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 The national Common Core initiative and a bevy of
standardized tests have drawn an awful lot of doubting eyes toward American
education. While Common Core at its heart seems a fine idea, implementation has
proved troublesome in many states. Here in New York, where significant improvements in standardized test scores from
September through June result in financial gain for schools, fudged scores and
student manipulation spur militant reactions from both parents and teachers.
The increase in national oversight has also added fuel to
the alternative education movement, particularly homeschooling and unschooling.
The question remains, though: are these relatively extreme ideas viable
gateways for bypassing constrictive schools or pipe-dream solutions at best?
While the public is mostly familiar with homeschooling,
unschooling might be a foreign concept to many. As the term implies, unschooled
kids do exactly what they please. Unschooled kids are taught by one or both
parents, like homeschooling, except that unschooling focuses on life skills and
a "learning to learn" approach. If a student's passion is to play video games
in their room for eight hours a day for an entire year, they do just that.
There is (and should be) no logical ceiling to unschooling: the idea is that an
individual child knows what they need to learn and when, and that traditional
schooling exhausts this curiosity through forced activities. In the case of the
year-long video game binge, unschooling parents would contend that it's natural
and that many wildly successful entrepreneurs went through identical periods.
Unschooling is one of the more radical approaches to
bypassing a U.S. higher education system that seems to lose adherents every
year. With more and more bright students coming up with million-dollar ideas
and securing venture capital from their dorm rooms, college is no longer a fish-in-the-barrel
on the road to financial success. Sure, unschooled kids can take the SATs and
attend college on their own wits, but why would they want to reintegrate with
the system their parents worked so hard to avoid?
As radical as unschooling seems, if combined with a parent
knowledgeable in information seeking and evaluation it might be a superior
option to traditional schooling, especially regarding STEM education. An
engineer friend of mine once told me that a good engineering program doesn't
teach to facts and figures but instead teaches how to think critically and
analytically when facing any problem. How feasible is it to expect a
traditional school, with national and state testing standards, to achieve the
same?
Unschooling is about teaching kids to teach themselves, and
search for information that interests them. The goal is to prepare students for
the jobs of tomorrow, not the jobs of today as traditional schools do. Critics
of unschooling level complaints similar to those traditionally pinned on
homeschooling. Undersocialization, underskilled parents, and inherently lazy
kids are frequently cited criticisms. Then again, there's a variance in defining
success. Unschoolers draw on stories of brilliant, unconventional dropouts like
Steve Jobs, but is every student cut out for an entrepreneurial future?
Conversely, many unschooled and homeschooled kids do attend college, in which
the unschool-to-school transition is difficult but not impossible.
My daughter attends an independent school by necessity, and
there are the same pros and cons as in any comparison of education systems. I
both love and loathe the freedom: the school can do whatever it pleases
academically (so that you'd better hope it's run by qualified individuals, not
business owners), but it's also sorely lacking in quality extracurriculars like
those found in publicly funded schools.* Perhaps the unschooling debate is
essentially similar: a student better hope their parents know what they're
doing, or they'll be left unsocialized and sorely lacking in life skills. Then
again, there are some terrible public school teachers out there. And maybe
parents really are the best candidates to foster their child's curiosity,
whether at school, home, or both.
*Although they did host a kindergarten engineering
challenge: the old "see-how-many-pennies-you-can-float-in-your-paper-boat-design"
one.
Image credit: Nicholas Scalice
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