off a list of things he's interested in: space, ocean creatures, maps, making medicine from plants, taking photographs, trains, going to museums, etc. (These are all things he explores enthusiastically.)

Leveling with him, I said, "You know, it's probably not obvious from your perspective, but did you know that you won't be doing any of those things at school if you go back next year? They have already decided what you're going to do each day." He sat perfectly silent.

I continued, "If you get up in the morning and you really want to go to the ocean with your guidebook and see how many animals you can identify or walk down to the field to make some medicine, you won't be able to. But if you homeschool, you'll have lots of time to do things that really interest you, and mama and I will be able to help you out."

"Really?" he asked. "Really," I said.

Without missing a beat, Ezra blurted out, "I want to homeschool! And I want to learn about. . . ."

Now the next three minutes, which I consider to be his first three minutes as an unschooler (even though he had a few months of Waldorf kindergarten left), I simply sat in stunned silence. With his old enthusiasm renewed, he practically shouted out a list of all the things he wanted to learn about and the things he wanted to do.

In order to capture all his ideas, we immediately went and bought a special notebook. In that book we began to write down all the topics, issues, concepts, and activities he wants to explore (weather, salamanders, archery, piano, chemistry, pottery, carpentry, submarines . . .) as well as the questions that he comes up with (Why is the sky blue when you are on earth but black when you are in space? Does it ever snow in Africa? Why do you almost never see women driving dump trucks?).

Now he's been unschooling for nearly eight months and one of his favorite times of day is when I get home from work and he gets to tell me about what he's learned. Sometimes he can barely contain himself telling me about the science and music classes he's taking, the newest set of letters, words and numbers, AND the games he played with his friends.

Even though he knows we may never do everything we write down in our ideas and questions book, he knows that it's there if he wants to pursue it. It's his choice. And, he shows pride, freedom and power in what he is learning, which is a far cry from his quiet, tepid response he had to two years of school.

I'm so glad we decided to listen to what he wasn't saying, and take it seriously. If we had decided to appraise his success in school by his adeptness at conforming, he might not have had the opportunity to be so free and happy in his education.

Tags for this entry:
power, freedom, play, choice, curiosity, homeschooling and unschooling, happiness

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