Unschooling NYC

My kids sleep until they wake up.    They also go to bed when they choose, which sometimes means 1am.

This ability to follow their natural sleep patterns, and to sleep until they are rested is virtually unimaginable to much of the population.

It is also the basis of some criticism. (But what isn’t when it comes to unschooling?)   People ask me “But don’t they need to learn how to get up early?” or “Don’t they need to learn that you can’t always sleep till noon?”

Well, if life is an endless drudgery of things you don’t really want to do … Read more

Whenever I hear talks or read articles about “What Kids Need to Know” and establishing a curriculum to ensure every child has an identical base of general knowledge, I immediately think of tape recorders.

Some of you (many of you?) may have heard me tell this story before, but it bears repeating.

On the first day of my Senior year in high school in the second to the last period of the day I sat down in my assigned Senior English class.   My teacher was James Worley, who was somewhat infamous for his “strict” teaching and his eccentric clothing.   Eccentric … Read more

The first week of my first year in college, we read a book in our Humanities class about paradigms.  Don’t ask me what the title was, I don’t remember.   All I do remember is that it became a kind of running “joke” in our class that anytime we didn’t like the way something was structured, we’d talk about needing a new paradigm.   (Oh college Freshmen!  Aren’t they just hilarious?)

So it is with no small amount of – let’s call it sardonic chagrin – that I say to you now; We need a new paradigm.

Every day, and I do … Read more

It’s not the perfect analogy, of course.

For one thing, in NYC it’s like every kid comes from Districts 1 or 2 and therefore enters the Games voluntarily, having trained for years via the slightly (but only slightly) less intensive competition to get into the “best” grade schools & middle schools, topped off by up to a year of targeted Test Prep designed to propel them to the Capitol Promised Land of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Bard.  (There are others, but those are the three I’ve heard the most about in the past few months.)

So, unlike our hero & … Read more

Socialization.

We Americans seem to have a real fear of raising kids who are “anti-social”.   Ask any home educator the most common questions they get regarding homeschooling/unschooling and they will probably answer:  “But what about Math?” followed closely by “What about socialization?”

When we speak of socialization, what do we mean, really?  I’ve given this quite a bit of thought over the years as a result of being asked about it so often.

As I see it, socialization means knowing how to handle yourself around other people; in the subway, in a library, in a grocery store or at a … Read more

A friend of mine told me today that forcing kids to memorize times tables (or any mathematical equations)  is the equivalent of forcing someone to memorize an already completed crossword puzzle.   Not only is it excruciatingly boring, but it takes all the fun, all the discovery & creativity out of the process.

He’s right, of course.

The biggest crime committed in schools today under the guise of “learning” is forcing reading and math on kids.   Forcing them at ever younger ages to forgo their own interests and creativity for the drudgery of “have to’s”.    Reading and math are at the … Read more

Contrary to what many might believe, unschooling – that is, self-directed learning – is not a “school alternative” that exists from roughly ages 5-18 and then goes away much as school fades into the distance.  In fact, despite the best efforts of the compulsory school system, unschooling is never completely eradicated.   Self-directed learning is our natural state of being.

You might look at it as having three stages.

Stage One:  Birth-Age 5

We all participate in this phase of unschooling, although some of us don’t get to enjoy it for more than 2-3 years, what with compulsory schooling encroaching ever … Read more

The education debate makes for strange bedfellows.  It’s no secret that I’m pretty liberal in my political views, and in my mind the decision to unschool is a liberal one.  Radical = having roots or pertaining to the root, and that’s what unschooling is.   It goes right to the root of learning.     So imagine my surprise when I found out, after writing this blog for a while and coming in contact with other unschoolers who are not in New York City, that a lot of them are libertarians or conservatives and disagree with me on almost everything except education & … Read more

Schooling is all about the future.   At least, that’s what schools tell their students; you need to get good grades, do well on tests, get into good schools/universities, so that you can have a successful life in the future.

For most kids this translates as “Be miserable now so you can be happy in the future.”

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.   No matter what anyone tells you, there is no crystal ball into which we can look and see what jobs will be needed, even 10 years from now.  We cannot see what the technology will look like or … Read more

On the one hand you have Sugata Mitra, who in his Ted Prize Winning talk said that the school system as we know it is not broken, but obsolete; who demonstrated how kids in even the most abject poverty, with no access to “good schools” can, on their own and with no help from a teacher or any adult, master a computer and much of what it has to offer in just a few short months.

On the other hand you have proponents of the Common Core Standards.   These are the people like Sol Stern who believe that what has … Read more