Unschooling

Unschooling There is a discussion going on in America about what went wrong in the past years to decades. This discussion is not limited to about what went wrong in our financial and regulatory systems that caused this economic recession. The change permeates many areas of life including education. While we came to think that public schools is the only and best way to educate our children there are new concepts out there that promise a better future for our young ones. One of these new concepts is Unschooling. Wikipedia defines Unschooling as a set of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child. Looking at the definition of Unschooling one can easily see an relation to homeschooling. Homeschooled children are taught typically by parents and sometimes by tutors, rather than in a formal settings of public or private school. At home they can more easily follow their natural curiosities and explore subjects of personal interests. Public schools tend to be more structured as a student must follow the curriculum and learn at the pace the teacher and peers dictate. Critics of home schooling and unschooling tend to view it as an extreme educational philosophy. They are concerned that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their peers, especially in the job market. Proponents of unschooling claim exactly the opposite is true: self-directed education in a natural environment makes a child more equipped to handle the real world. The general public has a perception about homeschoolers that they cant talk to people. In my view this common perception is entirely wrong. I found talking to young home schooled kids a delight as they are curious about life and ask questions that even an adult can challenge intellectually. Probably a nice way to describe unschooling is to say to learn from life and follow your passion. Home schooled kids go through life with eyes wide open and tend to generate novel ideas. And many new ideas come from unexpected sources. Thats what is needed to foster the change America is in need right now. For example, the organic whole food movement of the past years did not come from MBA educated thinkers of big food businesses but come the grass root thinkers at the bottom. No matter what age youre no matter whats our background you can learn in life. But the ability to learn must be learnt itself. Public schools tend to stifle the natural curiosity of children while unschooled kids tend to take more initiative in learning by their own. There is such an abundance to learn in life. Whether youre interested in history, science, writing, acting, sports, science, computer programming, web design or Spanish there is no much information and help out there to satisfy your learning curiosity. I myself use the Web heavily for my personal and professional growth. Quite often before I work on a new area I Google it or watch Youtube on the topic. It is amazing but I almost ever found the information I was looking for. Also professionally I constantly educate my self using the web in areas such as PHP and MySql programming, machine learning and SEO marketing. Although I want to school for 18 years I feel that most of the knowledge learnt there was not that appl icable to life. Granted learning Russian language and historic materialism in East Germany is probably an rare case of wasted knowledge). But even my math education was overdone: I dont use matrices and differential equations in my daily life. But today when I learn about business, economics and programming I feel that this is very applicable. And I get all this knowledge for very little money from the web, youtube videos, torrent media or from books conveniently bought at Amazon. Some progress towards unschool has alredy been made in the past. Thanks to the homeschooling laws of the past 10 years children can be taught at home by their parents (at leas in California and some other rstates). We also have seen the creation of community centers. Here homeschooled students have access to professors, computer Internet, books and local news. Sometimes they have even labs (science, languages) where homeschooled children have the also the same equipment resources as public school students. In summary, unschooling promises to be more effective and less costly for of education than that of traditional public and private schools. Unschooling centers around the learners curiosities, natural life and work experiences. The legal possibility of unschooling exists already today; and so do many resources. Whats the big challenge is for parents and self learner to unlearn the ingrained patterns of scholastic learning and transition to self-direct form of learning.