General happiness

Pam Sorooshian wrote, in a discussion on December 5:

Our goal as unschoolers isn't 'have fun'—that's not ambitious enough. That's good as a goal for a birthday party, but not for parents who have taken the responsibility for helping their children learn. We are aiming for more than that—we are expanding our children's horizons and helping them deepen their understanding of all kinds of things in the world.
. . . .

Learning is intrinsically satisfying and so a child should feel generally satisfied and happy if his/her life involves lots of opportunities for learning. I think general happiness is a good gauge of whether things are going well...but to say that our purpose is to have fun is to vastly understate and mislead about what we're doing.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/pamsorooshian
photo by Sandra Dodd, of the peel of a little orange that came off all in one piece
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A philosophical shift

People don't become really good at unschooling without changing the way they see themselves and the world. At the core of it, I think there is a philosophical shift that has to happen. Because people want to overlay unschooling on same old business-as-usual life it doesn't really fit very well; you have to remodel the house a bit.

(Not literally a house; not literally remodel. That was from a recorded interview so I can't edit it now.)


SandraDodd.com/interviews
photo by Sandra Dodd

Your role is...

"Your role isn't to set up a path for them to follow but to set up the environment for them to explore."

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joycefetteroll
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Food for Thought

Starting from food, moving to learning...

There's another aspect past the fact that hungry kids are cranky.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs says a person who is hungry cannot learn, so for unschooling I think that could be the very first consideration.

When a family doesn't consider learning the primary goal of unschooling, things can disintegrate pretty quickly. YES, once you get it going kids are learning all the time. But if a family starts with the idea that learning is happening all the time, they might never quite get the learning part of unschooling going. And in that case learning will NOT happen all the time. It's subtle but crucial.

From a discussion at Always Learning, in 2011
photo by Sandra Dodd
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God speaks through light

I got a daily calendar in India, each page having a different picture of Ganesha and a quote. One is:

God talks to His devotees through intuitive feeling, through friends, through light and through a voice heard within.

I really like that intuition and "a voice heard within" are separate. Having grown up Baptist, "friends" were often considered to be the devil for sure. But best of all is "light." Inspiration and clarity, no doubt, but things look different in different lights.

SandraDodd.com/spirituality
photo by Sandra Dodd, of figurines brought home from India last year

History

No one could make a website, or a book, or a library or a university with all the history you will come across in your life. Frolic! Delve.

Catch it in your peripheral vision. Learn it in relation to cooking or automechanics or learning which plants came from other countries when, and why. Why were airplane plants popular with Victorian ladies and with hippies? And the Victorian ladies couldn't have called them airplane plants, so what did they call them? And why did they have them? And what does NASA think of airplane plants? They're #1 on NASA's list! But wait... that's not just history. It involves geography, home decorating, botany and the space program. Don't stop 'til you get enough.

SandraDodd.com/history
photo by Sandra Dodd
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The flow of words

Words are like all the oceans and rivers in the world, like the rain and snow. They are insubstantial in a way; they can become solid, as these on this page are, or they can be flowing, as in a song or rhyme, or they can dissolve into the air. They can come crashing against you or knock you down. They can erode trust and love, as water can erode a cliff. They can soothe and heal and cleanse.

There are always more words to choose from and rearrange as you wish, and you can produce more and more new combinations until you're too old to remember how to do it, if you live that long.

Make choices when you use words. . . . Speak from your heart and your thoughts, not from your hurts or your fears. Use your words for good, for nurturing. Use your words to protect the peace of your home. Keep your words to yourself sometimes, but other times be so courageous that you put some words out there as a warning and a fence between you and those who wish to harm you with their own outflow of dangerous words.

Don't waste your words.

Build gifts from words.

from "Words" in The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Jessica Sexton, of Gioia Cerullo and Kirby Dodd,
in San Diego, September 2011
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