Seeing what learning is

When a newcomer was very confused, Meredith Novak wrote:

The basis of unschooling comes from seeing learning as a substantial human drive and seeing that learning depends absolutely on the perceptions of the learner. The second part is what makes everything tricky - you can't control what someone else learns. At best you can work on seeing the world from another person's perspective and try to create an environment which helps that person learn.

It can help a lot to think about how people learn via their hobbies. In a way, that's what real life unschooling looks like: people learning through hobbies. It usually involves a lot of playing around - and the playing around parts are just as important to learning as the parts where you need to go look something up, or network with another hobbyist, or take a class or workshop to improve a skill.

One of the common parenting/educational myths is that it's possible to imbue children with "good habits" by making them do certain things over and over. It Seems like it Should work... but when you look at adults there's no evidence it does. The results are pretty random. It's not a strategy that helps people learn about the world.

—Meredith Meredith
July 2012

SandraDodd.com/meredithnovak
photo by Carolyn Vandenbusch Neves

One thing leads to something else

Mary Ellen (nellebelle) wrote, years ago:

Up to now, we have never had any video games in our house. It wasn't that I purposely avoided them, it was just something we'd never done and the girls had never asked for. I had a vague idea in my head that they were negative along the lines of TV and other electronic media. Generally, when video games make the news it is not positive. I had never before questioned these ideas. Lisa had mentioned playing a race car game at her friend's house. We decided to give the girls a Nintendo64 for Christmas. This morning I played Crusin World with Lisa. The game is full of famous landmarks. It is not totally realistic, but does match many real aspects of the countries you race through. While cruising Germany, I mentioned the autobahn. I don't know too much about it, except that people drive really fast there. This led us to consider mph vs. kph, which led to the metric vs. US system of measurement. I told Lisa that I had bought some stuff to help learn the metric system because I wanted to understand it better. She said, "We can learn it together".

It never ceases to amaze me how doing one thing can lead to learning about something else.

—Mary Ellen(nellebelle)

"Everything I really need to know I learned from video games and cheesy cartoons."
SandraDodd.com/t/cheesy

image respectfully lifted from
Launchbox Games Database

Real, present, thinking children

Sandra Dodd, 2014, commentary on criticism:

How parents can ignore their own real, present, thinking children in favor of vague negativity and scare stories is a mystery.

Unschooling is not synonymous with anything. There are people who "unschool" except for…", and who "unschool mostly," but if their priorities are learning and peace, then arbitrary rules and decisions made on fear are less likely to seem like good ideas.

If an 11 year old is bummed, it might be worth really looking at his side of things. Being a child's partner in exploring the world is valuable in more ways than people can imagine, if they haven't done it. If the parent sees the child as an adversary who should be limited and made to wait until he's grown even to spend his own money, there will be more problems than they can imagine.

SandraDodd.com/partners/child

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I've added that to the page Look Directly at your Child

The full text with background and discussion is here on Always Learning.

photo by Lydia Koltai

Touch

A mom once wrote, of babies:

Not only have they never seen, touched or experienced anything in our world—they also have no way of communicating thoughts, feelings or desires with anything more than frustrated cries, screams and babbling.

I responded:

There is touch. There is gaze. Have you never just looked into the eyes of your child, communicating? Have you not touched them soothingly, and felt them touch you back sometimes? They can tell the difference between an angry look and a gentle look.

Parents who didn't know touch was a real way to communicate could practice on babies, and then use it with older children, and partners.

For children to learn language, they need opportunities to hear words, and for people to pay attention to the sounds they make. Mimicry is good, with babies. Even before they can articulate consonants, they can probably copy your voice going up or down, and you could copy them back. Singing little made up two-note songs can be a good tool for communicating with babies. Copying touch is good, too. (Don't return rough touch with rough, though.)

SandraDodd.com/babies

Like Riding a Bicycle

Vickie Bergman, some of her nice analogy about unschooling being like riding bikes:

Your own bicycle is powered by your own legs, steered by your own hands. It stops when you stop, goes where you want to go. But it's not that you are always responsible for your own movement. You are not just left to figure it out for yourself. When you prefer to have some level of assistance getting where you want to go, you also have tandem bicycles and bike trailers available to you. You get to choose if you want help and what kind and how much. And your parents are ready to help whenever and however you want them to.

No matter which kind of bicycle you are on, there is no separation between you and the outside world. No window to look out. You can smell the real world, hear the real world, stop and touch the real world. You are part of the real world. There are paths to follow if you want to, but your rides are not limited to the paths.
. . . .

That is unschooling. It is not a model of education, but a way of life. It is recognizing that people learn from living, and there is no need to separate learning from living. Unschooling lets a family live together, learn together. It is built on trust among family members, and trust in human nature. Trust that children have a strong desire to learn about things, even if those things may not be on the short list of school subjects. Trust that, with your acceptance and support, your child will follow his own path, leading exactly where he wants to go.

—Vickie Bergman

More at: SandraDodd.com/bicycle
photo by Vickie Bergman

Seeing and living harmoniously

I don't really care as much about the definition of unschooling as I do about helping real individual families to unschool in a way that works, that can last, and not just be a temporary respite from school or curriculum, but that can be sustained and enlarging in and for their whole family. If learning stops where "parenting" starts, how will unschooling be "learning from life"? . . . .

It doesn't matter if no two families decide on a definition. But when I'm asked "How did you do that?" I'm going to be honest. It's not about academics. It's about having changed how I saw the world and children, and then living harmoniously with my children in a world I *know* to be filled with all the elements they need to thrive. I suppose someone could spend a lot of volunteer time telling people how to unschool without changing their attitude or parenting. I haven't seen that, though, because I don't know of any truly happy and successful unschoolers who have clung to traditional parenting. If it can work, no one who's doing it has come out and helped others do it that way too.


From a 2004 discussion on why unschooling isn't 'just' unschooling, or something
photo by Cátia Maciel

When to say no

Sandra Dodd, response in 2000 to: Can anyone explain to me "unschooling"?

It's like "just say no."

Just say no to school years and school schedules and school expectations, school habits and fears and terminology. Just say no to separating the world into important and unimportant things, into separating knowledge into math, science, history and language arts, with music, art and "PE" set in their less important little places.

Most of unschooling has to happen inside the parents. They need to spend some time sorting out what is real from what is construct, and what occurs in nature from what only occurs in school (and then in the minds of those who were told school was real life, school was a kid's fulltime job, school was more important than anything, school would keep them from being ignorant, school would make them happy and rich and right).

It's what happens after all that school stuff is banished from your life.

Several Definitions of Unschooling
photo by Rosie Moon

The whole set of everything

We didn't have problems with our unlimited turns, but it's because nobody ever played longer than he really wanted to just to keep another kid from getting on. Not even nearly. If Kirby knew he wanted to play for a really long time, he would offer Marty a turn, knowing Marty couldn't last so long. Sometimes I would appeal to one of them to trade out, but it was for real reasons every single time. "Kirby has to go to karate, so can he go now and you can play all the time he's gone?" or "Holly's pretty sleepy anyway, and wanted to play Zoombinis. Can she have her turn soon?"

As with so many other things (every other thing, maybe) in our lives, though, it wasn't that single slice that "worked," it was the whole set of everything. They trusted me because I had spent years being trustworthy. They knew there was no secret agenda, and that I really did want them to all have fun things to do, and that they WOULD get to be on the computer uninterrupted, soon.

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That was in the dial-up days. The world is better now, with more computers in homes, with wifi, with tablets. At the link below you can also read how Pam Sorooshian handled sharing a different way, when she had three children at home.

SandraDodd.com/sharing
Helping Children Share
photo by Sandra Dodd
(re-used, because it's from the days of the writing)

Exploring interesting things

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

What can we do to help natural learning along?

We can help our kids explore their interests. If they're exploring their interests, they're doing real world work that will provide feedback on how well they're putting their puzzles together. We can bring the world to them so they have access to new interests. They can't know they're interested in the Titanic or haiku poetry or sheep shearing if they don't know they exist.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/talk
photo by Sandra Dodd

Gather and glean

I've always felt strongly that unschooling should be about the ideas and not about the individuals. No one book, website, speaker or conference should try to be (nor be expected to be) everything for anyone, but unschooling parents should gather and glean what they can from all the real world around them. We don't need to all agree, or all be on the same list or at the same conference for families to learn and grow with unschooling.

SandraDodd.com/speakingLnL
photo by Karen James

A grid over which to lay other things

If someone knew almost nothing in the world but trivia relating to popular music for the past 100 years, that would make a HELL of a good grid over which to lay other things. And I don't think a thorough knowledge of pop music (in any culture or language) over this particular past hundred years, which saw the proliferation of recorded music available in homes, the advent of radio broadcasts, movies with music, television variety shows, transistor radios, cassette players in cars, CDs, iPods and cell phones that store a ton of music could help but create a timeline of the culture. Wouldn't songs from Marx Brothers or Fred Astaire movies remind people of The Great Depression? Can anyone hear big-band swing music and not also think of the hairdos and costumes? Does "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy" not remind anyone of WWII? Knowing some of the context of Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers brings up LOTS of stories about where those songs were first heard.

The lyrics of some of the songs make specific mention of historical events, and that could help dating things, too, if a person were trying to figure out what came first.

Any hobby delved into deeply becomes another portal to the whole world—real and imagined; past, present and future.

"Trivial" connections are real
video from Young Frankenstein, 1974
Directed by Mel Brooks
Written (in part) by, and starring, Gene Wilder

How unschooling works

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Schooling works by pouring expertly selected bits of the world into a child. (Or trying to, anyway!)

Unschooling works by the child pulling in what he wants and needs. It works best by noticing what the child is asking for and helping him get it. It works best by running the world through their lives so they know what it's possible to be interested in. . . . .

Real learning travels the child's path of interest, from one bit of information that interests them to the next. Real learning is self testing by how well it works in the situation the child needs it for. Real learning is about understanding enough to make something work.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/how
photo by Roya Dedeaux

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

The world in movies

Movies touch and show just about everything in the world. There are movies about history and movies that are history. There are movies about art and movies that are art. There are movies about music and movies that would be nearly nothing in the absence of their soundtracks. Movies show us different places and lifestyles, real and imagined.

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(Think "film" if you live outside the "movie" zone; think "streaming video" if you want, though that includes TV series, shorts and documentaries which will dilute the idea of a film designed to last a couple of hours, with a beginning and end. Artistically speaking, "movie" refers to one of those. Many of the advantages do apply to other audio-visual media.)

MOVIES AS A PLAYGROUND, as tools, as portals
The image is from "Searching for Bobby Fischer," 1993, about learning, parenting, mentors, talent, and a child seeing life. It's called "Innocent Moves" in the U.K.

Dinosaurs, tortillas, The Tick

Deb Lewis wrote:

We played at the river yesterday. We threw rocks at floating ice chunks until we couldn't feel our fingers anymore. We had a snowball fight. We went sledding. We watched "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and read about dinosaurs. We played Master Labyrinth and chess. We stood on our heads. We made peanut butter and bird seed surprise for the flickers.

Today we're going to Grandma's house. She's making fresh tortillas and we'll visit with Dylan's uncle because he's flying back to Anchorage on Monday. We'll probably watch a movie there, too. I'll make a pan of fudge to take along.

My real and happy kid says a lot more about unschooling than I could ever convey by analyzing human nature. If I'm afraid to talk about my real unschooling life, how will I single-handedly change the world for the better? I've printed out my super hero license and I've sewn my Tick suit. Now, Evildoers, Eat My Justice!

—Deb Lewis

and there was more: SandraDodd.com/day/debl
photo by Rosie Moon

That bird is not a flicker in Montana; it's a robin in Yorkshire. There's some brown, some red, some snow; slightly close.

Seeing people as people

Response to this question:

At what age did you begin providing regular social interactions with other children?

I will say "from birth" and then I will ask you to replace "other children" with "other people."

Tadaa!!!
Your problem is schoolish.
You're believing that five year old girls need to play with a dozen other five year old girls. If you turn 180 degrees away from the myth and fantasy of how many friends kids have at school, and look at the real world in which you plan to live, things will look different.

Find people to visit, find places to go where other people will be. Begin to see people as people, rather than as pre-schoolers or school-age, or second grade. Just practicing that will take you MUCH nearer to peace about interactions with other people.

SandraDodd.com/deschooling
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Teens can feel crowded

[Teens can feel crowded] by the new and real knowledge that the house is small and the world is huge.

Baby birds have no idea what's outside that nest.

Young children will occasionally find some corner of the house, some closet or a wall surface that was always covered by furniture before and they are not surprised that there are parts of that house they had never seen before. The house is everything.

Teenagers know they are meant to get up and go out. They're not happy about it, sometimes, especially when their house is a haven of love and sweetness and creativity, but their instincts kick in anyway and their perspective changes, very literally, and that nest seems like just a little wad of sticks on one little branch of one of ten thousand trees....

Crowded by their new awarenesses and raging hormones and their relative size (their rooms and beds are getting smaller by the day) and their collections of stuffed animals and action figures and Lego.

Sandra
(January 2000, with one teen and two pre-teens then)

SandraDodd.com/teen/crowded
photo of Holly Dodd on her way to a party

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This photo was in the Just Add Light folder for many, many years, waiting for a quote or topic it might slightly match.
Good enough.

Looks like playing

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Real learning looks very different from schoolish learning. Real learning looks like playing. Even when it matches something kids do in school (learning the names of the different clouds for instance) it still looks more like goofing around because it stops as soon as their interest is satisfied. They don't push on like they're "supposed" to. No, what they do is revisit it when the feel the need to build on it and they draw on it (though not necessarily making it obvious to us) to help them understand more of the world. *Everything* connects to everything else.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/jitters
photo by Cátia Maciel

The open flow of real-world sharing

from 2004, Sandra Dodd:

The best thing unschoolers can do is to unschool well. The best thing those who are interested in helping others come along the same path can do is explain what helped it work well.

Reading other families' personal stories, hearing about paths that didn't work well and others that did is what helped me when I was new to this, and that's what I've been involved in helping happen ever since—real unschoolers sharing their real experiences.

Some people don't want to share in public and that's fine. Some people share things in public that turn out not to be true, and that's not cool. But over the years, many hundreds of unschoolers who first found one another through AOL's message boards, or at conferences, or through e-mail correspondence have met other unschoolers in person, and each person must ultimately gauge for herself who to emulate or trust or to go to for inspiration or whatever. There is no central board certifying unschoolers or conference organizers or listowners. It's the open flow of real-world sharing.

In 2024 I'm still offering a hand.
SandraDodd.com/help
photo by Linda Wyatt

Visions of input

There was a time when the only way for a kid to get information from outside his home and neighborhood was books. (Think Abraham Lincoln, log cabin in the woods far from centers of learning.) Now books tend to be outdated, and google.com is better for information. If Abraham Lincoln had had full-color DVDs of the sights of other countries, of people speaking in their native accents and languages, and of history, he would have shoved those books aside and watched those videos.

When someone thinks books are the one crucial step to any further learning, then books and school have crippled that person's ability to think expansively, and to see what's unfolding in front of them in the real world.

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That was written in 2010. I would like to upgrade my imagined young-Abe-Lincoln to streaming services.

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SandraDodd.com/bookworship
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Texas, when DVDs were abundant