A world of input

There is an artistic motif known as "the tree of knowledge." I don't know how old it is, but there are also artists' trees known as "tree of life" and sometimes they're very similar.. . . .

Thinking about this concept though, in light of my children's never having gone to school, has brought lots of thoughts welling up in me about our culture's worship of books, both in what's good and understandable about that attitude, and also of the ways it has been and continues to be harmful and unreasonable in light of Howard Gardner's writings about multiple intelligences and of the "information age," which gives even non-reading children access to a huge world of input.

SandraDodd.com/bookmotif
image inked in by Sandra, but black-and-white art is from an old bookplate
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Does TV create violence?

Deb Lewis wrote:

Does TV create violence, really? Maybe guns create violence. Knives. Baseball bats. Hammers. Axes, shovels, saws? Rope? Dynamite? Sharp sticks, rocks? Maybe it's language causes violence because most killers spoke. Maybe it's books. Clothing? Day time night time wind rain snow trees birds frogs.

For lots of kids, even the bad guys on TV are nicer than the real life crazy people they live and go to school with.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/t/violence
photo by Tara Joe Farrell
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The page also has this quote:

"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"

—Dick Cavett

Not what, but why?

When someone expressed shock that unschoolers felt TV was okay in any amount, Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

I wouldn't say that books are ok in any amount because it isn't *what* a child is doing that's important, it's *why* the child is doing it. A child who reads all day long because he has many options and his parents appreciate the value in choosing what you want to do is in a good place. A child who reads all day because his mother picks at him constantly when he's in her presence isn't in a good place.

I feel that TV is a resource like any other and that given the freedom to do so kids will use it when they need it and not use it when they don't, just like any other resource.

—Joyce Fetteroll

["TV" could be video, games, YouTube...]
SandraDodd.com/tvchoice
photo by Heather Booth

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

Ideaflow

I was studying education in the early 1970’s, having wanted to be a teacher since first grade. The university was a hotbed of radical new thought about learning, spirituality, the value and valuing of the human life and spirit. I was in my late teens, and eager to take my turn at trying to change the world. We read all the then-current discussions of classroom failure—James Herndon, A.S.Neill, Jonathan Kozol and John Holt—and I lived and breathed in their hopeful vision of the future of free schools and open classrooms. I taught hard, and after six years I quit. I never did quit learning, though.

Newer John Holt books were waiting for me fifteen years later, when my firstborn son was expressing his distaste for organized activities and formal learning.

While I was making him little medieval costumes and taking him to feasts and tournaments where I set him down to play with his collection of could-have-been-medieval wooden and clay and metal toys, he being part and parcel of that ongoing work of performance art which is the Society for Creative Anachronism, I started to think that maybe school wasn’t going to benefit a child who was resistant to group control and already surrounded by learning opportunities which my distant impersonal gurus of education would have approved. Homeschooling seemed part and parcel of the respect for individuals and the attachment parenting which had flowed so freely from my previous experiences.

SandraDodd.com/HippieShirt
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Experiencing direct learning

I am so certain that learning comes from experiences and touching, hearing, seeing, smelling and tasting that in light of natural learning, books seem flat and dry.

SandraDodd.com/r/hollydodd
photo by Sandra Dodd

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

What is this for?

Years before we had children, I was telling my young husband-to-be that in school the only math I liked were the "word problems." He said those are the only real math problems in text books. That was the real math. The numbers sitting already in equations and formations were the solutions to unstated problems, with only the arithmetical calculations left to be done.


I remember that moment vividly. I was in my late 20's and hearing for the first time what "mathematics" meant. I had asked my teachers all through school "What is this for?" and "How is this used?" and they rarely had an answer beyond "Just do it," or "It will be on the test."

SandraDodd.com/math/unerzogen
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Patience

In 1997, someone asked how unschooling moms stayed patient.

Other moms have told me they think I'm patient. It makes me feel guilty because I have the internal list of all the times I've blown it, but a few things have helped me.

The biggest was Adult Children of Alcoholics, an al-Anon group. I went to meetings for four years and learned a lot of calming and encouraging things. One of those is to remember what I wanted and needed as a child. Then I try to give those things to my children. I don't mean toys or books. I mean listening, and smiling, and joking, and letting them climb on stuff even if it made me nervous, and not making such strictly-to-the-minute rules like "be back at 5:45 or else" and other arbitrary control-junk. One of the quotes/sayings from that learning-time is "How Important Is It?" and thinking that little mantra can help a ton all by itself. If we waste our energy and our relationship with our children on how they wear their socks and where they keep their toothbrush between times, there's nothing left for important things. I try to save it for important things, and I try not to be the defining judge of what's important. There are things the kids consider very important, and I force myself (at first, until I calm myself and remind myself to give) to pay attention to their stuff too. No "That's nice dear" while I ignore them. When it happens, occasionally, that I've done that, I feel bad and I sometimes go back and say, "Tell me again about that game. I'm sorry. I wasn't really listening."

Next biggest influence was La Leche League. There I learned that children have within them what they need to know, and that the parent and child are a team, not adversaries. It reinforced the idea that if you are loving and gentle and patient that children want to do what you ask them to do, and that they will come to weaning, potty training, separation from mom, and all those milestones without stress and without fear if you don't scare them or stress them! Seems kind of obvious, but our culture has 1,000 roadblocks.


From having studied meditation and Eastern religion, I learned the value of breathing. I think what it does is dissipate adrenaline. I remember in the 1960's and early 1970's it was Big News that yogis could *actually* slow their heart rates at will! WELL duh. People had been doing it in church (those who cared to actually "be still and know") for hundreds of years, but nobody thought to wire up contemplative Christians.

When people (parents or kids) are agitated and are thinking for a moment that something has to happen JUST THIS WAY and RIGHT NOW, breathing helps. Deep breathing, slow, and full-as-possible exhalation. This is, in Western terms, "count to ten." Calm down and let the adrenaline go. Some people have biochemistry that's not easy to control, and some people count too fast.

SandraDodd.com/parentingpeacefully
(read aloud as an intro, in the recording at the bottom of the page)

photo by Sandra Dodd of the neighbor's tree seen through an inch-thick piece of ice from a bucket of water on a cold day
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Dodd-house Unschooling, 1994

What is below was written in 1994. I wanted to make it easier for other families to understand and try unschooling, and have been doing that ever since.

Our daily plans are nebulous, and although we might schedule a trip to the zoo or a papier-mâché day (something that takes a clean table and a lot of setup and no big interruptions), we don't have something scheduled on most days, and we don't "educationalize" trips to zoos and museums and such. We just go, and what we read or see is discussed, but not in a scheduled, checklist way.

There are several ways that I get ideas and resources. I have e-mail friends. I have a few local friends who homeschool but the homeschool scene is too structured for my tastes. I'm a member of the state organization and I get some good ideas from their newsletters. When I was beginning to homeschool, I got reassurance from a friend who has four older children. Her philosophy is that as long as they know things by the time they go on dates or get married, it doesn't matter how soon or in what order they learn them. Family Fun Magazine has some good ideas and I have some books on arts and science projects. Nothing has helped as much as reading Growing Without Schooling.



SandraDodd.com/pinkcrayons

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Update, 25 years later:

Earlier this week, Keith and I were at the old house (the house we were in when kids were young) watching Ivan (Marty's baby, who's 16 months old). I commented on the brick floor I had put in the entryway, and said I don't know how I had the energy to do that, but I liked the pattern, and it was still in good shape.

The friend mentioned above is Carol Rice (with the four kids and the good advice). Just recently, for a few months, she and Kirby were both working at Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless—she as a permanent employee, and Kirby as a contract IT guy.

Osmosis and television shows

A cranky person wrote to me:

I do unschool but I obviously do not subscribe to your radical view of unschooling where children are expected to learn by osmosis and television shows.

To the Always Learning discussion list I wrote:

When the environment is rich, children learn by osmosis, if the membrane through which ideas pass is their perception of the world. What they see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think becomes a part of their experience, and they learn. And they learn from television shows, movies, paintings, books, plants, toys, games, movement, sports, dancing, singing, hearing music, drawing, sleeping.... as if by osmosis, they live and they learn.

SandraDodd.com/tv
photo by Sandra Dodd of a tractor covered in lights
Albuquerque Bio-Park's "River of Lights," 2011

Any old thing

Ronnie Maier described strewing beautifully:

"Strewing involves making a wonderful variety of resources available to your kids with no expectation or requirement that the resources ever be used. These can be books, toys, or supplies left casually on tables or in bathrooms or presented quietly or with fanfare directly to your child. They can be posters hung on walls, craft or music or gaming activities that *you* start, Web pages left open on the computer, magazines subscribed to, alternate driving routes taken, etc. It is SO fun to do, and it creates an environment of discovery and fun in your house. The things you strew can be in support of interests your son has expressed or about just any old thing you think of."

SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd

Proxy baby

When Kirby was a baby, about ten months old, I was at the library with him. A woman whispered questions to me, in the shelves of books (the stacks). Her daughter had married a foreigner and moved to Denmark. They had a baby she hadn't yet met. She was asking me how old Kirby was and whether he was average size and what size clothes I thought she might send.

She was sad and said by the time she saw her grandson, he would be walking and she was missing all the baby days. We were nice with one another, and said bye, and I walked away.

But after maybe five or six steps, I turned around and hurried back to find her. I said "Do you want to hold him?"

She got tears in her eyes and nodded and she hugged Kirby with her eyes closed and rocked him a little bit, kind of got the feel of him, and the smell of his head, which wouldn't have been as good as her own grandson's, but it was better than nothing.

When she handed him back she seemed much calmer and better. It was therapeutic for her. And I've always been glad that I thought of it before it was too late.

SandraDodd.com/kirby
Keith probably took this photo.

For the record, this happened in the stacks by the north wall of what was then called the Wyoming Branch library, behind Hoffmantown Center, in Albuquerque. It was surrounded by rose gardens. Now it has been renamed the Tony Hillerman Library, but in 1987, it wasn't called that.
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The value of input

When someone wrote, "We don't value TV, we live our values by not having one," I responded:

I value input, information and learning. I've seen immeasurable learning in my kids and others from things they have seen in movies, on TV, in online videos, heard on the radio, read in magazines, picked up in conversations with others, heard in public presentations or from tour guides or from books. To eliminate some part of that input out of fear would have made my children's world smaller.

SandraDodd.com/connections/
photo by Karen James

Climbing mountains and baking pies

In response to someone saying her child would rather take the easy route than try something tough, Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

It's human nature to avoid what we feel is a waste of time, energy and resources.
It's also human nature to pour energy into what we find fascinating.

If someone is made to climb a mountain, they'll find the easiest path, and perhaps even cheat.

If someone desires to climb a mountain, they may even make it more difficult—challenging—for themselves if the route doesn't light their fire.

If it were human nature to go the easy route, I wouldn't be sitting here writing out a response! No one would write a novel. No one would climb Mt. Everest. No one would bake a cherry pie from scratch. No one would have kids.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/pressure
Photo by Sandra Dodd, of Holly Dodd riding a steam train restored and largely operated by volunteers. The easy route would have been for them to stay home and read books and watch movies about trains.

Providing entertainment

In response to:

How did you get comfortable with not racing around and "providing" entertainment for your children?

I wrote, in 2002:

Gradually!

I still provide entertainment for my children (and they provide things for the rest of the family too, because (shhh...) they think that's just how people in families are! They don't associate it with unschooling directly.

SandraDodd.com/addlightandstir

photo by Marty Dodd, earlier this year when he was out entertaining his girlfriend on a road trip because she was unexpectedly unemployed and he had a broken arm
P.S. The quote up top is from 2002. I'm still entertaining my kids 11 years later. The other day I subscribed to the last season of Breaking Bad, on Amazon, for Holly, who is 21 and lives at home. New episodes appear after they're aired.

Yesterday, Marty (24, and living separately now) and I were talking about a set of humorous history books I recently bought for him and me (matching sets), and about when Hannibal's Carthaginian army attacked Rome from the mountainous northwest. It was all about entertainment. Marty's current enrollment in a world history class is a trivial sidenote.

The world changes slowly

The world changes slowly, but it tends to stay changed! Flight was not possible before balloons. Food storage and transportation were difficult before canning and refrigeration. Without today’s wealth of books, videos and online information, home learning would be much more difficult. We can live in the light of our shared knowledge and ideas, in freedom and with confidence, at the cutting edge of education’s future.



SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo by Sandra Dodd; a hot air balloon visible out our back gate

Confidence grows

Any child who has learned to read without "being taught" (and I have three of them) cannot doubt that he can learn other things without finding a teacher and following a prescribed course.

If a child is past this point when unschooling begins for that family, there might be another skill instead of reading that will fill the need to see natural learning. For those whose children are younger, parents and children together can learn things in ways that don't involve reading. Parents can learn to recognize learning in its natural habitat (outside of books), while children develop confidence in their own ability to decode and decipher systems and situations large and small.

Confidence in children grows from looking back at what they've learned. Parental confidence grows from seeing in their own children what they've only read about, or heard, of others' children.

Top quote from: The Deeper Effect of a Child Learning to Read: Confidence (SandraDodd.com/r/deeper)

photo of Sophie, by Holly
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Hearing their voices, seeing their eyes

When deciding whether it's worth the money to go to an unschooling conference, factor in the money you saved by not buying a curriculum for each child. Count it as research for the parents, a learning experience for the children and a vacation for the family.. . . .
Meeting other unschoolers, hearing their voices and seeing their eyes will give you a connection that books and websites cannot provide.

SandraDodd.com/conferences
photo by Tim Mensch, December 2011

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I realize that not everyone can attend a conferences,
but for those who can, it can be a great advantage. —Sandra

The urge to control

If the "control force" is great with you, maybe use it to control your own clutter or organize your papers or rearrange your books or clothing. File your photos and negatives. Scan some stuff. Don't turn that awful control beam on people you love.

SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Sandra Dodd
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