Posts
I wasn't going to blog it. I wasn't really, but it's to easy.
Clearwater is one of about 30 schools that follow the philosophy of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. Such schools are sometimes called "free" and "democratic" schools, where students are responsible for their own learning and have a significant role in governing the school. They also have many parallels with "unschooling," a movement embraced by some homeschooling families who don't follow a set curriculum.
...
When asked what they like best about their school, Clearwater students say the freedom to do what they want, when they want. Even if that means they might not learn everything students at other schools do.
"I won't say I'm amazingly good at advanced calculus," said Josh Pidcock, 19, who's been at Clearwater since he was 12. "I'm not the most studied reader either. I'm OK with that. I figure I can learn that in a college atmosphere much better.(because college is the place to learn how to read)
...
Two of the graduates are now attending community college, and one is enrolled at Earlham College in Indiana. Two others are working. One student left without graduating, Sarantos said, and is in a job-training program.
Three more are set to graduate this year. So far, Campbell has been accepted at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. Before he applied, he organized a math class at school to prepare for the SAT and studied on his own.
But Clearwater doesn't measure success by college acceptances. (Thank God for that.)
9 comments:
I won't say I'm amazingly good at advanced calculus.
famous last words!
I think you are misinterpreting the comment about reading. He didn't say that he couldn't read, or was a poor or slow reader, just that he wasn't a "studied" one. I think he means that he hasn't read many of the classics, and is ok with waiting for college to concentrate on them. Not a horrible idea.
I do think that the philosophy of unschooling has a lot to offer. Children have a strong drive to learn, and love to learn new things; at least until traditional schooling drives that love out of them, at any rate. While some things in life may need to be forced, learning is not a chore and should not be treated as one.
One of the basic concepts of unschooling is that you can't make anyone learn anything. People learn best and fastest when they are interested in a topic, and as children (and adults who haven't had all their interest in learning schooled out of them) are always interested in something, unschoolers see no need to impose an arbitrary schedule of what must be learned when. Rather, they let their children direct their own learning, giving advice, but ultimately leaving it up to them.
As for objections that kids would end up with gaps in their education, no one knows everything; thus, everyone has gaps in their knowledge. As well, unschoolers explicitly reject the concept that there is a certain body of knowledge that everyone must know or else. If a child discovers that he must know something in order to accomplish a particular goal, then they can learn it much easier and faster once they have a need for it.
Unschooling is a definite paradigm shift, and not for the faint of heart, but it encompasses the idea of a "life of learning" better than anything else I have ever seen. It may or may not be practical in its purest form, but I feel it has great value.
Screw unschooling... I want unworking.
Seriously, several points.
You can't force anyone to learn? Come over to my house and see what happens to one of my kids when they are being knuckleheads. They might not want to learn... but they are certainly going to learn.
Unschoolers may reject the philosophy that there is a certain body of knowledge that has to be learned, but the rest of society doesn't.
Students might as well drop out as opposed to unschool. The net results are the same.
Unschooling might work for a slim percentage of students who are highly capable and highly motivated, but by and large unschooling has as much value as homelessness.
A few main problems (amidst the myriad of problems I have with this, but I don't have a month to compose a reply):
1. It's nearly impossible to know whether you're interested in a subject until you've actually studied it in some depth. Case in point: I majored in economics despite absolutely hating the subject for the first 20 years of my existance. I took my first class in it precisely because I knew my education would be incomplete without it, and felt compelled to. I never would have had the chance if I had not (1) forced myself to study a subject I had no interest in, and (2) already posessed the math background necessary to even begin to understand it.
2. Continuing with the previous point, schedules are rarely arbitrary. Math is the clearest example (understanding trig depends on absolute mastery of geometry and algebra, and God help you if you should ever try to learn anything more advanced), but the same holds true of nearly every subject. History depends entirely on context and prior knowledge; understanding literature at anything more than the most superficial level depends on knowing both historical and literary influences on a given work. Waiting 'until you need it' means not only gaps in education, but that students are (1) unlikely to even recognize those gaps, and (2) unlikely to have the tools to repair those gaps even should they recognize them.
3. Unschooling effectively puts students on a fixed career path before they ever graduate high school. To go back to the math example, if you decide you want to be an engineer, you can't suddenly decide to learn the 10 years of math needed to pass Calculus 101, which you need before you even make it to your first real engineering class. The only kids who benefit from unschooling are the few, genuine prodigies for whom it's clear what their talents are; and even in those cases, I'm not so sure if that's the healthiest thing. Studying Shakespeare might have been a waste of time for Bobby Fischer, but I can't help but wonder if he might have been happier if chess weren't his entire life.
Why is Josh still in high school (er, high unschool) at age 19? Is he slow? I think I was studying multivariate calculus, relativity, and second semester of circuits (plus a couple more EE/CS courses) the spring semester that I was 19.
One of the basic concepts of unschooling is that you can't make anyone learn anything.
This basic concept is wrong. I have a minor speech disability which was initially recognised when I was a pre-schooler. I refused to believe them (which was lucky as the diagnosis of the time was that I was lazy). Yet by some exhausting work my speech therapist and my parents got me pronouncing sounds like "th", "sh" and "ch" right.
Then my parents made me learn how to ride a bike.
If a child discovers that he must know something in order to accomplish a particular goal, then they can learn it much easier and faster once they have a need for it.
It may be true that you can learn something much easier and faster once you have a need for it. But it's not always possible to learn something fast enough. In those cases, learning ahead of time is a *good* idea.
For example, it's a bit late to start learning First Aid when you've just hauled the kid out of the sea and noticed they're not breathing. There's three minutes between stopping breathing and lack of oxygen to the brain.
Then there's the knowledge that you only know you can use for a particular problem if you already know it. For example, I once looked at a proposed alternative to a new transmission line into Auckland that consisted of a set of tide-powered turbines placed in one of the harbours. I knew that it wouldn't work because I knew:
1. Turbines produce the most power when the power driving them is high.
2. Tides have a period of slack, when the tide changes. This is when the rate of change is slowest.
3. Tides come at a different time each day.
4 Peak power usage in Auckland is in winter between the hours of 5 and 7 pm.
How long would it have taken me to find out that information if I had waited until I needed it? How would I have recognised that that information was what I needed?
Then there's the knowledge that is not at all necessary to accomplish a goal but yet makes life better. It's hard to look stuff when you're sitting on the front deck of a boat watching the sun rise as you travel between Tongan islands and there's no internet access around. But luckily my head includes John Mansfield's poem with the lines "And a grey mist on the sun's face and a grey dawn breaking".
I haven't read much unschooling literature. I picked up one book where the author promoted "cashier math" meaning his knowledge of math was limited to consumer math. All the math that anyone needs to know can be picked up along the way in real life. What about the math that one doesn't "need" to know? Exactly how does a teenager come across a uniqueness and existence theorem while standing in the line at Wal-mart?
What does a traditional education teach?
Delay. Of. Gratification.
Students don't know why something is important until a year or more later. Unfortunately, impetus to the idea that any sort of field of study is valid is the fact that so much crap is "taught" under the guise of academics.
All the math that anyone needs to know can be picked up along the way in real life. What about the math that one doesn't "need" to know?
I agree. It would be depressing to lead a life limited only to those things I *need* to know.
If a child discovers that he must know something in order to accomplish a particular goal, then they can learn it much easier and faster once they have a need for it.
For the most part, parents supply this need.
Post a Comment