Questions Are More Important Than Answers

Anna    General, Learning     comparison, curious, curiousity, enjoying, examples, fun, Learning, learning from life, questions, relevant, school, unschooling

Today I played a game: I asked questions inspired by the things around me.

The result? A list longer than even I had expected. I stopped playing after a few dozen questions, but the game does prove a good point: we can learn everything we need to know just by paying attention to what is around us.

Why is learning from your environment better, though?

That’s easy to explain.

Let’s say two children are learning about chlorophyll at the same time. The difference is that one child is coming across it through school, and the other child is curious about her environment.

Now, the child in school (let’s call him Jimmy) is being told this information by his teacher and his textbook. The facts are presented to him in a very concise, step-by-step way. Jimmy hasn’t thought about plant color before.

The unschooler (let’s name her Jill) is out having fun in the park with her family. Jill looks at the trees before she asks why leaves are green. Her parents explain and they have a conversation about it.

Both children are told the same information, but I’ll tell you why Jill is at an advantage: read more

Empowered Learning: Unschoolers Are In Charge of Their Education

Anna    General, Learning     comparison, education, empowered, Learning, lists, responsibility, schools, schools vs unschooling, unschoolers, unschooling

Unschooling can look like the lazy way out.

Compared to unschooling, schools require dozens of teachers and faculty, all with their own specializations, to make sure the school runs properly. The same level of complexity is impossible to replicate at home. There’s simply too much to do for one family to be responsible of.

The truth is the complexity is unnecessary, and even harmful.

Schools Create Educational Dependency

Schools accept responsibility for their students in several ways:

- Organization. Schools tell students what to learn and when to learn it.
- Control. Through an endless list of rules and regulations, schools limit activity to what is necessary for the school to run efficiently.
- Assessment. Students are graded, evaluated, judged, rewarded and punished according to their performance. It’s up to the school to tell others whether or not the student is learning.

Most importantly, schools take responsibility for the student’s learning. Schools base themselves around that responsibility. How will they control what the student learns? How will they know when the student is learning? How can they prove the student’s progress?

The tricky thing is that whether or not schools have good intentions, they can’t tell you what a student knows or what a student has learned. Only the student can. The only thing schools can be certain of is what the student has known at a given point in time, and what the student has been exposed to while in school. Schools cannot guarantee a student’s knowledge. No one can.

However, that lack of guarantee itself isn’t the problem. read more