Read here for anwers to many common unschooling questions. Members of The Unschooling Conference committee give their responses to questions from attendees at our 2008 and 2010 events. Finally, all your unschooling questions answered!
NOTE: All the opinions expressed here are those of the individual comentators. It is important that readers analyze and examine their own circumstance closely, as well as finding additional information before making decision which affect their family's well-being.
Dealing With Doubts
What's Your View On......?
Dealing With Doubts
Are unschooled kids well-rounded in their knowledge of the world?
Jen: I am not a fan of the term “well-rounded.” To me, well-rounded implies molded, smoothed by outside hands until there are no distinguishing marks, no edges to rest on. Well-rounded means that someone else has decided what to study and when and how much. Well-rounded means endlessly rolling, never being so excited about something that you must stop. I know I like to be able to give myself over to a project for days or weeks at a time. I love immersing myself in information and people and resources that feed a current passion. I also love feeling sated and being able to move on to something else when I want to. I want that same freedom for my daughter; that is why we don’t use school.
The importance of being “well-rounded” came about as an idea out of necessity. An institutional setting cannot cater to each individual child. Instead of having the goal of individually tailored, child-directed, appropriate, challenging and creative life experiences, the idea of well-roundedness came to be the catch phrase to make the automation of children’s lives seem like a good thing. “They are getting a little bit of so many things. We must make sure they have a little of this and a little of that. That should cover the bases – we’ll call it being ‘well-rounded.’”
If you don’t know a little bit about EVERYTHING, are you a bad person? Of course not! Resilience, confidence, curiosity, passion—those seem a lot more useful than “well-rounded.”
Jenina: Are you? A lot of times, this question comes from a person who feels that they don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of the world and has been made to feel that they somehow have less to offer the world because of it. The idea of well-roundedness as the definition of a good education is another one of those arbitrary concepts which comes from school conditioning.
Conventional school thinking (which is implied in this question) bases the acquisition of knowledge on negative footing. What I mean is that rather than having you focus on the areas in which you are strong, schools focus is on identifying areas of weakness using various tools, such as standardized testing. What this does is to take away time from becoming really proficient in areas in which you excel and are motivated, and make you spend what can be a lot of time working to improve in areas in which you may have little aptitude or interest. This is a fruitless game.
Just think about it in terms of your choices when/if you attend university or enter a job situation as an adult: NO ONE chooses a field of study in college or a job field based on their weaknesses, but on their strengths. Unschoolers seek to apply this line of thinking to a child’s whole educational career, rather than waiting until they’re 18 to have the freedom to think this way.
Does this mean that some kids may know a lot about one area and nothing about another—YES! And that’s the point. This well-roundedness that many people are after is actually a rarity rather than common, and spending all of kids’ time making them learn things that they may or may not want or have aptitude to learn simply dissipates the interests/aptitudes they already have, rather than letting them develop a strong foundation of interest and motivation on which they may branch out into other areas of learning.
Rather than well-roundedness, unschoolers look at their ownership and proficiency of knowledge. It’s clear from talking to most unschoolers, that they show a great deal of passion and a depth of knowledge in their chosen areas which creates confident and magnetic people.
I don't know how to answer the question "How do you know your child is learning what s/he needs to learn?".
Jen: I like to think about the idea of “need to know.” Institutional schools have created a paradigm wherein they tell people what they ”need” to know and when. The list of what people (especially “school-aged” kids) need to know is arbitrary, as is the timetable that is associated with this “need to know” information. There is nothing that correlates being 8 with knowing the times tables. There is nothing about being 15 that dictates that one knows about American history. What do kids actually NEED to know? They need to know how to communicate that they are hungry, interested, tired, scared or excited. They need to know whom they can ask for help. They need to know what options are available in their world, and they need to know how to trust themselves. Factual knowledge and skills that are acquired because there is a genuine need is what kids (anyone!) need to know. When you need to make a list so you don’t forget something, you learn to write. When you want to build something, you figure out how numbers can help. When you want more stories, ideas and facts than anyone in your life could possible give you, you learn to read. When your passion is making elaborate cakes, you learn to bake. Do kids NEED to know about Shakespeare’s plays and Avagadro’s number? Maybe, maybe not, maybe later.
Jenina: Firstly, and with all potential questioners, you must evaluate whether the person who is asking you this actually wants to have a genuine conversation with you about homeschooling, i.e., the question springs from a genuine curiosity and willingness to listen, or whether the questioner is seeking information from you to use as a basis to argue with you. Remember, you are not under any obligation to answer any questions from anyone about your homeschooling. In most situations you should refrain from giving too much information to others, unless you feel certain about their motives. The obvious potential exception to this is family and friends, with whom you wish to maintain connected relations. Even here, however you must make sure that the point of the conversation is not to dissuade you from homeschooling.
Secondly, you might consider turning this question around and ask “How do you know that a child in school is learning what s/he needs to learn?” Most people assume that they know what schoolkids are learning. When put this way, it’s apparent that this assumption is based on trust of the school system alone. I find this method very effective to deal with a provocative questioner
A more substantial answer, and the one I rely on myself, is to say that when you’re with a child 24 hours a day, you get to observe them in up close in a way that no one else can. You actually have better, deeper, broader information about your child than anyone else could. So, you are aware of areas where they could use help and what their strengths are. When you sense the need for a course correction, or for the addition or subtraction of something, you can take action right away with no interference.
You must ask yourself and any potential critics the question “Who decides what information is necessary to learn at what time?” Most people assume that there is well developed reasoning as to when children must learn things. However, as with most things related to our conventional school conditioning, these milestones are set arbitrarily. You will feel more confident in answering a critic if you educate yourself about how curricula are developed. What all of us need to learn is determined, always, by our interests in life. We all manage to learn what is relevant to us at any given time without outside intervention. The kind of academic learning that referred to in this question may be relevant, but only our children and us are positioned to decide what is necessary and what is not.
Alison: I remember wondering this very thing when my children were growing up. It worried me that my kids may not know “what they need to know.” To make the question a bit easier to ponder, I rephrased it: What do my children need to know? that seemed like a more manageable question. Like most people, I started off with what I thought was the most obvious: reading at a level high enough to be able to eventually read college level material, writing skills that would allow my kids to write research papers, and mathematical skills that would get them into college... I am sure you recognize the list. It is the list we’ve all been brainwashed into believing is the be all and end all of what it is children need to know.
I’m not sure why I hesitated when I came up with this first list, but I did. Anyway, I refocused the question onto myself. It became: What did I need to know? There wasn’t one single thing I could think of that would suffice as an answer. Once I figured this out I let go of having any schooled expectations of my children’s learning. This was an easier task now because what I did know was that most of the learning I had experienced at school left me feeling stupid, incompetent and as though I’d never “make it” as an adult. Examination of this led me to understand something very significant about my initial question: Children should never feel that they are stupid, incompetent or may possibly fail as adults.
This realization led me to the belief that there isn’t any particular set of skills any individual must have other than self-confidence and a sense of joy in the learning process. My focus at that point became one of considering how to keep my children’s self-confidence and joy of learning alive for that time when they’d have to rely on themselves to learn what it was they needed to be a success in the lives they’d choose for themselves. As a child in school, I often feared learning new things. When I set out to teach myself (i.e. learn) things schools did not teach, (for example, braille) I was empowered with a wonderful sense of joy and satisfaction with my work. In order to be successful at learning, we must feel empowered by the process, have self-confidence in ourselves as learners, and discover the personal and unique joy it brings. Remembering this truth, I concluded that there is no particular thing any child must learn. Rather, we as parents need to learn that there is no specific list of skills our children need learn. Instead, we need to have the skill of facilitating the learning our children crave.
