John
Holt’s word “unschooling” has taken a battering lately. Some homeschoolers
love the word; others (like me) don’t. Some unschoolers are passionate about
defining and refining it and adding on to it. Some see it as the basis for
a movement, or at least a community. Others have recently been caught up
in fights over the integrity of some who would be its promoters. And
some are trying to stretch it to create
“unschooling schools” and learning
centers.
I’d love to abandon the word; as some of my
articles on this
website make clear, I have been trying
for a couple of decades to stop using it. (Web keyword marketing protocol is the
only reason I haven’t.) But twice recently, I’ve seen the word “unschooling”
reframed in a way that I think is really important in terms of the future
of education. Both references originate with a trend spotting/marketing
firm called Sparks & Honey.
First, I saw an article in Fast Company quoting Sparks &
Honey CEO Terry Young with a list of eight new jobs people will have in
2025. Number two on the list is “Un-Schooling Counselor.” The logic is that
“education as a four-year box-ticking exercise” will be over. In a more
diverse future, people will occasionally dip into and out of both formal
and informal education experiences throughout their lives, and “un-schooling
counselors” will guide them through their personal processes. “We’re seeing
the evolution of the traditional counselor to someone who can hack your
life together so it’s unique,” Young says. (Why we can’t do that ourselves
is another question!)
Well, of course, everyone’s life is unique, although reinforcing that
uniqueness doesn’t appear to be the aim of our systems of formal education
– from preschool on up to university. Life learners have already realized
this. In fact, avoiding the homogenizing of public education is one of the
reasons many of us have chosen the school-free lifestyle.
The Sparks & Honey folks have also identified eight trends that they
predict will not only shape the future of education, but humanity. And they’ve
co-opted the term “unschooling” to describe what others like Dale Stephens,
Kio Stark, and
Anya Kamenetz have been calling “hacking”
your education, doing “UnCollege,” or “edupunking.” (The trend spotters
give a nod to the Thiel Fellowship, which helped Dale Stephens set up UnCollege,
in their materials). And so we see this interesting phenomenon whereby school-free
living and learning is moving from an outlier philosophy about educating
kids to being mainstreamed for adults.
But wait! They also appear to be saying that this “new” learning model
(which is how my kids learned 40 years ago) is for kids too. They
have a slideshow entitled Drop Out Now: The Economics of Unschooling. Superimposed
over a photo of a child (not a teen or twenty-something) with a laptop,
are these words: “Welcome to the new learning model, a move from institutional
learning to the school of Life…Learning is becoming more about self-actualization
and less about receiving a particular grade. Education is being custom-tailored
to fit the individual.” (Of course, that means it is becoming
commercialized too, but that, again, is another story, and I am trying
to be positive here.)
I’m not going to regurgitate the article I wrote for this magazine in
2010 entitled
Ready For A Changing World. But I will say that Drop Out Now confirms
its basic thesis, that people need new skills and attitudes to be able to
thrive in what will become a decentralized economy, and that life learning,
as a decentralized style of education, can provide them.
When my article was published online, it was widely shared, but often
laughed at, and disparagingly called “naïve,” “a fantasy,” and “utopian.”
Perhaps – if the highly paid trend spotters are to be believed – utopia
has arrived without my critics noticing! In that article, I wrote, “The
‘real world’ that parents worry unschooled kids won’t be able to cope with
is not the ‘real world’ of the future; it’s one designed to churn out obedient
workers and consumers. But times – and the economy – are changing.”
One needn’t be a rocket scientist to realize that the industrial model
of work design is becoming outmoded, and will inevitably take the industrial
model of education along with it. It’s becoming clearer every day that careers
are, as Sparks & Honey put it, becoming “unstructured and less singular,”
and that careers and lives will benefit when people have a wider range of
skills than before.
Realistic rather than utopian, this sort of thinking recognizes that
the “facts” and skills taught in schools today could be irrelevant in the
not-too-distant future, and that the jobs of the future don’t even exist
today. And, as I wrote in my 2010 article, the skills people will need include
some things some people might not think of as such, especially in the workplace
context. I’m thinking of flexibility, adaptability, networking, research
ability, motivation, time management, comfort with numerous types of learning
modes and models, strong family and community ties, entrepreneurship, innovation,
creativity, self-reliance, willingness to do it yourself. I and many others
believe these will become indispensable. And I can’t think of a better way
to develop them at any age than by life learning.
My partner Rolf (who
now manages apprenticeship training programs in addition to publishing our
magazines) and I recognized this a long time ago. And when we were designing
this magazine back in 2001 (the first issue was published in March of 2002),
our vision included adults as well as children.
We recognized that, in fact, young people and adults who went to school
could have the more difficult task in employing interest-based, learner-directed
education. That’s because most of us were limited by our schooling and continue
to be limited by a society that still clings to standardized, classroom-based
education. On the other hand, children who have never been to school don’t
have to deschool themselves or be taught how to learn – they just do it
naturally, with a little bit of assistance from adults. (Knowing when to
help and when to keep out of the way becomes easier after we’ve deschooled
ourselves, of course.)
So I welcome this new reframing of the idea of unschooling to include
adults. And I think that home- schooling families would do well to actively
support this broadening of the word’s usage. Maybe some credibility for
adult DIY learning will trickle down to more respect for our children’s
ability to self-direct.
Academic and motorcycle repair entrepreneur Matthew B. Crawford writes
in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft that the way we come to know
a tool is by using it, and recognizes that the task of getting an adequate
grasp on the world “depends on our doing stuff in it.” He was referring
to adults, who benefit from regaining our curiosity, trusting our ability
to learn by doing, and not separating the world’s store of knowledge into
silos. In addition to the other benefits, hacking our education alongside
our children makes us good role models for their independent learning. Conversely,
we can learn from them how to move beyond the limits of formalized education…no
matter what word we choose to describe it.
Learn More
Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything by
Kio Stark (Kio Stark, 2013)
Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands,
and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will by Dale J. Stephens (Perigee,
2013)
Better Than College: How to Build a Successful Life Without a Four-Year
Degree by Blake Boles (Tells Peak Press, 2012)
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher
Education by Anya Kamenetz (Chelsea Green, 2010)
The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition,
and Get a Truly International Education by Maya Frost (Harmony, 2009)
Wendy Priesnitz is
Life Learning Magazine’s founder and editor, the author of thirteen books, a journalist
with over forty years of experience, and the mother of two daughters who learned
without school in the 1970s and ‘80s. This article was published in
2013.
