Unschooling America's Children

Unschooling Asks Public School Teachers to Examine Their Role

Sep 11, 2009

Understanding that education is more than simply learning information will help teachers refocus on their role as educators.

Teachers, parents, administration and even the President himself are all asking hard questions about how to improve the status of American education. Standards are placed, changed, reached and failed yet still the tough question remains: how can education improve?

With unschooling profiled in the news and drawing criticism from many for the lack of knowledge taught, teachers should be asking some tough questions about their own classrooms and what key aspects of learning are missing.

What is Unschooling?

Law 2 in “The Ultimate Educator” (NVAA, by Edmunds, C., K. Lowe, M. Murray, and A. Seymour, 1999) explains that adults will not argue with those things they thought up or figured out on their own. This idea works great in the workplace, but should be applied more often to the school system as well. Put more simply, children too learn best by discovery. This is what unschooling is all about – discovering the process of learning without the constraints of a specific set of information to learn.

While unschooling goes to an extreme, the lessons taught should be pondered by all educators and parents alike. How do children learn best? How should teachers organize the school day? What manner of learning any single idea is best for all children? Many parents over the years have turned to homeschooling in order to focus on the specific strengths of each child and allow them the best chance at learning, and many of these homeschooled children have gone on to prove their schooling a great success.

Understanding the Role of the Educator

The educator is not simply a person in charge of imparting knowledge to others. While at the end of the education process, students will have learned a certain amount of information, it is not this information that should be the main goal of the teacher. Indeed the close look at objectives and test scores has taken the focus off of the most important aspect of education today: the process of learning.

Children are born with a variety of learning styles and gifts, and while many teachers do tap into this potential in their students, most attempt to simply find a way around these traits in order to succeed at the goal of a specific set of information that someone else has deemed appropriate for each student at a specific age to know. While it is important that students know these fundamentals of knowledge, it is the ultimate focus on this information that has become the downfall of the American school.

So how do teachers and administrators improve the education that students receive? Take the emphasis off of test scores and start tapping into the creativity and beauty of the world. Allow students the chance to explore, discover, test and fail. The solution is not found in the next research-based curriculum but in the students themselves.

BNC101

The copyright of the article Unschooling America's Children in New Teacher Support is owned by Jennifer Wagaman. Permission to republish Unschooling America's Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.