Is Educational Freedom Really So Hard To Understand?

So by now anyone involved in the homeschooling community has heard about the homeschooling piece produced on Good Morning America, which was specifically about unschooling. If you haven’t seen the video, here’s the link.

After this aired, they received such a response, they had the parents back on and they were able to explain a bit more about unschooling and what they do. Here’s the link for that interview.

Then Joy Behar interviewed them which gave them yet another chance to explain their view of the unschooling philosophy. Here’s the link to the Behar interview.

All of this created a lot of action online. What I found most interesting is how so many people were making definitive judgments about a topic based on a 5-minute news story based on a single family.

The judgmental people exhibited no inherent curiosity to learn more, to dig into the topic further in order to get a broader understanding of what to them was a completely new idea about learning and education.

And that in itself says all we need to know about the present-day state of education. Our system teaches students to react exactly in this manner. To listen to a 5 minute lecture from the "teacher" who is the "authority" and supposedly gives them everything they need to know about the topic.

However, I know there are those out there who do understand that learning about something new takes time and requires looking at a variety of resources.

So that’s why I wanted to do these interviews, to create a fun and comfortable place where people could grab just a glimpse of what it’s like to live with lots and lots of educational freedom and see how differently it plays out in each individual family.

Many people who have responded to my interview request are self-proclaimed unschoolers, but the most important thing is not unschooling, it's freedom.

Freedom is what creates the specific educational environment that works well for each family.

That’s the main lesson I would like for the general public to learn.

2 comments:

Linda Dobson said...

Excellent and right on, as always...thank you (on behalf of a whole bunch of un/homeschoolers who don't know I'm speaking for them, and who would probably be very bent out of shape if they did ).

Norma Jeanne said...

You can speak up for me any day Linda! And Deb - thanks for always saying what needs saying!
I was, unfortunately, not that surprised at the knee jerk reactionary negativity. That seems to be the instant reaction to anything out of the mainstream these days. Our educational system does not encourage curiosity, and in fact punishes those who display any! Thanks again!