www.NewHeightsEducation.org It starts after all of the tedium, all of the memorizing and regurgitating, all of the command and control. It starts after she is told what to learn, what to think, whom to listen to. It starts after her natural creativity and instinctive drive to discover her world are systematically destroyed within a coercive system designed to do just that. She must wait to be. www.NewHeightsEducation.org This is What Will Replace K-12 Schools and Colleges With unschooling, there is no after. There is only now. My daughter is a baker because she bakes. She is also many other things. To ask what a child wants to be when she grows up is to dismiss what she already is, what she already knows, what she already does. Baking brings my daughter daily joy and fulfillment while also helping to nourish her family and friends. She writes a baking blog, sharing her recipe adaptations and advice. She reads cookbooks, watches cooking shows (The Great British Baking Show is a favorite), talks to other bakers--both adults and kids--to get ideas and tips. She learned this all on her own, following her own interests, and quickly outgrowing the library children's room cookbook section to the adult aisles. As unschooling parents, we provide the time, space, and connection to resources that enable her doing. She has unlimited access to the kitchen. She has abundant opportunities to visit the library and explore the Internet for real and digital information to help her in her craft. She has three younger siblings and many neighbors and friends who are eager to be her taste-testers. Her work is also incredibly valuable. I have never made a pie from scratch but she makes them all the time, bringing them as frequent desserts to gatherings and special events. The market price for her delicious, seasonal pies would be steep. Who Children Are, Not Who They Will Become Will she always be a baker? It's hard to say. Will I always be a writer? I think so, but who knows? Will any of us always be who we are now? We can certainly have goals and ambitions that we work toward. My daughter wants to open a "bakery-makery" someday that combines her dual passions of baking and making, selling her pies and dolls side-by-side. That may be her future goal, but it doesn't stop her from being a baker and a maker today, creating and selling her goods when and where she can. With unschooling, learning and living are seamless and synonymous. There is no separation of one from the other. There is no segregation of children from the "real world." It is all real. The well-known educator, John Holt, who coined the term "unschooling" decades ago, wrote in his book, Learning All The Time: We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions — if they have any — and helping them explore the things they are most interested in. Children are eager to explore and discover their world and to engage in meaningful work and actions tied to their interests and fueled by their limitless curiosity. Our job as parents is to listen to their interests and ideas, support and encourage them, and help connect them to the wider world around them. Our job is not to prepare our children for who they will become, but to help them be who they already are. "I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." ~John Dewey (1897) Source: The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) https://fee.org/ By: Peter Gray Saturday, November 25, 2017 The cat is slowly scratching its way out of the bag. Ever more people are becoming aware of the colossal waste of money, tragic waste of young people’s time, and cruel imposition of stress and anxiety produced by our coercive educational system. Children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. Their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness were all shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education (here). So what do we do? At great expense (roughly ,000 per child per year for public K-12), we send them to schools that deliberately shut off their educative instincts – that is, suppress their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness – and then, at great expense and trouble, very inefficiently and ineffectively try to educate them through systems of reward and punishment that play on hubris, shame, and fear. Research shows that for far less expense, and with joy rather than pain, we can facilitate, rather than suppress, children’s and teens’ natural ways of educating themselves with excellent results (see here and here). Ever more families are becoming aware of this and are finding ways of removing their children from imposed schooling in favor of Self-Directed Education (here). Most of my previous writing about education has to do with the years that we unfortunately think of as “the K thru 12 years” (as if education is or ever could be a graded thing in which learning is staged along an assembly line). I have written about how doing away with the whole graded system and letting young people do and learn whatever interests them at any given time, in age-mixed settings, works so well in schools such as Sudbury Valley and the many other settings that have been developed to facilitate Self-Directed Education (e.g. here https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200809/the-natural-environment-children-s-self-education and here https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing- Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465084990/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1440592828&sr=1-1&keywords=peter+gray+free+to+learn). Ever more families are becoming aware of this and are finding ways of removing their children from imposed schooling in favor of Self-Directed Education (here https://www.self-directed.org/). But what about those years of schooling that we call “higher education,” especially the four years toward a college degree? Many young people, because of family and societal pressure, see that as essentially compulsory, too. For them, college is just a continuation of high school – grades 13, 14, 15, & 16. And those years of schooling are even much more expensive than the earlier ones, which expense must generally be paid by the parents or through loans that can saddle a person for decades. Moreover, there is growing evidence that very little is actually learned in those years. Fundamentally, college is a socially sanctioned system of discrimination. Here’s how one college professor, Shamus Khan, who is critical of the endeavor he is part of, has put it: 52 NHEG Magazine | March - April 2018 I am part of a great credentialing mill. … Colleges admit already advantaged Americans. They don’t ask them to do much or learn much. At the end of four years, we give them a certificate. That certificate entitles them to higher earnings. Schools help obscure the aristocratic quality of American life. They do so by converting birthrights (which we all think are unfair) into credentials (which have the appearance of merit).” March - April 2018 | NHEG Magazine 53
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