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.





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