When you're an adult, all you're learning isn't always going to be inside a building.
We don't really decide what happens every day
unless there's a planned outing or event we're going to attend.
Most days we just kind of finish up where we left up the day before on a project,
or sometimes we're just spontaneous.
Anita Rios-Sherman has six children under the age of 18,
five of them are on the autism spectrum.
Today the four youngest children will spend the morning at the local natural history museum
where they'll explore, read, draw and play with each other.
It's an educational philosophy known as 'unschooling'.
They decided to try unschooling when the local public schools
failed to meet the needs of her oldest son.
She found that he benefited from a totally unstructured approach to learning
and then tried the same method with her other children.
There are many things about the unschooling philosophy that work really well
with children that are on the autism spectrum.
A lot of it has to do with allowing them to explore their passions,
for them not have to earn that time to explore those things
'cause passions can turn into real life careers.
School is a place where children learn to be stupid.
And the process that makes them stupid, at least stupid in school,
is other people trying to control their learning.
That's John Holt, who's the intellectual godfather of the modern home schooling movement.
In a sense he's the moral leader of a movement in this country
on the part of a significant number of American families
to take their kids out of school and teach them at home.
There's a common perception that home schoolers are social conservatives
who want to shield their children from the modern world.
And it's good for the child to get out of the home, get away from mom and dad
and talk to other people because when they become adults, they've got that problem.
But Holt had a different view of the dangers of school.
In his ten books, Holt argued that children were capable of self directed learning,
possessing a natural curiosity that's quashed by modern schools.
They treat them like an empty receptacle
into which they are gonna pour whatever learning they think they ought to have.
In unschooling we say, people have been 'oh so you don't believe in schools?'
It's tricky because what John means by unschooling
is learning that doesn't have to take place at home and that doesn't look like school,
you know?
Because we're learning all the time.
Pat Farenga is the publisher of a magazine turned website that promotes Holt's philosophy
and the unschooling movement.
Schools believe, and most teachers believe childrenw ill not learn unless they are taught.
And in order to be taught the teacher must have x number of years of training
and they can only teach the subjects they've been trained in.
However, children and most adults when they're not in school and most kids when they're not in school,
learn holistically, they learn from all their senses and they learn from their experiences,
they're relationships
and to just bottle it up and say that now we're gonna learn math is artificial.
We were the only game in town in the 1980s and 90s.
Unschooling was pretty much a small niche.
Now though, you go online there's anything from Pagan unschoolers to radical unschoolers
and that to me is a great sign because there's a lot more of us!
But while unschooling is closely tied to home schooling, the two are not synonymous.
Farenga maintains a list of alternative schools that embrace some form of self directed learning.
I absolutely consider unschooling a spectrum, and that's, and again if you read John's books,
Freedom and Beyond, and Instead of Education in particular,
he talks about other places and, you know, where children and adults can be to learn
besides school.
One such example is the Houston Sudbury School,
based on the Sudbury Valley school model pioneered in Massachusetts in 1968.
Students here who range in age from six to seventeen play and learn with each other,
attend optional lessons in various subjects,
and each have an equal vote on how the school is run and money allocated.
I had been unschooling my daughter since she was born
but had encountered some limitations to that,
primarily how much I as a parent had to be involved and decision making.
So I became interested in this idea of
'was there a school that carried the same philosophy as unschooling
but gave kids some autonomy from their parents?'
And I had heard about Sudbury,
so the founders really came from the unschooling community here in Houston.
So in this environment the kids really can use the resources here,
the space, the community, the money and really create the life that they want.
You don't have to like, sit in one space like you just get to go wherever, I mean there's rules,
but you can just do whatever you want.
So for a long time in school I had a lot of problems with learning
and I was in a lot of special ed classes.
The unstructured environment has been probably one of the best things to happen to me in my life
to not be going to school all day and just be not happy with life.
You're not being in a classroom for days
with your mental health slowly deteriorating because of endless class work
you're going to be interacting with people and developing more social skills and responsibility
because everybody is held accountable for what they do here.
So in Sudbury you get a chance to really explore what you want to do
instead of just being forced to do stuff that really doesn't interest you.
There is just so much freedom.
In public school you kinda just like sit at a desk and listen to your teacher and that's it.
I definitely learned what public school wanted me to learn.
I listened in class, I was, like, payed attention, I got good grades
but here I learn but here I learn about what I want to learn about.
They even have a daily judicial conference where they deal with rule breakers.
During today's conference they sent a six year old out to investigate who crumpled up a print out-
Do you know who crumpled it up?
-but came up empty handed and decided to drop the matter.
While in a public school you'd have to go to a teacher or talk about something that happened
and typically they don't do a good job of sorting out a lot of those things.
In JC if something happens, even something small, you write that up and it gets talked about.
It's a very orderly thing, there's no arguments,
it's mostly about figuring out what happened and what can be done better.
Enrolling in a school like Sudbury can be really scary,
they're not getting what they'd be getting in a traditional education.
I was really afraid in thinking about this completely unstructured living for kids.
But in my experience these kids actually end up quite a bit more prepared, in some ways,
than someone who has had a traditional education
because they're actually participating in a lot more of the real life activities
that people do.
Making a huge decision for a group, with the members of a group,
when the group doesn't always agree.
While some parents might cringe to see their kids spending much of the day just hanging out,
playing video games or looking at their phones,
believers in the Sudbury approach maintain that the kids will learn what they need
when they need to do it.
I consider it a huge disadvantage to keep kids from these devices and this technology
which is what they need to be learning how to navigate in our culture.
Many of the kids who are interested in gaming and computers
are the kids who will grow up to be in those fields making the next big evolution in technology.
There's plenty of time to gain everything that you can gain at public school
right here at Sudbury
and a lot of students do and they actually learn it
as opposed to pretending to learn it for a test.
If the whole high school happens in six months at a Sudbury school
I still believe they learn it better than they would over years and years
of being forcedWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW to memorize it.
Like most Sudbury schools, this one is private with a 7 thousand dollar annual tuition fee
that they often modify to accommodate lower income parents.
We would love for the school to be available to families regardless of their income
but I would not want to enter into any kind of situation where we are accountable to the state.
What do we want?
School choice!
When do we want it?
Now!
While the school choice movement
has brought explosive growth in the number of charter schools nationwide,
unschoolers haven't felt much effect.
Homeschoolers haven't been able to take advantage of school choice
because there's no funding available for home schooling, that's not considered a choice.
That's changed somewhat with educational savings accounts
which allow homeschoolers in some states to set aside a portion of their tax dollars for education.
But Farenga is skeptical of government involvement.
When the school superintendent in the district where he lives
earmarked funds for homeschoolers like him in the 90s,
he eventually rescinded the money on the grounds that their activities were noneducational.
99% of the stuff we did in this house I'd say, with the board games behind me and projects,
there's a lot of different things that are educational.
If you believe that you're learning all the time, and we are learning all the time,
the world is your oyster.
But instead it's like 'oh no, that's not educational.'
Well who determines that?
Instead Farenga continues to advocate for unschooling as a social movement
focused on the rights and personal freedoms of children to find their own way.
Right now, the best thing you can do if you can't home school your child
is ignore as much of school as possible
and pay attention to what your child really wants to do
and work with that.