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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Unschooling is a radical branch of home-schooling where kids control what and when they learn -- free of teachers, schedules and tests. Unschoolers say it's intellectually empowering. Critics call it irresponsible.
Oct 3, 2005 | Celine Joiris has never failed a test. Never eaten crappy cafeteria food. Never been picked last during gym. It's not that she's a supernaturally lucky 16-year-old -- she's simply never been to school. "I like the idea of studying, but school is just like incarceration," she explains. Her brother Julian, 17, agrees. "My approach is, planning, schedules -- OK. Tests, OK. College, OK. Whatever. But I don't really want to think much about it," he shrugs. "I can't tell you where I'll be in two years."
What's that? A smart 17-year-old without a plan? A bright, middle-class teenager who's not stressing out about SATs and admissions essays? In an era when college prep begins in preschool and adolescents need Palm Pilots to manage their after-school activities, such nonchalance has the power to shock. What about all those stories about home-schooled kids dominating national spelling bees and hogging spots at Harvard? Surely "whatever" is not in their vocabulary.
But Celine and Julian Joiris are not your typical home-schoolers -- they are unschoolers, followers of a radical approach to education that rejects not just the routines of traditional school, but the authoritative ideology it represents. Unschoolers make up approximately 5 to 10 percent of all home-schoolers. They learn without teachers, curricula or exams; rather, their whole lives are laboratories in which skills and smarts are acquired piecemeal, through casual interaction with the world around them.
In the last decade, the number of Americans who home-school has surged at a rate of 29 percent a year, to include more than 1.1 million adherents nationwide, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But as their ranks have swelled and the movement has become more accepted, some of the contrarian ideals that once made it revolutionary have been diluted. Though there remain some real religious and ideological differences between traditional students and home-schoolers, on a practical level, at least, life for many home-schoolers bears a similarity to that of their public school counterparts. They work in online classes and with prepackaged curricula. They have tutors and field trips. They compete with one another over who has the most impressive internship and collect offers of admission from elite universities.
"When you buy a curriculum and set your kids down five days a week, except in the summer, all you're doing is playing school at home," says Sandra Dodd, a mother of three unschooled children from Albuquerque, N.M., and an outspoken unschooling advocate. "Most home-schoolers, especially Christian home-schoolers, believe that schools are too liberal and too lax," she explains. "On the other hand, unschoolers believe that schools are too inflexible. Our objections to school are 180 degrees apart from their objections. And so we are not only not on the same team, but school is actually closer to what they're doing than we are."
Since 1960, when A.S. Neill published "Summerhill," a chronicle of life at his "free-learning" British boarding school, and American educational reformer John Holt coined the phrase "un-schooling" in his books of the late 1970s, the philosophy has emerged as the rebellious twin of the home-schooling movement. While paired in many people's minds, the two have distinct agendas and ideologies. "It is a distinction that is as old as the home-school movement itself, and is an artifact of the fact the movement grew out of both the alternative school movement of the 1970s and the Christian day school movement," explains Mitchell Stevens, professor of humanities and social sciences at New York University, and author of a definitive study of contemporary home-schooling. "And those distinctions reflect a larger tension in American culture in differences as to how we should raise our kids."
