Unschool started in academia in the 70's as a rebellion against traditional classroom models. Back in the day it was called the "open classroom". Basically, academics questioned why kids were learning about trees from a text book in darkish classroom when directly outside the door there was:
a. real. live. tree.
With leaves that changed by season.
Providing shelter to birds, squirrels and bugs.
A living textbook in the truest sense.
It was a good question, that.
In fact, the best educators have been asking it for hundreds of years. Charlotte Mason understood, and wrote about it at the beginning of the industrial revolution in England. She waged war against "twaddle" (worthless worksheets and dry textbooks). She insisted that kids could learn from quality literature, and nature, and real life.
Unschooling is Charlotte Mason on steroids. It's child-led, interest driven learning that happens in the natural unfolding of life. It explodes the dichotomy of school vs. life. And in Derridian style unschoolers thumb their nose at production driven modalities of modernist education. Organic. Wholistic. Authentic. Diverse.
And the me who spent those years at CU and ensconced Boulder -life rejoices. Amen. Amen.
Insert my own personal schizophrenia.
Right-brained me and left-brained me wage war. Because, while making homemade chicken noodle soup with my children, my left-brained self is screaming, "Real math means memorizing multiplication tables. And cooking with kids is messy." The left-brained me longs to have a worksheet I can correct in the ink of a red ball-point pen.
Discipline.
Creativity.
Linear.
Inter-woven.
Curriculum based.
Interest driven.
The war wages. I cannot decide. And for unschooling to work you must trust it. Leap over the edge of the waterfall and let it immerse you. And the left-brained me cannot make that leap.
So I'm trying to find the middle ground. I ask:
"Will this worksheet help them learn?"
"Can it reasonably be taught another way?"
"If they fill in the blank correctly, yet cannot explain the concept have they learned?"
"Is it worth the battle?"
"Does it preserve or grow my relationship with my children?"
And those questions help to keep me on track.
It's the dance, after all.
Creative expression within structure.
1 comment:
I like the thought of unschool, yes me the engineer who loves order and worksheets and black and white. It is a romantic idea that we can learn everything we need to know about life when we research what we are passionate about at the time. But when do you learn about hard work and doing stuff you don't really like and calculus? I would guess it's a harder philosophy when the children get older. Interesting model and maybe for some kids.
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