Don't trivialize "trivia"

What is trivia? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense.

SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Tara Joe Farrell,
in Cerillos, New Mexico

What John Holt didn't know

NOTE FROM SANDRA: I was speaking, not writing, so when you get past that stuttery beginning, it might flow.

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One thing that John Holt, when he was writing about Teach Your Own, he, too, had a curriculum in mind. He, too, was thinking, not "Teach a curriculum," but "Do this, instead of school, until school is out, and then you will be done, and it will be cool, you will have dodged the bullet, you will have missed out on the damage of school." That’s worthy all by itself.

But John Holt didn’t have any children. He didn’t actually do what he was writing about people doing. I respect him, I love his books, I am glad he did what he did. But then people come along, after that, and they do it. And then they shared that with each other, and then people did it better than they saw their families do it. Other families say, “Well, I wish I hadn’t done this; it was all right, but oh, I wish we had done this." And so entire lives of young people have been lived now since John Holt died, who didn’t go to school. And what those families discovered, that John Holt could not have known, is that if you live your life receptive to the learning around you, accepting of input, appreciative of the other people around you who know things, and of the resources around you, and trying not to be prejudiced against input like television and videogame and comic book, then what happens is, the parents' learning kicks back in. The parents, who probably had sort of calcified because of school, they soften back up, and they start to want to learn. And so they are learning along with their children, or in a parallel-play kind of way. They might all be in the same place all learning different things, sharing the good parts.

Family Bonding (recorded interview and transcript)
SandraDodd.com/familybonding
photo by Sandra Dodd
of Keith and Holly, 2015

Aversion and motivation

Bob Collier wrote:

After Pat quit school, he refused to read a book. He hates them. Thank you school for teaching my son to hate reading books. My son has never read a book since school and that was five years ago. He's had not even one minute of a reading lesson since school. Yet his reading is excellent. He developed his reading skills from reading videogame manuals and web pages of cheats and walkthroughs and from videogames themselves, some of which have an enormous amount of text in the gameplay that you need to be able to read to play at all.

Pat's motivation for developing his reading skills came not from being told it was something he needed but from his own understanding of how it would help him get what he wanted.

There's no more powerful form of motivation, probably.

—Bob Collier
(whose son left school at seven)

SandraDodd.com/game/reading
photo by Gail Higgins

Tricked by "knowledge"

Meredith Novak wrote:

A great deal of parenting "wisdom" is made up of things "everyone knows" because everyone repeats them back and forth, over and over. Like "you have to go to school to learn" and "children need rules". Some of the things "everyone knows" are completely wrong, but because "everyone knows" them, it's very, very difficult for people to change their attitudes even in the presence of evidence to the contrary.

It was really shocking for me to discover just how much of what I "knew" was a result of that repetition. I accounted myself an intelligent, thoughtful person, with strong "alternative" viewpoints, but most of what I thought I knew about parenting was based in a kind of cultural conditioning. The ideas in my head weren't my own. That's humbling.

—Meredith

SandraDodd.com/sugar
photo by Sandra Dodd

Compassion spreads

I didn’t know they would be so compassionate.

Partly they weren’t taught to be cold, by school prejudices.
Partly, they have had a gentle life, and they NOTICE harshness.

Being compassionate about kids' changes can help affect how adults respond to their own and each others' needs and changes.

SandraDodd.com/unforeseen
(notes for a presentation in 2005)
photo by Cally Brown

Bright and sparkly

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

Intellectually, I got unschooling all the way from the very beginning. The part that took more time was relationships and wholeness. When I got THAT, that is when things started happening in the direction that made unschooling work great!

The way I see it, often, is that there are multiple facets that make unschooling work best. The two biggest facets that go hand in hand for me are the absence of school and school think, combined with real working relationships with my kids. People can go and do one or the other and not let them overflow into each other, but it won't be as bright and sparkly, with the facet analogy.

—Jenny Cyphers

SandraDodd.com/gettingit
photo by Karen James

Grandparents might worry

To a question about elderly grandparents of young unschoolers, I told this, of my mother-in-law:

When Kirby, my oldest, was seven or so, his grandmother pressed me at dinner in a restaurant with this: "Are you planning to have him tested?"

"No."

"How will you know he's not behind?"

I was sitting there surrounded by relatives, and Kirby was there looking at me. I said, "I know he IS behind in some things, and he's ahead in some things. So are the kids at school." And I put food in my mouth. And that was that.
. . . . Simply saying, "Thanks, we'll keep that in mind" can go a long way toward soothing worried relatives.

SandraDodd.com/mha
photo by Sandra Dodd
of my kids and their paternal grandmother
in those days, 1993 or so

Helping teens

Written when Holly Dodd was 18 (2009), of when she was in her mid-teens:

Holly has had a few jobs. One was working at a skateboard and clothing store in a mall a few miles away. One was working at a flower shop just a few hundred yards away; she walked. But the shop had another shop on the air base, and sometimes she worked there, so she had a base pass and a key to both shops. When Holly's jobs require driving, we let her use a car. Some of her school-attending friends are told they can't get a job unless they buy a car first. It seems to be a way for the parents to say no and then blame the kids for it.

Some mainstream families press their teenaged children to get jobs, and shame them if they fail, while putting conditions on when and where they can work. The result is that getting a job was just one more "do what the parents make you do" situation, and the jobs aren't fun; they're an extension of school and of parental control.

When teens or young adults have chosen to have a job without desperation for money, and when they are accustomed to learning all the time and living joyfully, they are a different sort of employee.

SandraDodd.com/jobs/bigbook
photo by Cathy Koetsier

364 Days of Learning

Sandra, from a recorded interview:

When people who are running a school, charging money for people to send their kids there, where they will keep them there every day, like the law says, and they're reporting to the state, like the law says, to then equate themselves with what radical unschoolers are doing, it’s cheatery. They are cheating, They are trying to suggest that they can do in 180 days—whatever 6 times 180 is in hours—that they can take the state requirement of hours and create, in that time, what a radical unschooling family can create in 364 days of learning.

Amy:

My audio wasn’t being recorded properly at this point, but here I said something sort of snarky, like “You mean 363 days, because of 'Learn Nothing Day',” because apparently I don’t know how many days there are in a year, and Sandra said:

Sandra Dodd:

I took out the one already, it would have been 365.

Amy:

And we had a pretty good laugh about that. But eventually we got back to talking about the other benefits of unschooling—things that people don’t necessarily think of as "education."

SandraDodd.com/familybonding

Learn Nothing Day (July 24)

Calm and thoughtful joy

What advice do you have for families who are new to homeschooling?

Don't spend money at first. Read, meet other families, let your children have time to do what they're interested in, or what they weren't allowed to do before because of school. If they want to read or play in the yard or ride bikes or watch movies or draw or paint or play games, make that possible for them.

While the children are recovering, the parents can learn about what they want to do and why, and how. There is more online about homeschooling than anyone could ever read. Find the writers and ideas that make sense to you, and pursue that. Don't rush into anything. Parents should learn to be calm and thoughtful instead of panicky and reactionary. It's better for health and decision-making, and it sets a good example for the children. Don't live in fear when you can live in joy.

SandraDodd.com/beginning
photo by Cátia Maciel

Unschooling, Time and Energy

Someone asked:

Is Unschooling Exhausting?

My first thought is "compared to what?"

Is unschooling more exhausting than having a child in school?

Is unschooling more exhausting than doing school at home?



SandraDodd.com/unschoolingtime
photo by Sandra Dodd

How much does unschooling cost?

Unschooling is priceless. It cannot be bought. And "cost" is a difficult concept, so if you have an easy answer floating to mind, try to scatter it and look from many different angles.

If a child is in a private school, unschooling won't "cost that much," meaning no one will send you a tuition bill and a steady stream of fundraising requests and tell you what clothes and shoes you have to buy.

If both parents are working and decide one should quit work and stay at home with the children, will it "cost" a full-time income? In one way of looking at it, perhaps. But counting potential is a trap.

If a family values love and relationships, unschooling can pay off in a jackpot of closeness and joy that could hardly be possible with school in the equation, and could never be bought back with a thousand hours of expensive therapy down the road. (Maybe factor in the time savings of not spending a thousand hours sitting and talking about what you could've done differently, in addition to the cost of it.)

There's more: SandraDodd.com/unschoolingcost
photo by Sandra Dodd

What about "Educational" Materials?

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Resistance to things that look schooly or educational makes sense—we're promoting letting all those things go completely, especially at the beginning stages of unschooling, and we talk about how beneficial that can be for helping people to help them understand that learning happens all the time, that much of what is "taught" in school is learned naturally by unschoolers in the course of living their complete schoolishness-free lives.

I don't think it makes sense to criticize unschoolers for being anti-schoolishness. That goes with the territory.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/stages/materials
image by WordCloud, of words by Sandra Dodd

In 2013, someone said my facebook posts were negative. In those days, WordCloud could generate artsy data from a facebook URL (or any URL or document). The posts were candid (they were already there). The size is based on the number of times words were repeated, in that sample of 293 posts—a year's worth. Looked pretty positive!

A learning world

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Unschooling is not leaving kids to their own devices until they show an interest in learning a given subject.

Unschoolers do not expect interests to arise out of nothing.

As an unschooling parent I offer ideas, information, activities, starting points, and material to my children as opportune moments arise, not out of nothing, but out of the experiences that are created by mindful living in the world—walking in the woods, visiting museums, watching movies, reading books, going to the theater, swimming in the ocean. Every moment in life offers opportunities for learning and investigation.

. . . .
Unschooling families live in a learning world—no division of life into school time and not-school time.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/pam/learningworld
photo by Karen James

Real people, real purposes

All the writing students do for teachers is pretend, practice writing. Every report written in school is a practice report, not a real report. Kids are writing about something that's already known, for people who don't really want to know. . . . . If you write about what you have done at your house, and what you thought about it, that's reporting about family relationships, child development, the results of different methods and ideas put into practice. . . . . Writing to real people for real purposes improves writing in real ways.

SandraDodd.com/realwriting
photo by Sandra Dodd
(my handwriting, but not my writing)

School Days

One wonderful thing in unschooling is realizing you don't know whether it's a school day or not. It is evidence of deschooling.

Don't forget school days completely, though, because you can plan outings when the museums and playgrounds are empty. There won't be a crowd at the cinema.

Old information has new purposes.

SandraDodd.com/unexpected
photo by Cátia Maciel
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As kids deschool...

Kids who haven't been to school are different, but here is
Joyce Fetteroll's advice for helping kids deschool when needed:

The best thing you can do while they're deschooling is let them play. And help them play. Make play dates. Make sure they have things they enjoy playing with. *Be* with them. Find out why they enjoy something so much. When they feel free—rule of thumb is one month for each year they've been in school, starting from the time when you last pressured them to learn something—be more active about running things through their lives: movies, TV shows, books, places to go: ethnic restaurants, museums, monster truck pulls, walks in the woods, funky stores ....

Look for the delight in life and it will infect your kids. 😊 As long as it's *honest* interest and delight! If it's fake interest to get them to pay attention to something you think would be good for them, they're going to notice and avoid it. It's the tactic they've been awash in since kindergarten: "Learning is Fun!"

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/deschooling
photo by Cátia Maciel

Mixtures, swirls and solutions

"Yesterday" in 2004:

I still see "subject areas" everywhere, but I haven't taught those categories and prejudices to my children. Science has much more to do with history than geology has to do with microbiology, but in school geology, biology, astronomy and physics are all "the same thing," and history is different altogether. Yet the best parts of history involve the knowledge cultures had and how they put it to use, whether in shipbuilding or iron tool use, medicine or communications.

Holly asked yesterday about when people discovered the world wasn't flat. I told her there was no one date or century because people discovered different things at different times, and some were shushed up when they said the world was round, or that the sun didn't orbit around the earth. I also told her, "Ask your dad, because he's really interested in the history of science."

I noticed when I said it that I had "named subject areas," but I didn't feel too bad. She's twelve, and reading, and after all "the history of science" was never part of my schooling. A science teacher wasn't certified to teach me history, and vice versa. Only outside of school did I figure out that scientific discoveries were history, and that music was science, and that art was history.

SandraDodd.com/schoolinmyhead
photo by Kelly Halldorson

Snakes and wild berries

When a science-minded kid loves to take the dog down by the river and look for wild berries and snakes, some parents say, "My kid just wants to play. He's not interested in learning. He'll never learn science just playing."

Each little experience, every idea, is helping your child build his internal model of the universe. He will not have the government-recommended blueprint for the internal model of the universe, which can look surprisingly like a school, and a political science class, a small flat map of the huge spherical world, a job with increasing vacations leading to retirement, and not a lot more.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Unschooling and other marvels

My Favorite things about Unschooling

• You can do it at home!
• Your kids are there!
• It makes all of life a peaceful learning lab.

Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. Unschooling is the radical, philosophical end of homeschooling. Unschooling is living a rich life and letting learning drop into your lap and into your ears and mind while you laugh and listen to music and play games. Unschooling is seeing the magic in every day, and the joy in yourself and the people around you. If your children don't go to school, why should you bring school home? Be free! There is nothing in school that isn't also in the real world. (And if there IS, why would you be needing to know it if it doesn't exist outside?) Use primary sources, not textbooks. Look at real nature, not photos of nature in a book.

SandraDodd.com/marvel
"Unschooling and other Marvels"
photo by Laurie Wolfrum