All of the days

Q: How will you know if they're learning?

A: Teachers need to measure and document because they need to show progress so they can get paid, and keep their jobs. They test and measure because they don't always know each child well.

Parents know a child is learning because they're seeing and discussing and doing things together every day. Not five days a week, or most of the year, but all of the days of their whole lives.


SandraDodd.com/faq
photo by Sarah Lawson
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High, low or average... (Don't ask.)

Of all the things I believe strongly, one that has changed my life as profoundly as any one other belief is my personal knowledge that test scores can and do (can't fail to) affect the treatment a child receives at his parents' hands. High scores, low scores, average scores—no matter. Parents cease to treat the child as his original, known self and color him soul deep with that number.

My life would have been different. My husband's life would have been different, without those 5th and 8th grade ITBS scores. I venture to say without even knowing who is reading this that your life would have been different, and specifically I believe your life would have been better, had not you been branded with a number on your "permanent record" (there's a big mean scary joke, the "permanence" and important parts) as a young innocent ten or thirteen year old full of potential, at some unknown point on a learning curve that might soon be at its settled-out level, or might just be beginning.

SandraDodd.com/testing/tests
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Random efficiency

Unschooling is a way to homeschool, but without the schoolishness. Things can be learned in whatever order they come along, and the learner will eventually connect all the information he has gathered, but maybe not in the same way or in the same order as the assembly line would have had him do it. —Sandra Dodd

Shockingly efficient
photo by Kristy Hinds

Actually seeing it

Q:  How can families transition from more traditional methods of education to an unschooling approach?

A:  Unschooling involves seeing the world in a different way. Sometimes formal homeschooling families do some deschooling, but when switching to unschooling, more and different deschooling is needed, especially for the parents who have been involved in school and teaching and defending schooling for probably 20 or 30 years. The kids will be ready to unschool before the parents, usually.

It would help to be in contact with other unschoolers at playgroups or on the internet, and to meet unschooling families with children of various ages. It's difficult to imagine it, so it's easier to actually see it.

This new way of seeing the world involves seeing music in history, and science in geography, and art in math, and not talking about it. The last part is the hardest part.

I don't mean never talk about it. I mean don't say "Oooh, look! Science!" Once a person knows science is everywhere, and everything is connected to everything else, there will be nothing to talk about except the topic at hand, or where they're going or what they're seeing. The learning will happen without being labeled and sorted out. The labeling and sorting can prevent learning.

SandraDodd.com/successful
photo by Ester Siroky
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Keep learning

We don't know what our kids are thinking about what they're watching, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling in their lives. And we don't need to know. It does help for us to keep learning, too, ourselves, so we have more confidence that they're learning.

SandraDodd.com/deschooling/
photo by Janine Davies

No assembly required

My favorite definition of unschooling is providing an environment in which learning can flourish. School prescribes what should be learned, and in what order. Then they build an assembly line, and put all the students on it. The reward those who get through easily, and punish others. School at home is like an assembly line for one.


Learning for Fun: Interview with Sandra Dodd
photo by Sandra Dodd, in an antique shop,
in Ashford, Surrey
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He will learn.

When a child’s life is full of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, people and places, he will learn. When he feels safe and loved, he will learn. When parents begin to recover from their own ideas of what learning should look like (what they remember from school), then they begin a new life of natural learning, too.

a 2012 interview at Mommy-Labs
photo by Sandra Dodd
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