Unschooling

Posted by: ashleytan on: September 11, 2009

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When you read an article like Boston Globe’s Pressure-cooker Kindergarten and a blog entry by a parent titled Education Needs to Be Turned on Its Head, it really makes you stop and think.

One thing that gets reinforced time and time again is how similar the educational issues are in the USA and here despite the difference in our systems.

Consider how the Globe starts:

5-year-olds don’t learn by listening to a rote lesson, their bottoms on their chairs. They learn through experience. They learn through play. Yet there is a growing disconnect between what the research says is best for children — a classroom free of pressure — and what’s actually going on in schools.

Sound familiar?

The parent observed this of schooling:

Traditionally, schools use this model:
1. Decide on what kids need to know to prepare them for adulthood.
2. Prepare a curriculum based on this.
3. Give students a schedule based on this curriculum.
4. Have educated teachers hand them the info they need, and drill them in skills.
5. The student reads, memorizes the info, learns the skills, and becomes prepared.
6. Students must follow all rules or be punished. This is actually more important than the info and skills, although it’s never said that way.

Again, sound familiar?

The parent doesn’t stop there. He goes on to suggest what we can do in education. The thing I find quite surprising is that he is not a teacher or a researcher and yet he says things the top thinkers and crystal ball-gazers in educational research are saying.

Then again, why should I be surprised? Any parent working in today’s world will recognise that we need to prepare our kids for a world that we cannot foresee. We cannot plan a curriculum because we don’t know what the world will be like, so we need to teach our kids to thinks for themselves, to learn by themselves, to problem solve.

What is that parent’s solution? Unschooling. He sells it more passionately and colourfully than I can. So head on over to his blog, read his entry on how education needs to be turned on its head, think about it and act upon it. Today.

Tags: change, unschooling