Unschooling and Quality Education

In the fall of 1994, Eric Anderson, Sarah Lawrence, myself, and several others had a long conversation on the topic of unschooling and its effects on the quality of education. Can an unschooler learn a rigorous, complicated topic? Isn't there a structure to knowledge best expressed formally? Are there topics that really must be approached formally? How to reconcile unschooling with the very formal processes of our own educations?

We exchanged email on this topic for several weeks. I've included several excerpts from our conversation here.

I'm not sure I totally buy this, Eric. Learning does, often, "just happen", in that the learner is the sole agent involved. I also don't think that learning requires one specific means, but instead, that there are many paths to knowledge and retention.

I don't consider you a radical unschooler. You are almost a model of the child-directed learning style I discussed only tangentially.

I don't either, although I'm the most radical unschooler I personally know.

I think you may misunderstand John Holt. When he argues against formal schooling, I don't think that he's saying the formal learning is always terrible. Instead, what I hear him saying is that formal learning is not necessary, that parents can teach their children just fine in an informal, child-directed way and that, often, less is definitely more when it comes to teaching.

As an adult, when I'm learning something new, I like a lot of independence to fit what I'm learning into my own conceptual framework. I don't like someone to spoon-feed me; I retain information better when I struggle to piece it together. I've definitely noticed that my children are like this, too. If I give them too much help or too much instruction, they howl at me and get frustrated more easily. If I stay in the background, they often figure things out for themselves.

My point is that they need both the experience and the conceptual structure, else they have to build the structure on their own. Holt is right to reject the teaching of concepts divorced from reality, but it is wrong to reject formal conceptual structures as such.

I don't see anyone rejecting formal structure as such. I don't think that unschoolers are like a Unix shop; there's no need to reinvent the wheel when you can go buy a perfectly good one. There's no need to reinvent calculus or physics, either (although it's plenty exciting to try).

I think you have to look at what unschoolers are up against - the notion that formal schooling is the One True Way to teach children and that they won't learn any other way. A small dose of formal schooling, when a person is receptive to it, can be an exciting crystallization of years of experiential learning. College-level logic was like that for me.

The years of math that preceded college-level math, however, were painful and boring. I learned a lot of math experientially; my math skills were always a few years beyond the classes' skills. In high school, poor teaching almost killed math for me (and I went on to get my college degree in math). Geometry, which should have been a thrilling epiphany for me, was presented in ways that made it seem dull and meaningless. (It didn't help that one of my geometry teachers was a verbally abusive alcoholic and the other told me that good-looking white girls in his class only got As if they slept with him.)

I did re-visit geometry later, when I took trig. And then, on my own, I discovered the beauty and order in geometry. Granted, Euclid and many others had visited that land first and their travelogues helped me explore. But math, to me, has always come back to a personal relationship between me and the numbers (or, in the case of geometry, between me and the lines and angles).

Until that personal relationship forms, math is just so many squiggles on the page; meaningless. Once the relationship forms, formal teaching in math can be a very useful tool.

What are the means I am talking about? For problem solving there are many techniques. Some of them are obvious, and we all have somehow taught ourselves to use them. Others are unlikely to be rediscovered easily -- it took centuries for some to be developed and recognized. Among the specific techniques I have tried are:

I can't enumerate them all. But there is no denying that to achieve full conceptual awareness, people have to learn how to learn.

I never learned these things in school. Such teaching as I had was informal, not formal, and experiential, not contrived.

I didn't learn problem solving in school, but I have formally studied it and I can say that building an explicit understanding of the heuristics has been helpful. I would never try to teach problem solving without doing some.

Problem solving skills are important to me. So far, my approach has been to ask leading questions, to let the child work on the problem using her own resources and to describe the methods she used. Very informal.

Some of the best problem-solvers I know have little formal education. But they have all the principles down pat. They learned to solve problems by working on problems, probably with some guidance from someone who knew how to solve problems.

The natural order is not something invented by the Ivy League. You can't study statistical mechanics without knowing mechanics, not because physics 101 is an arbitrary prerequisite but because the concepts of mechanics are assumed and used throughout SM without explanation. Technical fields tend to be like that. I tried to make up a chart of the knowledge structure for chemical engineering.

Okay. I'll grant that knowledge builds upon other knowledge and that it's useful to learn to walk before you try running. One question: if learning has a natural structure, why do we need to impose that structure from outside? Won't the natural structure show itself to the learner?

Each of what we call "the engineering sciences" needs a certain math level - mechanics needs differential and integral calculus; kinetics needs differential equations; fluid mechanics needs vector calculus and works better if one is really comfortable with tensors. The math isn't a prerequisite, though. It is more like a co-requisite, in the sense that once you get started in a field you suddenly have a burning and practical need to be able to deal with those kinds of equations. You can't get to the end of a field until you can use the math easily. The mathematicians cringe, but I know that most of us engineers don't really learn math until we use it on problems we have physical intuition about.

I like the idea of co-requisites. I majored in math, but my secret love is biology. As a math major, many of my class hours were spoken for; I needed to take at least 1 class in my field each quarter. In addition, I had to meet the University breadth requirements. However, I really wanted to take serious biology classes. All of the serious biology classes required two years of chemistry. I didn't have time to take two years of chemistry.

I enrolled in the basic biology classes to be taken concurrently with organic chemistry. With the help of a few classmates, some peeks at chemistry books and the knowledge that I would have to work a little harder to understand the subject matter, I sailed through the basic classes. Then I tackled genetics, immunology, psychobiology, microbiology and plant physiology, all of which required organic chemistry. Two of my favorite classes in college were immunology and psychobiology, both of which were pretty heavy on organic chemicals. I learned the rudiments of chemistry while taking these classes, without fulfilling the prerequisites.

What I'm saying here is that, yes, there is a natural structure and, no, it didn't need to be reinforced by artificial constraints. I picked up chemistry as needed to understand living systems. I believe that I appreciated chemistry more because I struggled with it as part of my goal of learning biology. I believe a motivated learner can start anywhere, picking up the pieces as it makes sense.

My natural structure may be different from yours, or my goals may be different. The knowledge is there. There need be no limits on what a motivated learner can accomplish.

As a faculty, we in the MIT ChE department have agonized over this structure. We want to get people doing design as soon as possible, because that is where the creative, fun parts of the field are. But we don't know how do anything meaningful without that whole structure.

Yes, I can see how difficult that would be in an academic setting.

OTOH, much of human knowledge is organized very differently. It is meaningless to say history assumes literature or fine arts requires foreign languages. You can study any of them on their own and find that any of the four leads you to any of the others.

And some foreign language students will study languages for many years before traveling abroad. Others will walk straight into a foreign country with no previous knowledge of the language or culture. Different paths, different needs, different results.

I think that people whose intellectual center is in the humanities tend to have the worldview that, while all knowledge is interrelated, there is no hierarchy to the structure and all the fields are on an essentially equal footing. Some humanists will put philosophy first, but beyond that deny precedence to any field.

And some of us who have both feet in math and science will argue so, as well. I don't believe the structure is hierarchical, but more like a roadmap (leading me to contemplate algorithms for optimizing !n problems). Physics has connections to math, to chemistry, to astronomy, to geology, to biology. Math has connections to psychology, philosophy, chemistry, physics, astronomy and just about everything else under the sun.

The two questions I have are "What is a learner trying to accomplish?" and "How can they get there from here?" There aren't any right or wrong answers to these questions.

The order to which I was referring was the sort of structure to the knowledge I outlined above. Still, I think learning is easier for children than for adults, and if one is to march down a long road it is best to start early. While learning may even be possible for such a crotchety old curmudgeon as myself, I think it is easier for children for at least three reasons.

I completely disagree with you here, Eric. I have lots of experience as a learner and I have definitely learned how to learn. I learn new skills all the time and continue to explore new avenues of academia. Last week, I learned to make frosting roses for my daughter's birthday. Last spring, I learned to use the OWL and MFC class libraries to write Windows programs in C++. Garry and I are also dabbling in astronomy.

My grandmother (age 72 and one of the greatest natural learners I have ever known) received an 8th grade education. She went to night school in her thirties to complete high school. All of my life, I have watched her open, inquisitive mind take on new challenges, explore new areas of knowledge, read books in various subjects and converse with delight and interest on topics that weren't even in existence when she was young.

And even though I think the technique is demonstrably better, I don't plan to force it on anyone. I don't even plan to force anyone to learn to ride a bike. :-)

When a child demonstrates the desire to learn to ride a bike and asks me to help her learn, I might suggest she try your technique. Just as when my daughters ask me to help them learn other skills, I will share my ideas and pointers about what they may do to make learning the skill easier. But I can't let my experience substitute for their actual, hands-on learning. Until they pit themselves against the task and make the knowledge their own, all of my pointers and suggestions are pointless.

And it's also true that too little teaching is better than too much. No one likes to learn a skill with someone hovering over her shoulder, criticizing her efforts. Much better is to give a simple instruction and then go about one's business, helping the child only when she asks for help (and usually a few minutes after that).

Learning better teaching myself blessings.

Okay. I'll grant that knowledge builds upon other knowledge and that it's useful to learn to walk before you try running. One question: if learning has a natural structure, why do we need to impose that structure from outside? Won't the natural structure show itself to the learner?

Well, it depends what you mean by impose. I think it can help enormously to expose the learner to the structure and explain why you think it applies. It took one heck of a long time to figure it out in the first place, and if you don't tell people about it you force them to reinvent it.

I think it can be a good idea to let children know that other people have thought about the structure of knowledge and that certain branches of learning (chemistry, for example, or physics or math) can be useful tools to help us think about the universe. However, being a rabid, anti-vampiric unschooler (fangs and all), I don't see any point in enforcing this structure externally, even at the college level.

If a person wishes to take chemical engineering courses without the prerequisites, I personally would let them. My view of the learner as the major agent in the learning process completely supports letting learners break the rules. Learners may learn more by breaking the rules than they do by following someone else's rules by rote.

But then, I think mistakes are great learning opportunities. A mistake, with consequences, really drives home a lesson like no laboratory setting can.

Now, they may very well go on to invent a new structure that will change the world. Or they may do what millions of people did for hundreds of years -- decide that chemistry is a confusing collection of unrelated facts and move on to things they could figure out on their own.

Or they may pick up a smattering of chemistry and later apply themselves to it. I still plan on a more in-depth approach to chemistry when I have the time.

Neither Sarah nor I are suggesting that we throw out books, libraries and knowledgeable mentors. We don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Our difficulty is not with the constraints of our institutional setting (course credits, prerequisites, credit limits). The problem is that doing chemical process design without understanding chemical reactors and separation processes is not chemical engineering. That falls back to the 19th century understanding of chemical processes, which essentially requires that each chemical process be considered as a unique entity. You can do industrial chemistry that way, and many a fortune had been made with that level of understanding. But it isn't chemical engineering.

But maybe some people want to check out chemical engineering to see if it really interests them. Others may want a mere smattering of chemical engineering. I believe that individuals are perfectly capable of deciding what level of mastery they wish to achieve -- and how best to get there.

Anyone can pick up some understanding of chemical engineering by learning some individual process in detail, say by following a personal interest in fermentation and distillation of corn liquor. That is fine, but if you want to generalize your understanding the only alternative I know is to go to the fundamentals.

Possibly, some people would better understand chemical engineering if they started with the specifics rather than the general knowledge.

I have followed my own interests into all the fields you mentioned, yet I recognize that my knowledge of, for example, geology is that of a dilettante. If I wanted to do real work in geology I would want to have a much more systematic understanding of the field, and I would probably start by asking a geologist (or reading an introductory geology book) for an outline of the structure of knowledge of the field. If my desire led me to the field, I would want systematic structure. That does not mean that I would take the "authorities'" word for things, but I would certainly want to hear what they had to say.

Over the summer, I met a fellow in Mendocino who had very little formal education. Yet his knowledge of the history and natural history of Mendocino was incredible. He knew a lot about the rock and soil formations, how they were formed, what minerals they contained, what grew on certain types of soil, where water might be found and so forth. His knowledge of the plants and animals of the region was astonishing (even to me, who has made the natural history of the redwood region a major area of study). He didn't know the Latin names of plants or all of the complex geological terminology, but I'd bet my brass boot buttons that he knew more about the region than any expert at Humboldt State.

He and I had a good time walking and talking about the region. We both learned from our discussions. My knowledge came both from field guides and from field trips. His knowledge came almost entirely from observation and from discussion with others.

Eric, I utterly reject the academic Ivory tower notion that holds that universities hold a monopoly on knowledge. Academic education addresses a small portion of learning what one will really need to do a particular job. Knowledge needs to be absorbed, not just through the eyes by the brain, but also by the ears, the nose, the hands, the body.

I am a big proponent of experiential education. I believe that many people learn better by doing. Unschooling allows us to create lives rich in learning experiences. We are able to do projects that have the side effect of teaching us abstract concepts.

The two questions I have are "What is a learner trying to accomplish?" and "How can they get there from here?" There aren't any right or wrong answers to these questions.

Sure, it is OK to dip into any field to extract from it just what you want. After all, I am an amateur/dilettante/hobbiest/fan/dabbler at almost every field I follow. No one can learn everything in depth.

And why should we? There is good in the notion of the Renaissance man, of a well-rounded education. To quote Tom Robbins, "Specialization is for insects."

The final advantage I said kids have is probably the most important one: time. As adults, we have to spend our time getting money (or food and shelter), travelling, feeding kids and changing diapers, getting our cars and cats fixed, writing thank you notes, planning picnics, and all sorts of things. As much as we would love to, we just don't have the huge chunks of time it takes to learn big new things. (We can de-junk our lives and leave more time for the things we love, but we have to do certain things, especially as parents.) The best gift we can give to our kids is to give them the time to explore the world on their own, wherever their dreams take them. That is the great boon of home education, and especially of unschooling -- we free our kids from that time-eating monster of compulsory schooling. Independent of anything else we do for them, we have done them a great service by freeing them to have real childhoods.

It is the day-to-day realities of adult life that provide rich opportunities for learning. Shopping, cooking, car repair, taking the cat to the vet, writing thank you notes, planning picnics and all the rest provide great opportunities for children to learn real-life skills (and for adults to learn, also). There's no need to get beyond daily life in order to learn. Opportunities abound.

I think a great way for us to free ourselves to learn as parents is to become homeschoolers. As an unschooler, one of my first duties is to model life-long learning. Oh gee, that means I need to learn, I need to take an interest in learning, I need to be passionately excited by learning new things. I can give myself permission to learn!

Another Tom Robbins quote: "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

I agree with you 100% about freeing children to have childhoods. My 14 year old stepson has had very little free time in his life (except at our house). He's a freshman in high school, an honors student, does peer tutoring, is on the football team and plays winter baseball. He doesn't have any free time at all. He's exhausted. He can't stay home when he's sick because he'll drop behind. He's a good kid, a nice kid, but he very rarely gets the chance to just be a kid.

For Christmas one year, I bought him The American Boy's Handy Book. It is a delightful treasure trove of the kinds of pursuits young boys in this country engaged in in the 19th century. Some of the projects were somewhat dangerous (involving knives, broken glass, fire, etc.), but I found myself wishing to give my children as much of the kind of freedom and self-building that young boys had in the last century. Building a canoe or perfecting a 6' tall man-kite would give a child many practical skills and build self-esteem more productively than any school self-esteem program.

It depends what you mean by "reading is important for children." If it is just a factual thing - if you mean that many children think it important (like I'd say "computer games are important for children") - then I see no problem; but if you mean that reading is more important for children than they want it - that children are mistaken - I think it will lead to coercion.

I think that Sarah just expressed my basic concern with Eric's approach. The minute we start thinking that we know better than our children what they need to learn (or eat, for that matter), the minute we tell them to trust our experience over theirs, that is the minute that we move from child-led learning to adult-dictated learning.

Obviously, we need to protect them from real-world dangers and so forth. But I've found that a straight pin teaches the concept of "sharp" really well and that my teacup reinforces the concept of "hot".

The reply to that is that you can tell them about the possible consequences of not getting enough vitamins. You might answer, "Well yes, but what I worry about is that when they are choosing freely what to eat, they may systematically just choose the wrong thing in a particular way." Let's set aside for a moment the question of whether you are right or wrong about this (I think you are wrong, as it happens), but I want to ask a different question. I want to ask you: how is this relevant to your question what should you cook them? Unless you are thinking in terms of coercing them, why don't you just cook them whatever food you think they'll like best?

Or you can cook foods that you enjoy, making them available freely to the child. A child growing up in our house will absorb certain topics almost by osmosis, perhaps through the placenta, even. ;-)

This theory that they won't learn the right things is not some random theory that you have picked up: it is a justification for coercion. There is no other point to that theory. So my answer to your question is that your statement about the idea that children might not learn the relevant things is only important if you are wondering whether to coerce them or not. If you know you are not going to coerce them, you need not address that issue at all. In other words, it was not I who introduced this idea of making people do things, but (implicitly) you.

I think there is a lot of truth to this. As an unschooler, I trust my children as the agents of their own learning. So far, that trust has been well placed. If I were to stop trusting that they would learn what they need to know, then the responsibility for what they learn would become mine, not theirs, and we would be back on the path of coercive learning.

One of the lasting images I have from John Holt was his assertion that many people don't like or trust children. It stopped me cold, but it's right. There is a pervasive assumption in American education, one that implies that children are naturally lazy, recalcitrant, stubborn and stupid. Like mules, they won't learn unless an adult applies the carrot or the stick.

One of the radical aspects of unschooling is to look at the child, not as a mule, but as a rational human being. Children, like monkeys, have an inborn drive to explore, to learn, to climb.

It is really a matter of trust. When we have children, we have the constant challenge of seeing the child as either an object to be acted upon or as the actress in her own drama. Even babies have their own agendas and they don't always coincide with Mom's agenda.

I have found that parenting with trust works better than parenting with the idea that my obstinate, recalcitrant child is out to thwart me (my youngest will be 2 next week ;-) . When I look at what the child is trying to do sympathetically, I can be a more effective parent and a more effective learning accomplice.

I think you have got to face this question about forcing: you have got to face the fact that if you fail to understand, for instance, why learning will be easy and interesting, you will end up coercing people for whose learning you are responsible. It is true that it is possible that you could persuade some people some of the time to do some things they don't find interesting, but it is hard to believe that would work across the board. If you have decided that a child for whom you are responsible would be greatly benefited by learning something, but the child refuses to do so, you will coerce him, because your reasons for not coercing him won't be enough. You might think that you will be able to avoid resorting to coercion, but you have this concern that people might make the wrong decisions about what to learn, and that embodies a justification for coercion. One can't sustain such a position. Sooner or later, you'll either resolve your conflict and realise your fears are mistaken, or the issue will become more important as time goes on, until you feel compelled to resort to coercion. It takes work not to coerce someone.

I think that this point is crucial. If you don't trust children as reasonable, rational, intelligent beings, then I think that it would be very difficult to unschool. If you don't trust that the universe can make its truth known without interference, then I see struggles ahead.

When my older daughter was a toddler, I hovered over her, afraid she would fall, afraid she'd hurt herself. When my younger daughter was a toddler, I toddler-proofed our house and let her take her spills (I was too busy to hover). When my older daughter was a toddler, I worked with her to learn body parts, etc. Imagine my surprise when her younger sister learned to speak faster without my help. She can count to 10 in Spanish, something none of us taught her.

I should like to stress that I fully accept that you are asking a good and genuine question here, and that you are not just trying to find excuses to coerce children. You are (intellectually) worrying about all this, and the end result of this worrying will be coercion unless you really understand why you are mistaken. I too once had similar nagging doubts.

Once again, I must echo Sarah's comments. You seem to be worrying that your child will not be worthy of your trust.

My children are worthy of mine.

Typing with a monkey climbing on my arm.

Let me rephrase it and try again. I think it is important for any human being in a literate culture to learn to read and write. I am not making a statement about what I want to impose on the helpless, I am merely making a factual statement about life in advanced societies. I am waiting to hear someone say that this observation is false.

I'm certainly not going to make such a claim.

I also happen to subscribe to a philosophy that says that normative statements can properly be derived from factual statements, and the normative corollary to this factual statement is that in a literate society people ought to learn to read. That is not the same as saying that reading should be forced on people. Rational people will decide on their own that reading is a skill worth having.

Ah, it is when people start using words like "ought" and "should" that I get my dander up. The words "ought" and "should" often lead to the legal words "must" and "shall".

"Vaccinations prevent disease. Every child should be vaccinated. Since no reasonable person could possibly think otherwise, you must vaccinate your child or we won't allow her in our schools, on our sports teams, in our universities."

Now you may not be one of those people who think that "oughts" should be changed into "musts", but there are plenty out there who believe that good things ought to be required and bad things ought to be banned, never mind niceties like constitutional liberties.

I think many of us on this list are sensitive to words like "ought" and "should", no matter how benignly they were intended. We've heard it before, followed by "or else".

The reason I phrased it like that was that, after I was so bold as to assert that some specific things are worth knowing, I was accused of wanting to coerce people to learn them. I don't normally write that way.

Perhaps that is because others on this list (myself included) are wary of pronouncements that lead to legislation.

I have a personal problem with any form of mono-ism. You presented a natural structure of knowledge. I can see that knowledge may have many natural configurations, that the structure of knowledge is organic, growing, changing. That there are many paths to truth, even some that look quite roundabout.

So, any time a person appears to be talking about One True Way, I see pogroms, witch-hunts, concentration camps, crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Gestapo standing behind them. That doesn't mean that the person is prepared to employ those means to convince me of the rightness of her point.

I stand by my original assertion that some specific things are worth knowing.

Okay. Worthwhile for whom? For every American? For everyone in the world? For every critter everywhere in the universe?

I think we can ultimately only speak for ourselves. You have found certain specific things to be worthwhile, perhaps even indispensable. Is it possible that, in learning these things, you passed by other knowledge that is equally valuable?

I ask this question in all honesty. I made choices to learn the things that I learned, but I also chose to leave behind certain specific things which still give me pangs of regret. For example, I took a heavy load in college. I was also working 30 hours a week (had to eat, you know), so I didn't have time to continue with my music studies or my studies of foreign language. I regret that my poor viola pines for want of practice and that I didn't go ahead with learning Japanese.

When I think of all the many things that people can learn and how important it is that we have all sorts of people following all sorts of interests in this world, the idea of coming up with any list that all people "should" learn is daunting. What should be included?

My list might well be very different from yours, reflecting my disappointments as well as my triumphs.

The issue of what order it is best to learn things in matters because, for at least some fields, it really is easier to learn things one way than another. You seem to be saying that if the order exists, it must be so easy to perceive that even a novice in a field can figure it out on his own. Heather seems to be saying that all knowledge is so interconnected that it is meaningless to talk about an intrinsic order. I think that there is some truth to both of those frameworks, but that there are fields of sufficient complexity that it is helpful to have someone point out how to approach the topic.

Actually, what I am saying is more "How do we know what the best order for learning is in a particular field for a particular student?". I certainly don't know. There are approaches that work well for many people. There are approaches that work poorly for many students.

I think there's a difficulty with taking strategies for teaching large numbers of college students and applying them to individualized learning. When you're teaching in a mass education system, you have to go with the percentages. If a few students fall through the cracks, too bad. When I want to learn something, the percentages don't matter. I'll try different approaches until it clicks. I'll review the subject matter until it becomes a coherent system of thought.

I'm not going to force my order on anyone, nor am I going to force anyone to learn any specific field. But if someone asks me to help them master one of the fields I know, I will almost certainly start out by presenting my view of the structure of knowledge in the field.

Fair enough.