Unlocking Learning Opportunities: Free Education from Schooling
I’m in the process of completely redesigning the HoltGWS website and am amazed at how much information and support for alternatives to school learning I’ve learned about and gathered over the decades (more on that in the next newsletter). But what I think is more important is how many new books, websites, apps, people, and other materials and places about learning without conventional schooling continue to gain influence in our culture. The Washington Post (October 31, 2023) reports that:
“Home schooling has become—by a wide margin—America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe …
“… Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, the Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases similar regardless of school performance.
“… The Post estimates there are now between 1.9 and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States …
“By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021 …”
Despite critics who lament that homeschoolers are not learning anything there is plenty of evidence that homeschoolers get into any number of jobs and colleges without conventional schooling experiences. The social proof that homeschooling works is, to me, the main reason it continues to grow. People see how other families teach their own and how those children fare and decide they can try it too. I’ve recommended many first-hand accounts about how and why families unschool (not turning your home into a school and your persona into a professional teacher). Jean Proffitt Nunnally has added her family’s story to this genre, with her well-written book, Success Without School: Unschooling my Children from Birth to College.
Jean writes that she and her husband had traditional public school and college educations: he has an electrical engineering degree and an MBA and her degree is in finance. Like many unschoolers and homeschoolers I know from the previous century (unschooling has been around a long time!), Jean learned about the benefits of breastfeeding from La Leche League and was disturbed by her pediatrician’s advice to stop it soon. Weighing that advice against her experience of calmly nursing her child in bed during the night made Jean reconsider expert opinions about child rearing. She then learned about homeschooling from a conference she attended and soon discovered unschooling. She writes about her unschooling experiences with candor:
“My patience was tested often. Despite my wholehearted resonance with the unschooling philosophy of freedom and self-directed learning, there were many times I slipped into a traditional teacher mode. That’s the model I had grown up with and was still culturally surrounded by: that children need to be taught, to be directed by a teacher of a parent. So I faltered in the beginning …”
Jean’s descriptions of her personal and familial struggles as they live and learn together in what she calls her “social experiment” will give heart to anyone seeking other ways to raise children outside the conventional school model. The details of how her son and daughter got into their first-choice college without ever going to school will be of interest to parents of teenagers, and her descriptions of how their family learned together can spark hope for those with young children. For instance:
“It was my intention to be more of an observer than a director, but I wasn’t always completely neutral. I certainly wasn’t above leaving books or materials around that I thought might pique curiosity. For birthdays and Christmases, I looked for practical gifts that might spark a line of exploration, such as a compass, flashlight, garden tool set, or recorder. The kids got plenty of toys from others, but I wanted them to know the value of real objects that could be enjoyed while also serving a purpose. Then I left it up to them to use those things or not.”
The Media and Me
On another issue, the ubiquity of media in our lives is astounding to me. In the 1980s and 90s we wrote about and sold books, such as The Plug-In Drug, about the dangers of too much screen time and how advertising is designed to influence us to continue watching. Today we all carry screens in our pockets or encounter screens nearly everywhere we look and, since young people in particular are targeted as the primary audience for advertising, there is a need for more critical approaches to what we are experiencing.
The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People, by Project Censored and the Media Revolution Collective, is a timely explanation and useful reference about how media shapes our lives and our abilities to determine what is actually occurring in the world. I like how its clear writing and examples give readers ways to think about and handle the steady stream of media messages they receive daily. The authors describe critical media literacy (CML) as
“… a liberators approach to making sense of the world. CML seeks to equip people with the tools to be independent media users, free from oppression or restrictions by others. We recognize that misinformation, disinformation, stereotypes, and problematic representations exist, but as media users we do not have to accept or internalize them. Indeed, an important part of being critically media literate involves creating media. Rather than just noting the problems with the media we encounter, CML encourages users to liberate themselves by creating messages and representations they with they found in dominant media.”
While the book is written for young people and contains in-chapter activities (“Think about the most recent text message you’ve sent …”) it seems to me it is most appropriate for mature teenagers and adults as its language is more academic than vernacular. For instance:
“Critical thinking encourages us to see that media representations are not reality; rather they are reflections or replications of social constructs that exist in real life. Social constructs tell us how society (the “social”) has assigned meaning (the “construct”) to objective reality. These constructs can shape our understanding of matters such as race, gender and sexuality, ability, and many other facets of individual or group identities.”
I hope there will be another book like this written for young people in elementary school and younger, as they too are aggressively targeted by media and parents need help and support to prevent their children from blindly accepting these messages. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful and useful book about how citizens can better understand how they are manipulated by the media in our society.