By Joyce Fetteroll
There's a myth going around that schools are
a place to get a great education.
But it's a lie.
Schools are factories. They take in raw
materials (children), apply a standard process (curriculum) and turn out a
product (children prepared for college). And while many children do become
grade A products (by school standards), there are grade B, grade C, grade D,
grade F, kids sent to special education, kids sent to trade schools, and drop
outs.
Are schools turning out great products?
For some reason schools are judged by the
grade A products they turn out, not by all the
products. For some reason when a product is grade A, schools get the credit.
But when a product is of lower grade, the product is blamed. "Lazy."
"Not applying yourself." "Learning
disabled." "Stupid."
While it might make sense for a factory to
toss aside unusable raw materials, is that what we want for our kids?
Do we want the "great education"
process that's being applied?
Schools are judged by the colleges the
products are accepted by. Which feeds into the myth that what
we want is a great education so we can get a job that makes good money so we
can have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and be a "success".
Would it be better to have a husband who is
kind, happy at what he does but who doesn't have a "great education"
or a husband with a "great education" who is miserable at what he
does and is unkind?
Is "The American Dream" the best
goal?
How many people have done what they're
supposed to and have what they're supposed to get ... and they aren't happy?
How many people have done what they're supposed to who didn't get the great
education or the great job or the nice house in the nice neighborhood?
*Supposedly* success will lead to happiness.
But does it?
If we measure success by how close we are to
the American Dream, we need a lot of money and stuff to be happy. If we measure
success by how happy we are, we need a lot less money and stuff! We just need
to do what we love and love what we do. :-) And to do that we don't need a
"great education". We need access to what we love and the freedom to
pursue it.
Do we want our kids to be products?
When schools were first designed the idea
was to raise up the education level of the general masses.
At the time, the "masses" — which included immigrants and children
trapped in poverty because life was spent doing what was necessary to stay
alive — had a pretty low level of education so the goal wasn't a lofty one. The
goal wasn't to get kids into college. The goal was reading and arithmetic and
basic knowledge. In the East the goal was better factory workers. In the West,
where parents started schools, the goal was basic learning, but the goals were
still not lofty.
It's no coincidence that public schools use
the factory model since schools were begun at the time when factories were
doing amazing things: turning out uniform products *cheaply.* And that seemed
like a great idea: spend a little bit of money and move the level of the masses
up from illiterate to literate.
In the past 100 years the basic factory
model schools are built on hasn't changed, but the demands on schools have
changed tremendously. What worked to raise the masses up from illiteracy is
being asked to 1) raise the masses to college preparedness and 2) assume that
knowledge poured in is enough.
Since schools are based on factories, scrap
— products that aren't up to standards — is an
acceptable part of the process.
Educators (at least the good ones who aren't
jaded and burned out) don't want to treat kids like products. They don't want
there to be kids who are considered scrap. But educators are trapped by the
model they have to work with.
If kids are to be helped to be the best they
can be, they need to be treated as individuals with unique needs. But no matter
how great the desire a teacher may have to treat her students as individuals,
schools are designed to treat them as products on an assembly line. A 3rd grade
teacher *has* to apply the 3rd grade process to all the students. Her job is to
create a uniform product that is in the state the next assembly line worker
(the 4th grade teacher) needs it to be in. There is just little leeway for kids
who need to move or talk to learn, who will naturally read later, who are
passionate about dinosaurs and not how plants grow and so on and so on.
(The same applies to doing school at home
with a curriculum. All that does is move the factory home.)
If schooled kids and unschooled kids both
can go to college then there are factors other than the application of that
factory-school process that's getting them into college.
Those factors are: the kids themselves,
access to knowledge and the time to explore it.
100 years ago schools were a handy free
place for the general masses to get access to books and a learned person. 100
years ago we didn't have the internet, TV, libraries, cheap books and leisure
time to use all those. Life has changed, but schools have not.
The basic idea of unschooling
is that we learn what we need by using it. And that's exactly how kids learn to
speak English. Toddlers aren't trying to learn English. They're using a tool
(English) to get what they want: which might be juice or a hug or picked up to
see better. The English tool is more efficient than
other tools they've been using: pointing or crying or wishing. And because
English is more efficient, they use it more. And because they use it more, the
get better at it. Kids learn English (and everything else) as a *side effect*
of living and pursuing what they enjoy.
The theory of school is that someone can't
be an engineer until they know everything an engineer needs to know.
But that's not now people learn best.
Someone who loves to build things learns how to build things by doing what they
love: building things! And since they love to build, they'll be fascinated by
things that connect to building. They may be fascinated by history of building
or artistic design in building or how structures built with different materials
behave or the physics of balance and load distribution and so on and so on.
If we want to build a birdhouse, we don't
need to know everything there is to know about hammers beforehand. We just need
to want to build and we'll learn what we need to know about hammers by asking and
trying out and someone helping us pointing out things we don't know to try. (We
can also read books and watch TV shows and watch other people and pound nails
just for the fun of it.) That's unschooling.
The goal of unschooling
is helping kids be who they are. They will explore the parts of life that
fascinate them and, while they're exploring, they'll be learning what they need
to in order to explore further.
It's how joyful people would live their
lives if they could live them backwards: just doing the things that would lead
them to where they ended up and skipping all the boring stuff that they never
used and have forgotten.
The first tricky part about unschooling is that kids
explorations often don't look like learning. It looks like play and entertainment.
But play is how kids are designed to learn! That's why it's fun for them :-)
The second tricky part is figuring out what
our role as parents is. Our role is to walk by their sides as they explore, not
let them explore on their own. At times we need to hang back and be quiet so
they can have the time and freedom explore something that fascinates them. At
times we need to share their enjoyment and be with them (even if it's the umpty gajillionth rerun of Spongebob Squarepants ;-) At
times we need to point things out. At times we need to share the things we
love. At times we need to take them to places they wouldn't know to explore.
The best thing you can do for your child is
be fascinated by life :-) Get rid of that cloak of dullness that school draped
over everything. Relearn how to explore just for the sake of exploring not
because it's good for you or because it will be on the test or because it could
be good for you one day. Do what's fascinating right now.