What can we learn from unschooling?

I've been reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn. Why, you might ask, has a member of the public school establishment who has no children of his own, been reading a book advising teenagers to abandon the baggage, orthodoxy, and purported oppression of the US school system for a life of self-directed exploration?

First, I certainly agree with some of the arguments and premises of Llewellyn's sometimes eloquently written book. Much of what happens in many classrooms is busy-work. An unfortunate amount of my day is spent on classroom management. And yes, students are generally expected to follow a proscribed course of study. All of these certainly contribute to a sub-optimal institutional education experience.

Secondly, as a professional committed to teaching students to learn, I am interested in strategies from many schools of thought that might allow my students to: develop effective learning skills; enjoy a richer experience in my class; and have access to instruction that serves a variety of learners. Unlike many of TPTB (these are generally people who exist in the rarified air of state and federal bureaucracies), I recognize that I can't force individual students to learn whether he or she is in the top or bottom 20% or the ubiquitously unstimulated educational middle class. No amount of standardized testing or repetitive practice can result in true academic achievement. In this way, I agree with Llewellyn that a disturbing amount of time is allocated to memorizing facts that are either easily retrieved from countless databases or will be of little consequence one way or another.

Before I come across as advocating a damn the torpedoes, demolish the schools - they are beyond salvation and usefullness - philosophy, let me say that I believe Llewellyn largely comes across sounding like an angry, at best libertarian, at worst anarchist, who would leave young people to their own designs. Lets be realistic: For at least 150 years, the US public education system served to provide a populace that drove the most dynamic civilization on earth.

However, there is no doubt that an education system designed for an agrarian society that managed to adapt itself to the needs of an industrial age, is woefully equipped for the demands of an information age in which ideas and vision are the products that will enrich and employ American masses.

I want my classroom to be a place where students are encouraged to investigate ideas and encounter a wide variety of opportunities. I know that I will please few students all of the time, most some of the time, and, hopefully, only a small minority none of the time. My vision is that of an unschooled classroom in which teams of students explore divergent technology interests, and I can point them in the right direction. Nonetheless, the majority of my experience has shown me that teenagers collapse under the weight, burden, and opportunity of independence.

What, then, is the right balance of latitude, structure, and requirement to place upon students? What are the strategies of an unschooling philosophy that can work to energize and educate that preponderance of teenagers who would drown in unchecked freedom? What do we have to provide to students that they may become young adults who cherish spontaneous moments of learning?

Llewellyn's book is at its best when it presents ideas like the following:

"All the people we call geniuses are men and women who escaped having to put that curious, wondering child in themselves to sleep. Instead, they devoted their lives to equipping that child with the tools and equipment it needed to doing its playing on an adult level." - Barbara Sher.

It is entirely regrettable that teachers have been accomplices to removing wonder, excitement, and playfulness to learning. But it is clear to me that students are complicit in their own disenfranchisement in learning. None of this, however, precludes contemporary publicly funded education from becoming a vehicle to self discovery.





However, at the same time, the author mana

Up a 21st Century Creek Without a Paddle

What is a computer lab full of 25 students and free internet access from Comcast? A disaster. The science teacher and I have a fun, collaborative project and enthusiastic students. Yet, they can barely perform research and are completely unable to use online web page creation tools. It's cliche, but you get what you pay for. Comcast, thanks for nothing. Your generosity might actually turn students off to creative uses for technology.

Re-learning Learning

Through little fault of their own, students have come to believe that knowledge is something that they receive from teachers. Consider the following 7th grade student reflection on a recent animation project:

"I didn't like scratch all that much. If you messed up something and needed to go back and fix it, it would mess up the whole Scratch project. ... Also, if you had a question for Mr. Lavigne, he would be helping someone out so then you couldn't finish either." Somehow, this student has come to believe that: firstly, messing up is wrong and apparently disastrous. Secondly, the teacher is the person that fixes problems.

At first glance, this seems problematic and concerning to me as a teacher. However, continuing to read this reflection relieved some of my concerns: "At first, I thought Scratch was SO hard. I didn't think I was going to be able to do this Term 2 project. But, once I started on it, and learned new things about it, it got MUCH easier. It took less time to do things so I could get things done quicker."

This student, along with more than 200 others, used Scratch to animate and illustrate topics related to cyber-safety and digital citizenship. Initial reactions were often similar to that of the previous student:

"I think that Scratch is a cool program. I think that at first it was difficult, but the more we used it, it got easier. If I were to learn more about scratch [sic] I think that I would find someone who knew all about scratch and ask them to show me an example." - 6th grade student

"When I started this Scratch project [sic] I liked it even though I was having a little difficulty ... I think Scratch is very easy to learn, even if you don't know how to use computers. There are two things that I would do to learn more about Scratch. First, visit MIT. How cool would it be to meet the people who created this program." - 6th grade student

"I could learn more about scratch by ... going online at www.scratch.mit.edu. I could learn from this website because I could watch someone's and see how they did something that I didn't know. I have to admit that I got an idea how to use scratch from people's projects." - 6th grade student

Children understand how to learn; More importantly, they also understand their own individual learning preferences. Somehow, the U.S. education system has gotten in the way. Yes, some children will always be risk-averse. But our culture of everyone [succeeding] not failing has caused fear of failure to suppress natural learning instincts.

As teachers, one of our primary goals must be to get out of the way and allow learning to emerge even when the fear of failure arises.

The Thinking Teacher and FISA

As I listen to the President's ongoing protestations about Democratic attempts to "weaken" National Security, I realized we have a responsibility to ensure that our students don't succumb to Bush ideology which has disturbing parallels to propaganda that saw Hitler installed as Chancellor of Germany and the fall of it its democracy for nearly a half century. Am I ranting against conservative agenda in terms of National Security? If so, that is not my intent. I agree completely that government should be able to request wiretaps for suspected terrorists and their agents; What is so wrong with a secret court that is mandated to respond within 48 hours and empowered to grant retroactive wiretapping authority? The neocon aversion to any form of reasonable oversight is a transparent ploy to be able to act against unnamed enemies with impunity.

While carpooling this morning, a colleague raised an observation: What happens when, in five to ten years, new teachers were themselves educated under the auspices of NCLB? In our fanatic quest for universal mediocrity, will we create a generation of teachers who, themselves, lack the critical thinking skills to question important issues? If teachers become accomplices to enacting political-education objectives, who will be left to teach young people to question the motivations of those who are defining objectives? Students need to be taught more than facts; they need to be able to do more than perform skills in isolation: They need to be taught to question not only distant forms of authority (including the federal government), but also local forms present in the classroom including the text, the teacher, each other, and the omnipresent test.

If you teach critical thinking as part of your curriculum, what and how do you teach? How do students respond? Do you have any longitudinal data that shows how your students perform on standardized tests?