Coming Out

That's right.  We've said it.  We are coming out of school and into a new way of thinking.  Our new obsession is how to best approach the education of our children.  We have been thinking about this off and on for years, but since we started preparations for homeschooling we have put a lot of serious thought into the subject.  We have made the decision to go the "unschooling" route.

What is unschooling, you may be asking?  This from Wikipedia:  

Unschooling is an educational method and philosophy that rejects compulsory school as a primary means for learning. Unschoolerslearn through their natural life experiences including play, game play, householdresponsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in maximizing the education of each unique child.

This post is not about bagging on the traditional school model.  It is about providing you with enough background information to understand where we are coming from so we can have an intelligent conversation about it if you are interested. And we hope you are.

When we started looking into different homeschooling philosophies this last summer we decided to think about what was most important to us.  Before studying the many philosophies out there, we came to the conclusion that the most important thing we wanted our kids to learn from school was how to learn.  We also wanted them to love learning.  If they have that we are confident they will succeed.

This has been a long journey.  Before I (Randy) gave "unschooling" any serious study I thought this approach was for lazy parents who were being irresponsible.  And with my superficial understanding of the philosophy, of course I would come to that conclusion.  However, I have had an about face.  

I am a very curious individual and I love learning.  Interestingly, I don't think I would have recognized this characteristic in myself until after leaving High School.  I am one who gets obsessed about something and wants to eat and drink it for a while.  There has been (and still exists in most cases) backcountry sledding, cello, statistics, reliability, math, physics, biology, shoe design, wood working, cooking, T'ai Chi, full body alignment, etc.  I have discovered that there simply isn't time to do everything and one has to learn how to prioritize their interests to accomplish the means that they are most interested in.  When someone forces me to learn something it turns sour quickly.  I have come to the realization that almost everything  I have learned that is worthwhile has happened outside of classes.  Don't get me wrong, classes have their place.  I am proud of the M.S. in statistics I earned at Iowa State University and it was probably the only setting where I could have learned what I did.  But the process would not have been worthwhile if I had not been personally invested.  I knew that it was up to me to succeed and I learned a lot because I was willing to do what it took to succeed.  For example, when I found I wasn't up to speed on matrices and linear algebra, I watched lectures from MIT on youtube (which are great, if you're really interested) and talked with other students about it. 

(Megan now)  From the beginning it was a matter of prayer.  I was trying to decide what curriculum to choose for my daughters.  When I first began, it was an overwhelming task.  I mean, that is a huge decision!!  I was confident that we would be guided to something good for our family.  But I kept thinking, "What I choose for them is probably going to impact their whole lives! Yikes!" (Too much like Satan's plan.)

It may have started about that same time that I came to the conclusion that every person has a unique education--even the kids that go to the same schools and have the same classes.  Not a great revelation, I admit, but I had never thought about it in this light. There were holes in my education that weren't there for others.  Yet on the other hand, I had learned some things that other people hadn't.  It was a great realization that there is no ONE curriculum that fits all.  And that was a relief--and a worry.  Am I going to have to taylor this to each child??  This was going to be tricky.  

I felt good about the curriculum we started with but I knew that I would learn a lot this first year and possibly need to make some changes as we went along.  So here's the first change.  Unschooling. Interestingly, I have noticed that the process I went through to educate myself about unschooling is the way this philosophy proposes we allow our children to learn.  When they are the ones that want to know, they will learn it. And they will own it. Which gives me confidence in our next step.  Much less tricky than trying to do it for them, but still a lot of responsibility on me to expose them to all kinds of things and help them learn to learn.

(Together again) Once we were excited enough about what we were learning and wanted to act on it, we started talking about it with others.  We quickly found that it's not easy to talk about this subject since our new ideas are the opposite of what our culture currently accepts as education.  So we have decided to share with you some of the best of what we have read and watched.  If you are interested or worried about our children, we would love to talk to you about it... after you've done your homework.

Some assumptions up front (the mathematician can't help it).  We believe these apply to children just as much as they do to you and me.

- We are naturally curious
- No one likes to be bored
- Real learning cannot be forced or coerced 
- We choose to do hard things that interest us

A Mathematician’s Lament, essay by Paul Lockhart http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

How this type of philosophy fared in Matamoros, Mexico http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

Sudbury Valley School (est. 1968) stuff.  To me (Randy), the Sudbury Valley School model is the most ideal schooling system I can imagine right now.
- http://www.sudval.com/05_articles.html (Most articles from “Articles on the Following Subjects” were helpful)
- Videos linked here were interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI&list=PL5ACC72C2C7100240 
- Daniel Greenberg on Sudbury Valley School http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um2c9o25nfM (it’s all good, but my favorite part is at about 28:00 - 32:00)
- Free at Last by Daniel Greenberg (book)

This study has been intertwined with an enlightening, fun, and fruitful gospel study on how our Father in Heaven teaches us.  How does he do it!? We encourage you to keep this and other gospel principles in mind as you read through these articles.  That's what we've been doing.  Trying to sift through the information to distinguish truth from error.  We began with the need to know something.

Are you still here?  This feels right for our family and we are going to go down this path.  We still don't know how it's going to work out exactly for us but we're excited to get started.  Heaven help us!