"Unschooling"

I have decided to start a separate blog to focus specifically on school -related things in an effort to document the great homeschooling adventure that our family is embarking on. Other family and friends have their "project blogs." I guess this is mine.

As a preface to this blog, I just want to say a few things. The first item of business is an explanation of why it is that our family has made this monumental decision. If you would have asked me two years ago if I was interested in homeschooling, I would have chuckled and said, "Are you crazy!?" (There are a few of my friends who can actually attest to this.) While homeschooling seemed like a nice idea for some, I would have never pinned myself as the homeschooler. Homeschooling seemed overwhelming, time consuming, and it seemed to me that homeschooled children were a little, well, unique, to say it politely. I'm sure many of you reading this have similar conceptions of homeschooling. In other words, what I am trying to say, is that unlike some, I was struck over the head with the idea of homeschooling rather than intending to do it all along. And how is it that homeschooling took such a hold on me, you might ask? Well, it is very simple actually. Two years ago, when we arrived in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, we became acquainted with an exceptional homeschooling family. Namely, the Tom and Brenda Lamont family--I hope you don't mind me giving your names. Shortly after arriving there, Brenda informed me that she had prayed our family to Pennsylvania. Perhaps. But as I am fond of saying, the Lord is the great multi-tasker. I believe He had many reasons for taking us east for those amazing eleven months. One of those reasons, I am now convinced, was to inspire us to home school. One day, as I was talking with Brenda, her homeschooling came up. I asked her what made her decide to home school? She proceeded to unfold to me her story. While she talked, I had one of those experiences where your whole body goes quite tingly. Suddenly, homeschooling seemed not only different, but strangely intriguing, and quite frankly, somewhat enchanting. At that time, I wouldn't have called myself converted to homeschooling, but I was taken with the idea of engaging my whole family in some kind of similar learning adventure. I had always dreamed of having the means to take my children on sight to study historical things. For instance, while I was in college, I went on a tour called the Mormon-America Travel Study Program. We studied American History, Church History, and American Literature right where they took place. We read the Gettysburg Address in the Peach Orchard, prayed with Joseph in the Sacred Grove, read Emily Dickinson in the splendor of her garden, and discussed Emerson and Thoreau whole floating in Walden Pond. It was an indescribable experience. I always thought I would want to do those things with my children, only, I figured I would do it in conjunction with their schooling. Now the idea of it being their schooling started to creep into my mind.
Over time, the thoughts and feelings I was having evolved into more advanced study and prayer. Being the theoretically minded person that I am, (My graduate work was in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology after all.) I determined to start studying some of the prominent homeschooling theories before becoming too committed to the idea. The more I studied; however, the more I fell in love with homeschooling theoretically. It all sounded so quaint to me. I knew actually accomplishing it practically was a different can of worms though. And then of course, there was the matter of introducing the idea to Nicholas, who already thinks that I am too liberal and free-minded in my parenting practices. While I initially studied on my own, and kept my thoughts and feelings to myself, eventually I did broach the subject with him. As I expected, he bristled at the idea. But after I pressured him to take me seriously, and make it a matter of prayer and fasting, he gradually began to come around.
After helping him be open to the idea of homeschoolimg, the question of "how" we would do it obviously came up. Although most of the homeschoolers I talked to recommended just diving in, for me, "how" had to be theoretically grounded. So of course, we had to decide which homeschooling theory, or theories would provide that grounding. Nick's natural inclination was to stick close to a curriculum, and the homeschooling theory he originally most aligned himself with was the classical homeschooling approach which uses the Socratic method and focuses on the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. On the back of the famous classical homeschooling book The Well Trained Mind, it reads: this method will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education. (Sounds like Nicholas, doesn't it--discipline, uprightness, march march march! His theme song for life and parenting is, after all, the song George Banks sings in Mary Poppins--

"The Life I Lead"

I feel a surge of deep satisfaction
Much as a king, astride his noble steed
When I return from daily strife, to heart and wife
How pleasant is the life I lead!

I run my home, precisely on schedule
At 6:01, I march through my door
My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due, at 6:02
Consistent is the life I lead!

It's grand to be an Englishman in 1910
King Edward's on the throne;
It's the age of men
I'm the lord of my castle
The sov'reign, the liege!
I treat my subjects: servants, children, wife
With a firm but gentle hand
Noblesse oblige!

It's 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion
Are scrubbed and tubbed, and adequately fed
And so I'll pat them on the head
And send them off to bed
Ah! Lordly is the life I lead! (This is his favorite verse.)

Forgive me for including the lengthy lyrics here, but I just couldn't help it. What I really wish is that I was including a sound bite of Nick singing them!) Anyway, nothing could be further from my homeschooling world. In fact, the homeschooling theory that reached out to me most was John Holt's unschooling theory."Unschooling" is a type of homeschooling that doesn't use a fixed curriculum. "It is grounded in doing real things, not because we hope they will be good for us, but because they are intrinsically fascinating." Some refer to it as delight-directed learning. When I read Holt's book Teach Your Own, or Mary Griffith's The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child's Classroom, I was hooked. And let me just put in a note here on behalf of my mother. I guess there was some news program recently on unschooling. I didn't see it, but my mother said to me one day: "I saw something on the news the other night that just blew me away. It's some new trend called Unschooling. What is the world coming too." She then proceeded to tell me about the program and was shocked to hear I would call myself an unschooler. The show sounded like very radical unschooling to me, or perhaps I am just on the other end of the spectrum. At any rate, I just wanted to say that for me unschooling does not mean that parents can never use a curriculum, or that parents can never teach anything to their children, or that children should learn about life entirely on their own without the help and guidance of their parents. Unschooling does not mean that parents give up active participation in the education and development of their children and simply hope that something good will happen. And foremost, unschooling is not unparenting; freedom to learn is not license to do whatever you want as a child. Perhaps I have misread the theory, I don't know. But for me, unschooling is about learning to love learning for the sake of learning, and learning by really studying something, not simply memorizing facts to be regurgitated at a later date on an exam. It's learning about both things that truly fascinate you, and things that are necessary and good to know for real life, mental development, and career orientation. Anyhow, enough about unschooling. Getting back to our story, the long and the short of it is that Nick and I's differences naturally lead to a finding of common ground and I am quite pleased with the blend of structured teaching for basic language and mathematics that we have developed, as well as the "world as your classroom" approach that I use for Science, Geography, etc. All of it is theoretical still, but I think successfully putting it into practice will be one of my life's greatest accomplishments.