Ben Draper from the Homeschool Macomber Center Writes About Freedom, Boredom and Happiness in Education

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The Macomber Center is a home education resource center in Framingham, MA, for families interested in giving their children an opportunity to come together to socialize and learn. The Center follows a pedagogical model of free, democratic education, where children are natural learners and guide their own education. The values of responsibility, freedom and respect are at the core of this group. Visit the Macomber Center's website. You can find the original writings here and here.

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” – Aristotle

When I speak with other people who share the unique experience of having gone to a democratic free school, what we end up talking about is not how it prepared us for success in adulthood – we take that as a given – but how grateful we are to have had such an idyllic, happy childhood; that we were free to spend every day doing just what we wanted.  

People in the worlds of unschooling and progressive education spend a great deal of time arguing that these alternatives do an even better job preparing children for success than traditional education.  This has, of course, been necessary in order to legitimize these alternative movements within the mainstream.  But it leaves intact the basic assumption that childhood is merely a means to an end, that the purpose of childhood is to prepare for adulthood.  But childhood, just like all of life, is to be lived fully and enjoyed.

Why Unschooling Isn’t Uneducation

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Excellent article written by Misha at Simplicimom. "Simplicimom is an online magazine for any mom looking to make life a little simpler and a lot more fun. Being a mom can be hard, but it doesn't have to be." Visit Simplicimom or see the original article.

I think a lot of people get confused. I think a lot of people think that because my – or other people’s children – are unschooled it means that they aren’t educated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Just because we don’t follow a set curriculum and do A,B,C,D before a child reaches a certain age, doesn’t mean they aren’t learning. They are learning all of the time. What’s great about it is that I’m not constantly “on them” to do this, that or the other thing.

I was worried for years that Liam couldn’t do his multiplication tables. He still can’t just reel them off to you like I learned how to in school. This infuriated me. We sat for hours with work books and flash cards. I even sent him to school half days so he could take advantage of a special education math program (he is slightly autistic). They couldn’t teach him his times tables either. I’ve done all kinds of programs – visual, auditory, picture-based. But if you ask Liam right now, what’s 4 times 3 – he won’t be able to tell you.

How I Would Unschool My Kids

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James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, author and blogger. He maintains a blog at JamesAltucher.com where he discusses his experiences as an entrepreneur and his theories for success and happiness. He is an advocate of the idea that one shouldn't send one's kids to college and that one should never own a home. You can find this original writing at his website here.

My dad hit me when I got bad grades. Particularly when I was young and got a bad grade in “Conduct”. Happiness was an “A”. Even better: an “A+”. Sadness was an “F”. It was almost like a joke. Like the only way to get an “F” is if you tried to screw up almost as much as you tried to get an “A”.

But in twelve years of basic schooling I can’t’ remember anyone asking where the “E” was. It goes A, B, C, D (which was really horrible to get a D. It means you were trying somewhat (so as to avoid the “F”) but you were just plain stupid and got a D. Not even a C.) and then, the magic “F”. Which was more than just a letter but a one-letter acronym. None of the other letters stood for anything. They were just letters. They could’ve been replaced by numbers (Claudia tells me in Argentina they were graded by numbers from one to ten. No letters). It’s not like “A” stood for Amazing. Or “B” Boring. “C” Crazy. “D” Dumb. You could’ve just replaced them by 1, 2, 3, 4. Or a “1+”. But F was irreplaceable.

The Beginner’s Guide to Unschooling

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Leo Babauta is the creator of zenhabits. He is a writer of numerous books, is a vegan and an unschooling dad.

There’s nothing I get asked about more as a parent than unschooling, and nothing I recommend more to other parents.

It’s an educational philosophy that provides for more freedom than any other learning method, and prepares kids for an uncertain and rapidly changing future better than anything else I know. My wife and I unschool four of our kids, and have been for several years.

And yet, as powerful as I believe unschooling to be, I’ve never written about it, because the truth is, I certainly don’t have all the answers. No one does.

The beauty of unschooling is in the search for the answers. If anyone had all the answers, there would be no search. And so what I’d love to teach unschooling parents and kids is that the search is the joy of it all.

Ban guns? Maybe we should also ban school!

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He has worked at faculty positions at Stanford University and Yale University. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here. This post was written December 16, 2012. The original can be found here.

In the wake of the recent school shooting, I can add my voice to the millions who think that easy ownership of hand guns and assault weapons is absurd, but there is another point to be made. Can’t we at least start to debate whether having schools is such a good idea? 

Below are some of the questions typed into google in the last week that landed the searcher on one of my outrage columns. They paint a picture in the aggregate of students who are very unhappy in school.  Were these searches made by just some odd kids? Or is it possible that most children find school difficult, threatening, and uncomfortable?

Home-Education is About Learning, Not Schooling

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Zion Lights is a writer and mother interested in ethics, attachment parenting, permaculture and green living. She is a regular contributor at One Green Planet. Check Out her website.  The original article can be found here, but has printed here with the author's permission.

I wonder whether approaching the subject a different way would have been more tactful. First, a barrage of questions washes over me; 'What do you mean, you're going to teach them yourself? How will you know what to teach? But you're not qualified to teach that subject?' Then, more adamantly stated, 'Are you sure it's legal?'

These are the incredulous comments of a teacher friend of mine after hearing that my husband and I plan to home educate our children. She studied for four years in order to teach in a school, and she strongly believes that teachers who study for less than two years are not 'properly qualified' to impart knowledge to young people.

So, I'm having trouble conveying to her our decision not to send our children to school. To say that we plan to 'home-school' our daughter does not offer much explanation, as the term implies that teaching will take place in a structured fashion, in the home instead of the school, with a strict timetable, exams and homework, and to a strict curriculum. If this was the case, there would be little difference between home education and school education.

Whoever Said There's No Such Thing As a Stupid Question Never Looked Carefully at a Standardized Test

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Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer who has explored a number of topics in education, parenting, and human behavior. He is considered a leading figure in progressive education. His website is here. You can find the original article here.

It can't be repeated often enough: Standardized tests are very poor measures of the intellectual capabilities that matter most, and that's true because of how they're designed, not just because of how they're used. Like other writers, I've relied on arguments and research to make this point. But sometimes a telling example can be more effective. So here's an item that appeared on the state high school math exam in Massachusetts:

n 1 2 3 4 5 6 tn 3 5 __ __ __ __
The first two terms of a sequence, t1 and t2, are shown above as 3 and 5. Using the rule: tn = (tn-1) plus (tn-2), where n is greater than or equal to 3, complete the table.

Richard Elmore: "I do not believe in the institutional structure of public schooling anymore"

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Dr. Gary Houchens is a former teacher, principal, and district administrator now serving as Associate Professor of Educational Administration, Leadership, & Research at Western Kentucky University. This original writing can be found at his website School Leader.

In my teaching and writing I sometimes ponder whether the existing structures of schooling are actually the biggest obstacle to student learning.  Can schools as we currently know them ever accomplish the mission we've established for them?

This week Richard Elmore, one of the nation's most prominent educational thinkers, emphatically shared his conviction that they cannot.  Speaking at a forum on education reform sponsored by the Aspen Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (where Elmore is professor), the father of instructional rounds distinguished himself from other panelists by concluding that schooling as we know it will inevitably fail.

"I do not believe in the institutional structure of public schooling anymore," Elmore said, noting that his long-standing work at helping teachers and principals professionalize their practice is "palliative care for a dying institution."  Elmore predicted "a progressive dissociation between learning and schooling."

How to Learn Anything

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Dale J. Stephens is an American entrepreneur, speaker, and author of Hacking Your Education, best known as one of the original 24 recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. He is also the founder of UnCollege, which is a social movement that aims to change the notion that going to college is the only path to success

I’ve been hiding away working on Hacking Your Education. It isn’t going to write itself, and I have to focus all of my energy on getting my edits back to Penguin before July.

Last weekend I was in Porto, Portugal, where I spoke at EDEN—the European Distance and E-Learning Network. I caused quite a stir at EDEN, which is exactly what I wanted to do. In countries like the United States, it can be a controversial topic to discuss alternatives to the traditional systems. But in the United States, we have homeschooling, we have unschooling, and many alternative schools—from Montessori schools to self-directed colleges like Goddard. However, in European countries such as Germany, Sweden, and Spain, homeschooling is illegal. It is much more crass to talk about education reform in many parts of Europe than in the US.

27 Non-School Skills Children Need

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Leo Babauta is the creator of zenhabits. He is a writer of numerous books, is a vegan and an unschooling dad.

Everyone knows that our school system, in general, is not giving our kids the basic reading, writing, ‘rithmatic and science skills needed to be competitive in the high-tech workforce of the upcoming generation (at least, that’s the general assumption, and we won’t argue it here).

But there’s much more to life than those basic subjects, and unless you have an exceptional teacher who is willing to break out of the mold, your child isn’t learning the crucial things he or she needs to learn in life.

Why Textbooks Suck

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He has worked at faculty positions at Stanford University and Yale University. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here.

I take as my starting point LIFE: The Science of Biology, since it is certainly the best textbook ever written.

LIFE has chapters that start with a question. This is very good. Here are some examples subchapter headings:

1.1 What is Biology?
1.2 How do biologists investigate life?
2.2 How do atoms bond to form molecules?
3.2 What are the chemical structures and functions of proteins?

Real Education Is Human

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A beautiful account by Dr. Kirsten Olson. She is author of the book, Wounded by School. Visit Kirsten Olson at her website.

At an extraordinary and unusual school I visited recently, I observed a seven-year-old girl come before the school’s judicial council. The day before she had violated a cardinal rule of the school.  She had failed to look after her own safety.  She and four of her friends had ventured to a pond dock on the school grounds, where they saw a water snake.  Intrigued, they wanted to catch it. 

Using a Tupperware container, string, and some duct tape, they made a trap and dipped it into the water.  The little girl, her heavy backpack still on her back, leaned too far out over the dock and fell into the water.  Some of the older, high school boys saw her fall in, rushed to the pond, and pulled her out. The water was only waist-deep and slow moving, but in the life of the school, where children are allowed full freedom to roam the school grounds as long as they look out for their safety, no kid had ever fallen into the pond before.  The adults at the school, understandably, were beside themselves.

Why Play=Learning

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In sum: Play = Learning. As children move from the sandbox to the boardroom, play should be the cornerstone of their education. The research is clear: Playful pedagogy supports social-emotional and academic strengths while instilling a love of learning.

By Roberta M. Golinkoff, PhD & Kathy Hirsh-Paske, PhD. They are the authors of 12 books. You can read the original article with references on Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development.

"Our children from their earliest years must take part in all the more lawful forms of play, for if they are not surrounded with such an atmosphere they can never grow up to be well conducted and virtuous citizens."
--Plato, The Republic   

The study of play has a long history. From Plato to Kant, from Froebel to Piaget, philosophers, historians, biologists, psychologists, and educators have studied this ubiquitous behavior to understand how and why we play. Even animals play. This fact alone leads researchers like Robert Fagan, a leader in the study of animal play, to speculate that play must have some adaptive value given the sheer perilousness and energy cost to growing individuals. Researchers suggest that play is a central ingredient in learning, allowing children to imitate adult behaviors, practice motor skills, process emotional events, and learn much about their world. One thing play is not, is frivolous. Recent research confirms what Piaget always knew, that “play is the work of childhood.” Both free play and guided play are essential for the development of academic skills.

Unsolicited Evaluation Is the Enemy of Creativity

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The newest post by Peter Gray who is a research professor of psychology at Boston College, a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology, and an author. This original piece can be found at Peter's blog Freedom to Learn at Psychology Today Here. 

In my last post I wrote of evidence that children’s creativity has declined over the past two or three decades, a period during which children’s lives, both in and out of school, have become increasingly controlled and regulated by adult authorities. Here, now, is some further evidence that freedom—including freedom from unasked-for evaluation—is an essential element to the blooming of creativity.

Non-directive, Non-Judgmental Parenting Predicts Subsequent Creativity in Children Longitudinal research has shown that children raised by parents who are relatively non-directive and non-judgmental exhibit more creativity later on than do those raised by relatively directive, judgmental parents.

The Real Damage Done By Testing in the Schools: A Conversation With Milo

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Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. He has worked at faculty positions at Stanford University and Yale University. He is the author of, Coloring Outside the Lines, and his website is here. Milo is his six-year old grandson.

I had a long conversation with Milo, my six year old grandson, the other day. Milo is very smart. (Yes, I know. What grandfather wouldn’t say that? But trust me, he is.) 

I asked him what he had done that was fun recently and he told me about a game he had been playing with a friend, which was good to hear about since Milo went through a long obsession with chess that I am happy to hear is waning.

I then asked him about school. I asked him if he liked taking the tests (which are everywhere these days - even in first grade) and I also asked him if he had learned anything interesting lately.