This article was published in Teacher Plus in January 2016 and is available here
http://www.teacherplus.org/2016/january-2016/our-experiments-in-unschooling
Our experiments in unschooling
4 January 2016
One Comment
Ramgopal K
“….. human violence, greed, laziness, and all the other sins
are not an ugly human nature breaking through the safeguards of moral
training and self-control, but the opposite. They are the result of
denying human nature, which is essentially loving, creative, empathetic,
caring… in a word, divine.” –
Charles Eisenstien
Since the time we decided to ‘unschool’ (which is what we choose to
call what we do) our kids, we have had a myriad reactions to our
decision. Ranging from outright shock and anger with us combined with
pity for our kids, puzzlement, and diplomatic rejection to genuine
concern and eager curiosity. There have been a variety of questions
around this move. So I thought it is perhaps best to organize this
article as a response to the questions we get asked.
First, I think it’s best to start with what we mean by unschooling –
like many other terms connected with ‘education’ (oops, that itself is
such a contested word!) ‘unschooling’ means different things to
different people.
What is unschooling to us?
Unschooling for us has meant a learning that is self-driven and
self-chosen that comes from active participation in natural living
experiences. We try to leave the children largely to themselves to
choose what they want to pursue and how they wish to pursue it. There is
very little in terms of a predetermined structure or curriculum that is
imposed. The ‘learning’ happens as part of the day-to-day living. They
actively participate in the household chores – cooking, fixing stuff at
home, working on farms, whenever we are on one, and making decisions to
the extent that they are able to. When they have questions around
something that comes up during the course of the day, we discuss them,
refer to books or research on the Internet to study it further. Whenever
we think there is a need to regulate or make a choice for them, we
suggest it to them and attempt to arrive at a certain agreed norm
collectively. For example, the regulation of screen time (movie,
computer time) or learning of Telugu and mathematics. Besides this they
pursue music and various hand crafts.
Why unschooling?
The understanding of how we want to raise our children and the choices
around their education has evolved along with our own process of seeking
a more meaningful and fulfilling life. It started with my quitting my
corporate career, because I was frustrated with it and never really
enjoyed it. I found my calling in teaching and working with kids. I was
involved in teaching at and running a small alternative learning centre,
founded and run by Gurveen Kaur, called Centre for Learning (CFL) in
Hyderabad. CFL was a place that nurtured active reflective thinking and
experimentation in learning, teaching. There was an ongoing engagement
to think about how education could be fun and personally meaningful. And
this question was always posed in the larger context of a more
sustainable, fairer, and freer society. Our children went to CFL until
last year and us parents have been involved with CFL as teachers,
volunteers, and parents since 2007.
It was during this time that I was also exposed to work around human
rights, social movements, and the impact of what we have come to see as
“development” on the lives of other people and the environment. We had
also come to spend a lot of time living and working with a friend who
lived with very basic amenities on a small farm away from the city.
These experiences dismantled a lot of learning and assumptions that I
had come to have and gave me a fresh perspective on work, learning and
living, and the idea of a good life. Some of which I summarize below.
I realized from my teaching experience with children that one of the
most preposterous and tragic myths of modern schooling is that a child
needs to be in a closed space five days a week, nine months a year for
ten years packed together with other children of the same age, being
told all the time what to learn, and how to learn and being monitored
constantly to learn all that they learn at school!
Even granting that what they learn is worthwhile (which is highly
contestable), whatever is learnt can easily be learnt in far less
stressful ways with a lot of fun, in far less time and without all the
control and threat mechanisms that a schooling process uses.
This environment that pushes things down on children firstly kills
any joy for learning. It utterly disregards the child as an active
learner, who has his/her own questions to pursue, in his/her own way and
pace. Since all that is to be learnt is decided from afar by a set of
adults and administered at a pre scheduled time and pace, studying
becomes a chore that is clearly demarcated from play. Very early, we are
conditioned to think of play as being wasteful and that learning cannot
be playful or that there is even any learning in play. After a few
years in school, learners seldom study because of their own motivation,
they study for exams, for certificates or when coerced to do so with
threats or rewards. Do you remember reading a science textbook in your
free time? Have you ever seen a school going child do that? Given the
choice, children would watch TV or go out and play.
We also realized that what is recognized as knowledge or worth
knowing is extremely narrow in school. The best of schools probably
teach academics well, but anything beyond it is either “extra
curricular” or given token symbolism, with the occasional workshop or
two – handicrafts, tailoring, maintenance and repair of your cycle –
does any school put the child who is interested and does this with great
skill and interest above one who does well in a written academic test?
Does any school nurture a student who wants to be a gardener or a
farmer?
Children, when left to themselves, enjoy the ‘extra curricular’
activities and will even perhaps choose to pursue these more seriously
if they are not subtly (through the grade system, segregation) and
explicitly (through admonishments) discouraged from doing them.
We felt that staying out of school would in fact give our kids the
opportunity of a wider exposure to things beyond academics. It leaves
children with more time to experiment, have far more diverse real life
experiences and social interactions.
So when we decided to move out of the city to live on a farm, it was a
natural decision for us to stay out of school. However this was not an
arbitrary decision that we took. We spent time discussing this with the
children and they know that if at any point they want to go to a school,
they have the freedom to make that choice.
How do they spend their time?
The experiment with unschooling began with our attempt to move out of
the city to a village to live there and work on a farm. Our children had
the company of two other kids who were also around their age and didn’t
go to school. A large part of their time was spent in play. They would
spend time coming up with games, formulate their own rules and then
improvize them as they went along. They would accompany us to the farm.
Sometimes choosing to help us in our work, sometimes doing something on
their own.
Over the four months that we stayed there they would from time to
time help us in the construction of the mud house that we were involved
in – mixing mud, plastering walls, sieving sand. Besides this they would
sometimes lend us a hand with harvesting, sowing seeds, planting trees,
watering plants, etc. Being on a farm they frequently encountered
snakes, scorpions, lizards, and birds. That would prompt them to read
about these creatures using field guides to identify snakes, tell the
venomous ones from the non-venomous ones. etc.
As a practice, we never deliberately kept the kids out of any of our
real life issues, unless we felt it would be disturbing for them to
handle. In the course of our time there, we had issues with the
neighbouring farmers for access, for which we had to engage with
government departments. The children would be part of the brainstorming
we had, accompany us to the collectorate office, be part of our
conversations. On another occasion we had to engage with illegal granite
mining on a hill close to the farm. So they would listen to our
conversations about the impact of the mining, hear us discuss possible
ways to handle it, see us meet people in the village, talk about
petitioning, etc. If I had to slot these experiences into different
subjects it would be social studies (understanding village social
setups, government bureaucracy functions), ecology and environment
science (food chain, diversity, natural farming, use of solar energy,
impact of mining on environment), biology (plants, animals, anatomy,
reproduction) …as you can see, the list of subjects is endless and the
learning was seamless.
Since we moved back to Hyderabad from the village, they spend three
days at an informal resource centre to which a few other home schooled
children go. There they get to take up self-initiated projects, pursue
study on chosen themes, and take up group projects. Depending on the
resource people coming in they get to choose to learn dance, art, craft,
theater, etc.
On the other days in the week they are home. Sometimes when we go to
work on a friend’s farm they accompany us and spend time there, else
they use the time in reading, visiting a library, or pursuing practical
projects around tailoring, crochet, craft using Internet to research and
learn. When we travel to conduct workshops or work on a farm, they
travel with us and are participating in ways that make sense to them.
The only scheduled learning that we do is mathematics once in a
couple of weeks and some reading practice in Telugu. Mathematics
because, while some of it gets handled during the course of the work we
do, some of it doesn’t and they have enjoyed doing math when they went
to Centre for Learning. Telugu because, while they are fluent in English
and read it, there is never an opportunity to engage with too much
Telugu literature in the normal course and we feel if they are at least
equipped with the reading skills they can later always take off from
there if they want to.
What about the company of other kids?
This is a very frequent concern that people express. That if children do
not go to school, they are going to miss out on socializing with other
kids their age. We found that while children do like to have other
children to interact with, this can easily be organized outside school.
Meeting kids over play in the evening, visiting friends, meeting other
home schooling kids and during travel to other places. However, we feel
that the need to be with other kids of the same age is rather over
estimated. Children can very comfortably relate to people of varied age
groups. It’s only when adults treat a child condescendingly or when they
talk down to them that the relationship doesn’t become a meaningful
one. Otherwise they can have quite an active, stimulating friendship
going with older people. In any case in a school the children are all
grouped according to age and so a child is almost always spending time
with children of only her/his age, which is rather restricting. And this
interaction too is very strongly mediated by adults most times. Not
having to be in school every day for 5-7 hours frees up a lot of time
for interactions with people in other forums like art and dance classes,
workshops, common interest groups, etc.
What about academic subjects like science, mathematics, social studies?
While we plan time for the children to do mathematics and practice
Telugu reading, we don’t really see the need to do the others as
structured subjects as yet, since ideas, concepts around these subjects
come up anyway during the course of our work. Whenever they have a
question around a certain topic, we pick up books to refer to or
research on the Internet.
For example, when we had a snake in our backyard, they got quite
interested in knowing how to identify snakes, recognizing venomous
snakes, responding to snake bites, etc. They picked up a Field Guide by
Romulus Whitaker and read it with great interest and excitement. When
they wanted to know how a petrol engine works, we talked about chemical
reactions and from there went on to talking about elements, atoms, and
molecules since they needed this to understand chemical reactions.
So in short, topics from science, social studies are learnt when
questions around them come up organically during the course of their
exploring life. And this way they have never treated them as boring
subjects with boundaries.
What are the challenges of unschooling?
For one, we had to acknowledge and accept that we (the parents)
ourselves are schooled in many ways. So there are times when there is
insecurity and anxiety. This cannot be a ‘method’ that we choose to
impose on our kids. This is a process where the parents have to be
collectively involved with the kids, constantly engaging in a dialogue
in what we are doing with them, so that they are not just being handed
down decisions but are a part of the choices we make.
Many a times we instinctively talk down to them, or don’t trust them
enough to leave them to themselves to pursue their paths on some issues.
So we realize it is as much a journey for us as parents where we need
to reflect on our own conditioning constantly and attempt to do that
transparently with the kids.
And given that there are not very many precedents around you,
sometimes we are uncertain and hence anxious. However, there is a big
enough community of people spread across the country who are taking to
this path and building connections with them gives a sense of
solidarity.
What reassures us is the active engagement the kids have in what they
do and learn and since they choose to do it, there are no hard lines
between play and learning. And they are doing it with joy, not with the
burden of an external assessment.
What’s the future? What will they do without certificates?
At this point we haven’t really thought about or chartered a clear plan
for the future. It is possible that they might want to go to a school
when they grow up a little and we will find them a school at that point.
If we feel that getting a certification is needed there is NIOS
(National Institute of Open Schooling) where one can register for 10th
class certificate examination. There are other options too like IGCSE,
which offers certification options for self-learners.
However at this point we are not very anxious about certification,
since we have seen a lot of people pursue their passions, find work
without the need for certifications.
Unschooling is a path, where the parents need to be open to unlearn,
reflect and submit themselves and their long held beliefs to
examination. This also means that we examine fundamentally our own work,
lifestyle, learning and values. There is no clear manual for going
ahead, we need to, along with our children, figure our way as we go
along, which means that we cannot use authority to impose things and
must be open to acknowledging mistakes to the children and correcting
ourselves.
Some interesting resources from which we have drawn understanding and inspiration for our journey.
- How children fail – John Holt
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0fgtvbMT7k – This movie of around 20 minutes explores possibilities for learning and living with a paradigm of Trust.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUoYAj7Nosg – A short movie, critically examining the levels of institutionalization of our lives and its implications.
The author is primarily a home maker.
He also spends his time participating in initiatives towards ‘Degrowth’,
working on permaculture/natural farming based farms, documenting health
impacts of nuclear power, campaigns for sustainability, and workshops
on ecology. He also engages in theatre with children. He can be reached
at knramgopal@gmail.com.
