Here's a rerun from about a year and a half ago, in which I was responding to an interesting meditation on the nature of homeschooling, and the labels attached to it, by Shaun at Red Sea Homeschool. I stumbled on it today, and it seemed worth resurrecting, particularly in light of a conversation about homeschooled high-schoolers over at 4-Real Learning.
My current high-schooler has, in the last year, turned a significant corner in her schooling, a corner on the far side of which she's discovered that she has serious academic interests. The desire to pursue them, and to get herself to a place where she can pursue them even more seriously, has transformed her into a person who does, in fact, get up and do math without having to be told. Her program right now doesn't look much like what people think of as unschooling: she does a fairly formal complement of standard high-school courses, with textbooks, and she takes Latin III on the campus of the college where her father teaches. The textbooks, however, are a function of her strong desire to teach herself things, rather than being taught: she'd rather work her way through the U.S. lit text, for example, with a schedule of review questions and writing assignments, than 1) be taught directly by me, or 2) be turned loose in the library to read whatever and do artistic responses in papier-mache. Two years ago I'd have laid money on her going for the papier-mache approach, but no longer.
Also, it's worth noting that with my two younger children both schooling, and close enough in age that they can do more or less the same things at the same time, I do more actual teaching, as of a class, than I formerly did. I find that with those two, the structure of a regular routine, and of having to sit and listen sometimes, provides a necessary discipline. This year we appear far more "schooly" than we've ever yet done, in six-plus years of homeschooling. Be that as it may . . .
UTOPIA AND UNSCHOOLING
Years ago in graduate school, I took a course in utopics: the study of utopias. I had just come from a program in which we read, in the good old-fashioned way, actual literature; now I found myself asking -- not aloud, because I didn't want to look like a hayseed -- "Who is this Derrida of whom you speak?" In the utopics course, we did read some literature: The Emerald City of Oz, Herland, and that one by Edward Bellamy where they wear paper clothes. But the literature merely served as lens-fodder, meaning that for us, anyway, it existed only to be read through something. What we read it all through was a book whose title was Utopics, and whose subtitle was a lengthy skein of jargon consisting of words like "play" and "spaces" all twisted up together into something which looked as though it ought to make sense.
This was pretty much the situation from cover to cover, and as I plowed through, I kept thinking, "Mr. Strunk, where are you? Mr. White, phone home!" So for that reason, and also because it's been about seventeen years since I read the book and I don't know where it is now, you will understand that I can't now tell you a whole lot about what I read. But one idea has stayed with me: that a utopia exists in the gap -- another favorite theory word -- between whatever it's reacting against and the ideology it's doomed to become.
Sooooo . . . well, history of course is rife with examples. In late-eighteenth-century France, for instance, utopia exists somewhere between the first peasant picking up a pike and the first downstroke of the guillotine. In early twenty-first-century America, utopia exists somewhere between the moment when you say, "Down with the judgmental narrow-minded Pharisees of the religious right," and the moment when you say, oh, I don't know, something of a settled moral nature about people who like NASCAR and shop at Wal-Mart.
In meditating tonight on this reflection on homeschooling and what to call it, exactly, I somehow thought about that utopics course, which just goes to show you that you should never, ever, ever ask whether you're going to use some component of your education in later life. If you have to ask, the answer is almost certainly going to be yes. Anyway. Shaun makes the point, and a good one it is, that it's somewhat disingenuous, maybe, to use a term like "unschooling" as if it described something other than what homeschooling already is, ie learning outside the "box" of the school model. She writes:
Really there are two questions here: is there such a thing as "unschooling," distinct from plain old "homeschooling,"(whatever that means); and well, what should we call what we do, anyway?
In answer to the second question, I'd say to call what we do, whatever that is, by the name that's the easiest for the general population to digest. By now most people have at least heard of homeschooling, if they don't already know people doing it. Unless they're prepared to ask what that means, and then to stand there all afternoon while you unravel the mysteries for them, they're going to fill in the blank however they want anyhow. So what if you're standing there with your nose-piercing and your green hair and your kids named Horizon and Unconditional Amnesty; if you say "homeschooler," and the other person's mind automatically goes, "Mrs. Fundo-wacko-right-o-matic," there is not a thing you can do about it, even if you do have all day.
The business about "unschooling" is harder. Over at Saint Daniel's the "message" under the blog title is a string of words which seemed to me, at the time I wrote it, to describe what we do and are, and the last one is "unschooly." Visitors to the blog have suggested, with varying degrees of charity, that this is perhaps not the right word. One person advocated "non-schooly" -- un? non? and the difference is? And now I ask myself: why do I identify us that way at all?
Looking at Shaun's thumbnail description of her own homeschool, I'm struck with the thought that actually, most of the time, we're a lot less unschooly even than that. We've never dropped English. Ever. We have put off long division when it wasn't working out for us, and come back to it later when it was, but it's a little harder to ditch algebra I, though let me tell you, some of us seriously feel like it. And yet . . . and yet . . . we're not really, at heart, all that schooly, either. We do what sit-down work we need to. We recognize, with some reluctance, that there are some things which children, especially high-schoolers, have to do, whether it delights them or not. I'm not comfortable with saying to my 9th grader, "Okay, forget algebra. Do it when you feel like it." I love her, I trust her completely in many ways, but I do not have any faith whatsoever that she would wake up any morning between now and April 13, 2035, and say, "Hey! I want to do some algebra now!" So we have a certain amount of nose-holding and, some days, a lot of tears and ranting and vows that she will never go to college. At the same time, we're really not part of the school paradigm, which means that we're free to say, well, this approach is certainly not working (right now ours seems not to be), and, how can algebra be made better for this child, so that she can learn it? It's not a question of "do this or fail," but of what will make learning happen for a given child. And we also know that if we haven't cracked algebra by the end of this year, we can just take a break, then pick it up and finish it next year, and then go on from there. The point is not that she "passes" so that she can move up the ladder a rung; the point is that she learns something. How much of it she needs to learn depends on what she needs it for: to score decently on the SATs? to become a mechanical engineer? Do we need total math immersion, or do we just need to get by, focusing instead on things that matter more to us in the long run?
(One thing I'm seeing here, after a day in which she was trying to finish five pages by tomorrow, when she meets with her tutor, is that algebra is starting to rule our lives, in a bad way, in the same way that it ruled mine. Think "living nightmare." Actually, she doesn't have it quite so badly, because the wall she thinks she's up against can be moved a lot more easily than a school wall . . .and we're blessed to have a tutor who's also a homeschooling mother, and gets this)
Homeschool high school presents its own challenges to natures which tend towards the unstructured and "flow-y" -- how do you accomplish what you need to in high school and still color outside the lines? -- but otherwise our life tends to look a lot like what Shaun describes: some workbooks, some structured stuff, a lot of doing what kids are interested in, a lot of moving at their speeds, a lot of learning-rich play. We don't have a schoolroom. We don't sit at desks. We don't use a structured, sequenced curriculum, at least not religiously. Most tellingly, I don't teach. And yet I can't quite call us "unschoolers." There is a philosophy attached to that word, and as unschooly as we might seem to some of our friends, we don't entirely subscribe.
Here, I think, is where the idea of utopia comes in. Let's see if I can manage to make this sound as intelligent and eureka-ish as (trust me) it seemed in my mind half an hour ago when I first sat down to write it. The point -- well, the point I remember, of many -- of this utopics book I read so long ago was that the revolutionary principles which define a utopia themselves inevitably harden over time into ideology. Utopias begin as revolts against a prevailing ideology, as breaks for freedom -- but, well, you've read Animal Farm, right? And Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, which aren't explicitly about utopian impulses, except as the impulse towards adultery is a kind of utopian desire. And you know what they say about your spouse, versus the person you leave him for. You love 80% of your spouse's character, but the other 20% you can't stand, and this bothers you. You want there to be nothing you don't love about the person you love. So, on meeting someone who's the opposite of the 20% you can't stand, you leave your husband and take up with Mr. 20%, only to discover that that 20% is the ONLY part of him you can bear.
What does this have to do with homeschooling? Um. Let me retrace my steps here, while you meditate for a moment on the question of why I never got a Ph.d. Okay, the "hardening into ideology" thing, and unschooling: unschooling as a philosophy is an ideology. It may or may not be ideologically connected to certain political philosophies, or parenting philosophies, or spiritual philosophies, but by itself it constitutes an ideology: a philosophy with a set of marching orders. In this way it's no different from the classical method, or the Charlotte Mason approach, or Waldorf education, or any number of other educational philosophies from which unschooling purports to differ. This is only significant because unschoolers -- and I'm thinking here of people who identify themselves unambivalently as unschoolers, not merely as "unschooly" -- seem to regard their position as a revolution against structure, and method, and authority. They are not the people with schoolrooms. They are not the people with school time. They are not the people who tell their kids how or what to learn.
The only problem with this is that it is a method, with structure and authority (use "John Holt" five times in conversation . . . ), as well as a set of underlying assumptions about learning which are as settled and rigid in their own way as the classical method is. The assumption that children will learn what they need to know, and self-regulate seems fairly unshakeable, as does the assumption that all resources are more or less equal in value (the Star Wars video game is no less valuable a learning tool than the living book). I'm not necessarily criticizing these assumptions, or unschooling in general -- I'm pretty sympathetic to these leanings. At the same time, I guess I meet revolution with skepticism. And I'm still trying to tease out an answer to the question Shaun raises.
At the end of the day, which it really is here, and tomorrow is another one, I think that what's happening in lots of our households is a rich learning lifestyle that happens somewhere in the tension between the formal school paradigm and the formal paradigm of unschooling. I'm also deeply skeptical of phrases like "holding everything in tension," which in some contexts just means suspending your moral judgment. But here I think it works. Most of us, in this conversation, anyway, are trying to do something outside the lines of the school model, because we recognize its flaws and limitations, and we want better for our children. We don't want simply to replicate an institutional experience in our own homes. Life is bigger than that, and we want our children out in it, learning from it. Part of that "outsider" impulse is, I think, an instinctive distrust of educational philosophies which seek to sum up how "children" learn, as if "children" were a gigantic, monochromatic colloidal mass with one shared brain. I love Charlotte Mason, for example, but when she starts talking about what's good for "children" I tend to glaze over. Which children are these, who like doing two history tracks -- and only two, the same two all year -- at the same time? I like a lot about the classical method, but again, which children are these who aren't ready to compose original pieces of writing before the age of 11? And I adore so much in unschooling -- but which children are these who know what they want to do in life, and are willing to do even algebra on their own terms in order to get there? Not mine. And what mother is this, who believes that her son will tear himself away from a video game of his own free will? Not even. "Video games" and "free will" don't even belong in the same sentence, in my experience.
All this is a very, very long way of saying that whatever it is, whatever you call it, seems to happen in the uncharted spaces between the ideological islands. I can't even call it "the way children learn," because there are no "children." There's this child, and this child, and this child, and this child. And this mother, and this mother, and this mother. So maybe language fails us in the end, at least collective language meant to explain and prescribe. So, I don't know, the next time somebody asks you where your child goes to school, you just start miming five people dissecting owl pellets, or a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano exploding, or a sentence diagram, or a Latin noun being declined. And maybe next time they won't ask.
(and I realize that I haven't managed actually to answer Shaun's question. See "why I don't have a Ph.d," above. I now can't remember whether I had an identifiable answer in mind when I started -- if I did, it's gone now. Well, okay: that we're really "on" when the philosophy fades into the background, and we're focused on the child. And that if there's such a thing as "unschooling," it lies in the willingness to put aside a cherished philosophy because it doesn't fit a given child, rather than trying to make the child fit the framework).
This was pretty much the situation from cover to cover, and as I plowed through, I kept thinking, "Mr. Strunk, where are you? Mr. White, phone home!" So for that reason, and also because it's been about seventeen years since I read the book and I don't know where it is now, you will understand that I can't now tell you a whole lot about what I read. But one idea has stayed with me: that a utopia exists in the gap -- another favorite theory word -- between whatever it's reacting against and the ideology it's doomed to become.
Sooooo . . . well, history of course is rife with examples. In late-eighteenth-century France, for instance, utopia exists somewhere between the first peasant picking up a pike and the first downstroke of the guillotine. In early twenty-first-century America, utopia exists somewhere between the moment when you say, "Down with the judgmental narrow-minded Pharisees of the religious right," and the moment when you say, oh, I don't know, something of a settled moral nature about people who like NASCAR and shop at Wal-Mart.
In meditating tonight on this reflection on homeschooling and what to call it, exactly, I somehow thought about that utopics course, which just goes to show you that you should never, ever, ever ask whether you're going to use some component of your education in later life. If you have to ask, the answer is almost certainly going to be yes. Anyway. Shaun makes the point, and a good one it is, that it's somewhat disingenuous, maybe, to use a term like "unschooling" as if it described something other than what homeschooling already is, ie learning outside the "box" of the school model. She writes:
What got me thinking about this was reading Melissa Wiley’s many wise thoughts on how her own family has moved towards a more unschool-y style. She wrote:
Unschooling is outside school, bigger than school. It doesn’t need to be the ideal best-possible version of school. It is something broader, richer, more rife with possibilities.
And I could not help but think, But how is that different from homeschooling? Homeschooling for us has been about drawing comic books and writing songs as history “narrations”; sitting down at the piano before breakfast, and then again before lunch, and then again after dinner; dropping English as a subject and picking up Chinese instead (and soon, German too!); dumping long division for a while and playing with protractors and compasses. And of course it has been chin puppets and orchestra concerts and sisters playing Harry Potter for an entire afternoon. It’s full of surprising connections, giving Victoria opportunity to say “just like Mozart!” or for Violet to draw stories weaving together the fiction and history she’s reading with her love of manga.
But no one would mistake us for unschoolers. I mean, you could say we are child-led learners, in that I follow my children’s interests at the pace they seem to want to go (though I find I tend to underestimate that). But how do you unschool Chinese? And if sitting down with a computer program or a workbook and doing the sometimes tedious work of memorizing characters is unschooling, then what is not unschooling?
Really there are two questions here: is there such a thing as "unschooling," distinct from plain old "homeschooling,"(whatever that means); and well, what should we call what we do, anyway?
In answer to the second question, I'd say to call what we do, whatever that is, by the name that's the easiest for the general population to digest. By now most people have at least heard of homeschooling, if they don't already know people doing it. Unless they're prepared to ask what that means, and then to stand there all afternoon while you unravel the mysteries for them, they're going to fill in the blank however they want anyhow. So what if you're standing there with your nose-piercing and your green hair and your kids named Horizon and Unconditional Amnesty; if you say "homeschooler," and the other person's mind automatically goes, "Mrs. Fundo-wacko-right-o-matic," there is not a thing you can do about it, even if you do have all day.
The business about "unschooling" is harder. Over at Saint Daniel's the "message" under the blog title is a string of words which seemed to me, at the time I wrote it, to describe what we do and are, and the last one is "unschooly." Visitors to the blog have suggested, with varying degrees of charity, that this is perhaps not the right word. One person advocated "non-schooly" -- un? non? and the difference is? And now I ask myself: why do I identify us that way at all?
Looking at Shaun's thumbnail description of her own homeschool, I'm struck with the thought that actually, most of the time, we're a lot less unschooly even than that. We've never dropped English. Ever. We have put off long division when it wasn't working out for us, and come back to it later when it was, but it's a little harder to ditch algebra I, though let me tell you, some of us seriously feel like it. And yet . . . and yet . . . we're not really, at heart, all that schooly, either. We do what sit-down work we need to. We recognize, with some reluctance, that there are some things which children, especially high-schoolers, have to do, whether it delights them or not. I'm not comfortable with saying to my 9th grader, "Okay, forget algebra. Do it when you feel like it." I love her, I trust her completely in many ways, but I do not have any faith whatsoever that she would wake up any morning between now and April 13, 2035, and say, "Hey! I want to do some algebra now!" So we have a certain amount of nose-holding and, some days, a lot of tears and ranting and vows that she will never go to college. At the same time, we're really not part of the school paradigm, which means that we're free to say, well, this approach is certainly not working (right now ours seems not to be), and, how can algebra be made better for this child, so that she can learn it? It's not a question of "do this or fail," but of what will make learning happen for a given child. And we also know that if we haven't cracked algebra by the end of this year, we can just take a break, then pick it up and finish it next year, and then go on from there. The point is not that she "passes" so that she can move up the ladder a rung; the point is that she learns something. How much of it she needs to learn depends on what she needs it for: to score decently on the SATs? to become a mechanical engineer? Do we need total math immersion, or do we just need to get by, focusing instead on things that matter more to us in the long run?
(One thing I'm seeing here, after a day in which she was trying to finish five pages by tomorrow, when she meets with her tutor, is that algebra is starting to rule our lives, in a bad way, in the same way that it ruled mine. Think "living nightmare." Actually, she doesn't have it quite so badly, because the wall she thinks she's up against can be moved a lot more easily than a school wall . . .and we're blessed to have a tutor who's also a homeschooling mother, and gets this)
Homeschool high school presents its own challenges to natures which tend towards the unstructured and "flow-y" -- how do you accomplish what you need to in high school and still color outside the lines? -- but otherwise our life tends to look a lot like what Shaun describes: some workbooks, some structured stuff, a lot of doing what kids are interested in, a lot of moving at their speeds, a lot of learning-rich play. We don't have a schoolroom. We don't sit at desks. We don't use a structured, sequenced curriculum, at least not religiously. Most tellingly, I don't teach. And yet I can't quite call us "unschoolers." There is a philosophy attached to that word, and as unschooly as we might seem to some of our friends, we don't entirely subscribe.
Here, I think, is where the idea of utopia comes in. Let's see if I can manage to make this sound as intelligent and eureka-ish as (trust me) it seemed in my mind half an hour ago when I first sat down to write it. The point -- well, the point I remember, of many -- of this utopics book I read so long ago was that the revolutionary principles which define a utopia themselves inevitably harden over time into ideology. Utopias begin as revolts against a prevailing ideology, as breaks for freedom -- but, well, you've read Animal Farm, right? And Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, which aren't explicitly about utopian impulses, except as the impulse towards adultery is a kind of utopian desire. And you know what they say about your spouse, versus the person you leave him for. You love 80% of your spouse's character, but the other 20% you can't stand, and this bothers you. You want there to be nothing you don't love about the person you love. So, on meeting someone who's the opposite of the 20% you can't stand, you leave your husband and take up with Mr. 20%, only to discover that that 20% is the ONLY part of him you can bear.
What does this have to do with homeschooling? Um. Let me retrace my steps here, while you meditate for a moment on the question of why I never got a Ph.d. Okay, the "hardening into ideology" thing, and unschooling: unschooling as a philosophy is an ideology. It may or may not be ideologically connected to certain political philosophies, or parenting philosophies, or spiritual philosophies, but by itself it constitutes an ideology: a philosophy with a set of marching orders. In this way it's no different from the classical method, or the Charlotte Mason approach, or Waldorf education, or any number of other educational philosophies from which unschooling purports to differ. This is only significant because unschoolers -- and I'm thinking here of people who identify themselves unambivalently as unschoolers, not merely as "unschooly" -- seem to regard their position as a revolution against structure, and method, and authority. They are not the people with schoolrooms. They are not the people with school time. They are not the people who tell their kids how or what to learn.
The only problem with this is that it is a method, with structure and authority (use "John Holt" five times in conversation . . . ), as well as a set of underlying assumptions about learning which are as settled and rigid in their own way as the classical method is. The assumption that children will learn what they need to know, and self-regulate seems fairly unshakeable, as does the assumption that all resources are more or less equal in value (the Star Wars video game is no less valuable a learning tool than the living book). I'm not necessarily criticizing these assumptions, or unschooling in general -- I'm pretty sympathetic to these leanings. At the same time, I guess I meet revolution with skepticism. And I'm still trying to tease out an answer to the question Shaun raises.
At the end of the day, which it really is here, and tomorrow is another one, I think that what's happening in lots of our households is a rich learning lifestyle that happens somewhere in the tension between the formal school paradigm and the formal paradigm of unschooling. I'm also deeply skeptical of phrases like "holding everything in tension," which in some contexts just means suspending your moral judgment. But here I think it works. Most of us, in this conversation, anyway, are trying to do something outside the lines of the school model, because we recognize its flaws and limitations, and we want better for our children. We don't want simply to replicate an institutional experience in our own homes. Life is bigger than that, and we want our children out in it, learning from it. Part of that "outsider" impulse is, I think, an instinctive distrust of educational philosophies which seek to sum up how "children" learn, as if "children" were a gigantic, monochromatic colloidal mass with one shared brain. I love Charlotte Mason, for example, but when she starts talking about what's good for "children" I tend to glaze over. Which children are these, who like doing two history tracks -- and only two, the same two all year -- at the same time? I like a lot about the classical method, but again, which children are these who aren't ready to compose original pieces of writing before the age of 11? And I adore so much in unschooling -- but which children are these who know what they want to do in life, and are willing to do even algebra on their own terms in order to get there? Not mine. And what mother is this, who believes that her son will tear himself away from a video game of his own free will? Not even. "Video games" and "free will" don't even belong in the same sentence, in my experience.
All this is a very, very long way of saying that whatever it is, whatever you call it, seems to happen in the uncharted spaces between the ideological islands. I can't even call it "the way children learn," because there are no "children." There's this child, and this child, and this child, and this child. And this mother, and this mother, and this mother. So maybe language fails us in the end, at least collective language meant to explain and prescribe. So, I don't know, the next time somebody asks you where your child goes to school, you just start miming five people dissecting owl pellets, or a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano exploding, or a sentence diagram, or a Latin noun being declined. And maybe next time they won't ask.
(and I realize that I haven't managed actually to answer Shaun's question. See "why I don't have a Ph.d," above. I now can't remember whether I had an identifiable answer in mind when I started -- if I did, it's gone now. Well, okay: that we're really "on" when the philosophy fades into the background, and we're focused on the child. And that if there's such a thing as "unschooling," it lies in the willingness to put aside a cherished philosophy because it doesn't fit a given child, rather than trying to make the child fit the framework).
Reposted from April 13, 2008
More good stuff from Shaun, whom I have not visited enough in recent months: Homeschooling Is Optional
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2 comments:
Thanks for a chance to revisit this (your) essay, now that we're a year further in! All that you say about utopia and revolution makes total sense (I do have a PhD, so I can say that. (-; )
I too am skeptical of anything that smacks of revolution. Maybe it's because I was born listening to "Won't Get Fooled Again" at deafening volumes?
Thanks again for the meditation that sparked it. Nice to put that theory to work in some real-life way . . .
It was interesting to me, too, to go back and reread what I'd written -- since then, we've moved to a different state, everyone's older, I have more children schooling at once, and the whole landscape is different. Funnily enough, my most "unschooly" child -- my oldest -- looks on the surface like the least-"unschooled" child of the lot. She works and works and works at serious academic stuff. And yet it's almost all self-motivated, and aimed at a goal which she's chosen, all of which is what motivates her to begin with.
On the one hand, it feels like a bit of an abdication to say to a teenager, "Well, it's your life." But it is their life, and I figure that this stage is all about both preparing for, in terms of honing advanced skills, and also discerning a way to travel. And I just kind of stand by and hand her the books or read the essays or write down the grade she got on the history test she gave herself. It's all kind of fascinating to be a part of.
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