Joyce Fetteroll on
How Unschooling Works
Real learning is how they learned to speak English. If you can step back and look at it objectively, they don't consciously learn to speak. It's just there. They absorb how others use it. They play with it. They pick up a piece and use it as a tool to get what they need because it's better than the tools they had been using. (They realize "ook" gets them milk more efficiently than crying.) They never think, "Oh, English is useful. I need to practice and get better at it." They just use a variety of tools (including English) trying to get what they want and get better at the tools that work best as a side effect.
All the stuff they teach in school are tools that people might use to get what they want. In real life if someone is reading Charles Dickens and wants to know why society was like that, they'll read some history. Unfortunately schools do it backwards: giving kids the tools before they have the reasons or desire to use them, e.g., making them study Victorian England in case they want to understand Charles Dickens better. And because the tools are so dull when taken out of context, kids often turn away from the things the tools are good for.
School is like hammer lessons. It's teaching kids how to pound various size nails into different types of wood with a lot of different types of hammers. Over and over and over. Then moving onto saws. Then moving onto drills. The thought being that if they have the skills they can then be prepared to do anything.
But they're so bored with the tools and have such a bad taste in their mouths towards the tools from the years of coerced learning, that the feeling transfers to anything that even uses the tools.
Unschooling approaches learning the other way. It starts with bird houses (or stools or chunks of wood for whacking or toys for stuffed animals or whatever the child is reaching out wanting to learn) and kids learn how to use the tools as a side effect of doing something they want to do.
Science, math, history, literature, writing, reading are all tools.
Science isn't the important part. It's the questions that are important. Anyone can look up the answers. But asking the questions is what's important. Not "Why is the sky blue?" science questions. But any question. Wonder about things. Why do pigeons walk funny? Why did my friend do that to me? Why does the cat behave that way? Why do people believe that?
History is a tool for helping us understand why our favorite characters lived in the society they did, and why the things that happened to them happened.
Math is a tool for helping us to compare things to other things so we can make better decisions: This deal is better than that one. I need to save for 3 more weeks to get both toys. It's 11 AM and Daddy will be home at 6 so that's 7 more hours or 14 of my favorite half hour shows.
Literature is a tool for helping us answer the questions we have about humans. But without the questions, literature is just a bunch of words on paper.
Writing is a tool for putting our thoughts down on paper and potentially getting them into someone else's head. Without the need to communicate thoughts, there's no need to write.
Reading is a tool for getting information we need. It's one of many tools. It's a really useful tool but unfortunately it's worshiped at the expense of other tools. Not because reading is light years ahead of the other tools but because reading is the most efficient tool for mass education. Which unfortunately gets interpreted to mean it's the best tool. But the best tool is whatever matches a child's needs and learning style. Movies, videos, hands on, talking, nature, listening can all beat reading if they work better for the child.
Schooling works by pouring expertly selected bits of the world into a child. (Or trying to, anyway!)
Unschooling works by the child pulling in what he wants and needs. It works best by noticing what the child is asking for and helping him get it. It works best by running the world through their lives so they know what it's possible to be interested in.
A QUESTION:
how on earth do you unschool in Math and feel confident that they're learning everything?
By coming to the realization that real learning doesn't look like school learning. And that school learning looks as it does not because that's how the best learning looks but because of the compromises schools need to make in order to meet a goal that isn't providing the best learning for each child.
Real learning isn't linear. It isn't testable (in the one size fits all school way). It doesn't cover everything in the traditional way of thinking.
Real learning travels the child's path of interest, from one bit of information that interests them to the next. Real learning is self testing by how well it works in the situation the child needs it for. Real learning is about understanding enough to make something work.
Schools have different goals than real learning. And that's important to realize. They weren't designed to provide the best education for each student. They were designed 100 years ago to cheaply raise the general education level of the masses. Teachers and parents and educators 100 years later want schools to be more, want schools to provide what every child needs. But 1) real learning would be too expensive and 2) they don't trust learning that doesn't look like school learning because: they're trapped by never having experienced real learning on the level that unschoolers do, needing to prove learning is taking place (to parents and the state) so need a process that's testable, needing something that's "cheap" (for example 30 kids and only one adult, one set of information for every child.)
The fact is that learning the way schools teach is really hard. It's why it takes 12 years!
If kids were taught how to build with Legos the way schools teach everything, they'd first -- before kids had ever seen a Lego or even had the desire to build with them -- be made to memorize all the colors Legos come in, then the shapes, then ways Legos could be connected, then systematically go through architectural styles (since that would be practical knowledge that could be useful for future careers), engineering principles. Then the kids would be given plans and told to put the Legos together exactly according to the instructions. (Points off for any bricks out of place.) And then the kids who were truly gifted in sucking up this information would be allowed free access to Legos.
When your child was first acquiring language, did you worry that because he wanted to talk about balls and dinosaurs and favorite t-shirts that he would never be able to discuss how nuclear fission differs from other forms of radioactive decay?
Think about the non-academic interests he can speak knowledgeably about and how he acquired that knowledge. Did it come from building an abstract foundation of knowledge before beginning to tackle what he was interested in? Or did it come bit by bit picking up more information as he used what little information he had? Basically doing something before he understood it.
That's how unschooling works. Kids build up knowledge about what interests them. They have a vested interest in understanding what interests them.
(Unfortunately for new unschooling moms, what interests them usually doesn't look academic. It looks a lot like playing. (Play is how kids are created to learn!) Learning looks like video games and Harry Potter and making videos and reading and watching TV and playing with friends and pretend and chatting on line.) It's really only after kids are grown and following their interests into college and jobs that we can see how what they did led to where they got. But the ongoing process doesn't look at all like school.)
Kids don't learn to ride bikes by studying the physics of rotation. They learn by getting on and falling until they build up enough understanding to keep it upright. Even once they have it upright, they don't know everything. They know just enough to do what they want to do. As they want to do more, the acquire more information.
That's exactly how real learning works. Math -- real understanding of how numbers work -- comes from using numbers for personally meaningful uses. Games. Video games. Allowance. Art software. Decisions in the store. It takes way way fewer hours using math to understand it than in school. Schools present the abstract (which is testable) as a way to get kids to understand the underlying concepts (which is really hard to test). (And schools often fail, ending up with more people with math phobia than proficiency. And though schools take credit for the proficiency, they're no more responsible for math proficiency than art proficiency. Kids good at math are like kids good at art. But they are responsible for kids fearing math and hating art and history and science and reading.) The way schools teach everything is ass backwards and really hard which is why it takes so much work in schools.
Unfortunately there isn't a short cut from believing learning needs to look like school to believing that learning by doing is enough. And some people understand it's enough but still harbor feelings that it isn't enough. (The messages we pick up from society are pretty insidious and their roots go deep!) Read about the real learning unschooling kids are doing. Observe real learning in your own kid. (And take off the school glasses when you do it! 😉 Eventually you'll get it. ㈹
Joyce's original, two websites back (and not phone-friendly, but GREAT from a widescreen):
How unschooling works
More by Joyce Fetteroll
Pam Sorooshian, on How Unschooling Works
Several people with stories of
how learning works
(including Joyce)
