How Unschooling Works

Great article here by Joyce Fetteroll on her Joyfully Rejoycing page.

A snip:

All the stuff they teach in school are tools that people might use to get what they want. In real life if someone is reading Charles Dickens and wants to know why society was like that, they'll read some history. Unfortunately schools do it backwards: giving kids the tools before they have the reasons or desire to use them, e.g., making them study Victorian England in case they want to understand Charles Dickens better. And because the tools are so dull when taken out of context, kids often turn away from the things the tools are good for.

School is like hammer lessons. It's teaching kids how to pound various size nails into different types of wood with a lot of different types of hammers. Over and over and over. Then moving onto saws. Then moving onto drills. The thought being that if they have the skills they can then be prepared to do anything.

But they're so bored with the tools and have such a bad taste in their mouths towards the tools from the years of coerced learning, that the feeling transfers to anything that even uses the tools.

Unschooling approaches learning the other way. It starts with bird houses (or stools or chunks of wood for whacking or toys for stuffed animals or whatever the child is reaching out wanting to learn) and kids learn how to use the tools as a side effect of doing something they want to do.

The rest is just as good...enjoy!