"Radical Unschooling" is unschooling fully, from the roots, from the principles, extended into all of one's life and being.
about the benefits of radical unschooling.
(and there's a good transcript there)
photo by Sandra Dodd
If I were to say unschooling looks like laying on a quilt at night, looking at the stars and talking about constellations or it looks like taking long car drives just for the sole purpose of having long winded discussions about every single US war in history, there would be 30 people who popped in and said that's not what it looks like at all, because their kids aren't interested in those things.
Unschooling isn't about where or how you learn something, it isn't about doing what everyone else is doing. It's about creating a rich environment for your naturally curious child to learn things that spark their interest. If you can do that, you'll be headed in the right direction.
Parents who are unschooling as a whole way of life, can discover what no school can find, and the core aspect of it is the family as a base for learning—for learning about family, for learning about relationships, and resources, money, food and sleep, and learning about laughter.
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."
2024 note: Truer and deeper than facts that can be discovered anywhere, anytime. Looking back, I see its importance more clearly. |
Today: The day this is scheduled to go out, Keith and I will have three grandkids from 8:00 to 1:00, and then the other two at night. There are logistics involved. The oldest grandchild is being paid to come back and help at night. Drivers, food, activities, re-staging between... Same goals as in the 2003 story above—fun, peace, contentment. |