Unschooling and Afterschooling

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Unschooling and Afterschooling
by Amy Zahler, Afterschoolers Staff

An afterschooler can never really be an unschooler--the whole concept of unschooling insists that there be no teacher/student interaction and as afterschoolers our kids are immersed in teacher/student relations all day. Still, there are many aspects of uschooling that I find work well with afterschooling. Above all, I want to make sure learning never becomes a drag, and that's why I turn to unschooling for much of my inspiration.

What is “unschooling”?

The concept of unschooling is that people learn as a matter of course in life and formal schooling puts unnatural limitations and expectations on learning. There are no boundaries between math and science and art and history in the real world and there shouldn’t be arbitrary boundaries placed there in the name of Teaching.

Think of the things you like to do best. Do you do them because someone told you that they were the best things to do, or because they interested you and you enjoyed doing them? Once you found something that interested you, I’ll bet you did your best to find out everything you could about it: you Googled it; you looked for books or videos about it; you looked for workshops and presentations and just folks who knew about it who might be willing to teach you something. You didn’t stop your quilting project to think, “Oh, this is spatial awareness. I shall increase that area of knowledge in my brain.” You didn’t ponder, “Hmm...have I been working on too much art recently with regard to this quilting thing? Should I switch to the history of quilts so I can get a better perspective, or perhaps I should work through a text book on math before laying out my geometric pattern or buying some cloth.” All those things may have been involved in your project, and you may have learned new things or sharpened skills while working on your project, but you didn’t break them out into separate “learning experiences”.

Also, do you like any of one of your favorite things because someone at some point in time said, “Sit down and do this now.” Maybe there are one or two that you like despite being told to do them, but I doubt there are any you like because you were told to do them. Choice is important in education: if a child doesn’t choose to learn he or she won’t no matter how much you sit down with that child and make them look at something. Provide opportunity and let opportunities grow.

Unschooling says that if you’re doing it, you’re learning. And “it” is life.

Each and every thing you or your child does teaches something. A child learns from a video game or a television show as well as from a book or a worksheet. And once curiosity is peaked, the student takes it upon him or herself to learn a LOT about that thing. He or she picks up many facts that are likely to simply roll off the brain when presented in a dry textbook formula.

Before I go on, I should state up front that even if I could homeschool, I would not be a pure unschooler. It simply does not fit with my personal style—I would be uneasy if my child had not learned to read by the end of a first grade time period. However, I do try to follow a number of concepts from unschooling in the course of our afterschooling, and I want to make sure caregivers are aware of unschooling concepts when making education choices.

Four basic unschooling principles

1. Let the child lead. You may have a great unit study on clouds planned, but if your child goes out and finds a really pretty bug, ditch the clouds and look at the bug. Observe that bug. Suggest that there are places to learn more about bugs, perhaps. But whatever you do, don’t say, “Great bug. Now if you’ll remember, we’re out here to study CLOUDS if you don’t mind.” Heh—maybe that’s why I have such a hard time staying on topic in this forum: some of my best thoughts are tangents!

2. “Strew” interesting items or experiences where your child will find them and let your child explore them. If you live in a sterile box, there won’t be any triggers for the child’s imagination (or yours). Strewing means to make items or experiences accessible to the students: leave a book or magazine related to a subject of interest out where your child will find it or walk past an interesting store with your child on your way somewhere else. Have real, working items of interest around your house that your student can pick up and examine at his or her leisure: Don’t just read about the cotton trade but find a cotton boll and leave it by the computer. Can you separate the seed? Plant the seed? Make thread from the cotton? Try new things and use experiences to lead to other topics.

3. You are all learning together. It’s not about Teacher and Student and it’s not about the parent blindly following the child. Yes, I know I said the child should lead, but that doesn’t mean that the parent abdicates his or her role as a parent. Unschooling isn’t unparenting. Unschooling is, in some ways, a lot of work for a parent. It’s looking at things together and thinking of ways to get to answers that work in a given context. And there is a lot of letting go—remember that your child is a separate human being from you and has different tastes from you. If he loves history and you won’t talk to him about anything but math, he’s not going to come away from your afterschooling sessions with a love for any subject. Learn to accept your child’s interests and learn to explain why you believe certain topics are important. It will work out better for you both in the end.

4. Children will learn things when they are ready to learn them. (This one is hardest for me and one with which I can’t quite come to terms.) If your child doesn’t learn to read until he or she is high school age, that doesn’t mean that they are substandard humans. It means that they had a great deal of things to learn before their minds were ready to learn to read. Provide opportunity, and then step back. The most important lesson I take from this is not to worry if my child doesn’t master all of the state-mandated benchmarks in a year. He is ahead in some and may be behind in some. Ultimately, the goal of education is to become an educated person, not “smart for a second-grader” or an “above average middle school student”. Step back and allow the big picture to form. There are no “academic measures” for unschooling. That’s the point of unschooling—getting away from academic measures and labels. The unschooling parent wants his or her child to be the best person that child can be, not the best student. The unschooling parent notes successes and builds on successes—there is no failure, only things that are not right for that person in that moment.

A mistaken impression that many people have is that an unschooling parent is completely hands off.

In fact, unschooling can be a lot of work for a parent! There is no standard unschooling curriculum and no outside authority that will guide you along. A parent has to take a step back and start listening to the child—really listening, not just hearing words and putting the parental meaning on them. From there a parent has to be willing to act. Don’t get stressed if you can’t find the right thing to strew in front of your child at that exact moment, but don’t fall so far back that you don’t do anything. It’s a real balancing act!

I found a wonderful story on Sandra Dodd’s unschooling website (http://sandradodd.com/strew/liammap ) about a parent who didn’t care for science fiction agreeing to sit down and read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card because it was her son’s favorite book. The son had had a bad experience with school and didn’t want to read anything vaguely schoolish and mom was worried. The mother read the foreword to the book, in which Card makes several references to the Civil War trilogy The Army of the Potomac by Bruce Catton. It just so happened that those books were in the attic from the mom’s youth. Out they come and down they go to the computer desk.... Son picks them up... The result: The son created a very detailed unit study on strategy and tactics using a variety of sources, all from one science fiction book.

I know the “linkage” system works—it’s how I became the owner of a website for afterschoolers, for instance! One investigation about education lead to another about school reform and another about homeschooling until my search and understanding morphed into something quite different from what I started with. Unschooling is the ultimate in topic surfing!

When I was a kid, though, I sometimes didn’t know how to pursue a topic that interested me.

I had many interests that I did not follow up on because I simply didn’t know how and it was easier for me to go onto something else rather than try to figure it out. My parents were of the opinion that if something really interested me I’d figure out how to find out more (perhaps they were the ultimate unschooling afterschoolers). In many cases they were right, but I can see where more strewing would have been of great benefit to me. They didn’t have to sign me up for 100 classes, but putting out or pointing me to some information or resource to find out more about a topic I expressed interest in would have helped immensely.

Strewing is a huge part of unschooling. Even strewing textbooks is fair game—Sandra Dodd makes a point of saying how she enjoyed filling in workbooks when she was young as long as she didn’t “have to”. I think that’s a key to all academic enrichment exercises I want to pursue with my son: I want them to stay fun. Learning really is fun—it’s the drudgery of school that isn’t fun. And I don’t mean repetition, either: repeating multiplication tables can be fun when you’re a kid as can playing games with flashcards. It’s when that “must do this correctly” thing takes over that it stops being fun.

One of my favorite “aha” moments for my son was when he “helped” me plant flowers in front of the house when he was about three. We had talked about the parts of a tree, but the whole root thing went right over his head. Picture books didn’t help; they just pointed to dirt under a tree and called it roots. Okay. But when I took a little plant out of the nursery container and crumbled the ground and showed him the roots, I could see the light spring into his eyes as he realized what a plant’s roots really were. Nothing special in that environment—something I would have done anyway. It undoubtedly would have taken less time without my son’s help! But it was a science opportunity—it was learning together and strewing all at once.

I like to have guided serendipitous moments.

I like working with the structure of The Story of the World or a math workbook for example. But I don’t mind skipping through something that isn’t capturing son’s attention. If today we were scheduled to learn about carrying but multiplication is the in idea, multiplication it is. I also want my son’s extracurricular activities to look exactly the way he wants them to. If he wants to do math in pink marker, in pink marker it shall be done. And rainbow skunks get just as much credit as black and white ones do. They are his.

In other words: let them go but back them up.

I have a friend who was convinced she had only two options for career path coming out of school: doctor or lawyer. Nothing wrong with either choice—but they were her parents’ choice, not hers. She went to law school, became a lawyer, was miserable, and eventually became an engineer. She likes her job, but her mother complains to all who will listen about how she was “throwing everything away.” Her mother was well-meaning and sure of herself, but way out of line. Thank the gods my friend didn’t want to be a forest ranger or a poet or something horrible like that…

The things we really learn how to do may be things that we read about, but they are definitely things we experience. That’s the idea behind unschooling.

The uschooling parents don’t have to have a home that looks a certain way; the environment that encourages learning would be one in which mentors respect children as fellow humans with opinions that matter and encourage children to ask “why”. The unschooling parent does not worry about schedules, but encourages a child to follow any topic that interests them to completion.

Reading is a part of an unschooler’s education, but only a part. Now, I would go nuts waiting around for my child to finally start reading the way some on that unschooling site have. Not that it’s a bad thing what they did—I just don’t think I could do it. I think those of us who have made it to this board have taken to heart the mantra of “the more you read to your child the more s/he will learn.” The problem with that is the folks saying that are preaching to folks who never read to their children. Yes, they exist. No, they are not unschoolers—those folks read to their kids. The problem is that we get so het up about not reading enough that we can shove other things that are learning experiences to the back burner.

You can do great by “just” playing games with your children. Activities such as adding the numbers on the two dice to figure out how many spaces to move or getting a wedge in their game piece for knowing about Jupiter that can help them make a connection to the things they’re reading. Even watching TV can help them make the connection. Yes, you heard me. Kids can get started on great tangents from TV shows—and tangents are another name for “unit studies”. Think about your point of reference: do you hum to yourself “The Flight of the Valkyries” or “Kill da Wabbit” or that music from Apocalypse Now? You knew right away what I was talking about, didn’t you? Those are three great topics—all from one tune. Unschooling is like that!

The trick is not to let something stop at Bugs Bunny or Apocalypse Now. The involved (unschooling) parent notes child humming “kill da wabbit” and makes a point of having Wagner playing in the background one morning when Junior comes down for his breakfast. That’s strewing—getting something to be a jumping off point for more learning. This is not strewing: “Ah, yes. The Bugs Bunny version of a famous opera. Can you say “opera”? Very good.”

My favorite aspect of unschooling is that students learn to take ownership of their own education and learn to push forward and learn more. They don’t wait for someone to teach them something; they look for ways to learn it. They do this in part because their teachers (learning partners?) have taken a step beyond following a strict system and instead allow a great degree of freedom in practice. Allowing opportunities to occur and following up on those opportunities is far more important than following any rules for unschooling you might find.

The single most important lesson to learn from unschooling is that we don’t have to fill every single second with Important, Extensively-Researched Curricula. Kids learn when they’re doing nothing but playing or even watching television. I read a comment to a blog somewhere (unfortunately I’ve lost the reference) in which the commenter felt extremely sorry for afterschooled kids because they had to sit through boring classes all day and then sit through more schooling at night. Poor things never had a chance to do anything but be bored. I never want that! If a curriculum I bought for afterschooling turns out to be boring for my son I switch tactics. There are some areas where I want to make sure he gets extra work, but I never want his life to be all structure. That is why I look to unschooling for afterschooling inspiration.

Amy Zahler is the Editor in Chief or Afterschoolers.com and firmly believes in parental involvement in education. She and her husband afterschool their son in Northern Virginia, USA.

Web pages for more information:
Sandra Dodd: Radical Uncschooling
Unschooling.com

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