Turning Learning on Its Head

WASHINGTON — For Pat Willette’s two young sons, Alexander and Nicholas Jones, living near a stream on 17 acres in central Maine offers infinitely more learning opportunities than any classroom.

The boys, ages 5 and 9, started a wildlife refuge. They watched their chickens produce babies, then observed the chicks growing up. They even slaughtered them, learning about poultry anatomy.

“They attempted to dig to the center of the Earth,” Willette said. They learned local geography through hiking and map-making near their mobile home, which is in the small town of North Turner.

Willette says she smiles every time anyone asks her if she is going to give the children the summer off. “Since we don’t give formal lessons and we don’t devise learning experiences for them, there is nothing to give them the summer off from,” she said. “Am I supposed to order my kids to stop reading, or order them to stop figuring out how much the toy they want to buy will cost?”

The Willette-Jones family is one of thousands across the country educating their children through real-life experiences, rather than in the classroom. It is an alternative known as “unschooling,” the approach that was used to teach Jessica Dubroff, the 7-year-old killed recently while attempting to fly cross-country.

“Kids start out in the real world, then we take them out of it, put them in school and teach them in a de-contextualized way--and then we worry because they can’t make the leap,” said Susannah Sheffer, editor of the magazine Growing Without Schooling.

“We tell kids: ‘School is where you go to learn,’ and then they come out and think the rest of life isn’t learning. A little child doesn’t distinguish between learning and living. We don’t say to a 1-year-old: ‘Now we’re going to learn about language acquisition.’ ”

Unschooling is an offshoot of the home-school movement, which emphasizes flexibility and learning at a child’s own pace. But unlike traditional home schooling, it rejects the use of a formal textbook curriculum and relies on encouraging a child’s own interests. Its adherents have grown gradually in number over the past two decades.

“The most important component is that the learning is child-driven, not parent-led,” said Suzanne Robbins of Fairfield in Northern California. She is unschooling her 8-year-old son and her 6-year-old identical triplet daughters.

“It doesn’t mean that these children do not choose to learn the basics, just that they may approach these subjects in a manner and time that are different from their peers,” Robbins added. “It is a lifestyle and philosophical choice.”

Jessica Dubroff’s family believed she could better learn mathematics by preparing flight plans and designing furniture than by reading texts and doing math on a blackboard. Although that approach drew some harsh criticism, committed unschoolers say the concept is sound and has been unfairly maligned because of the accident.

“Unschooling doesn’t work for everybody,” Robbins acknowledged. “It’s about being in touch enough with your kids to know if it will or will not work for them, and not being rigid about it. If any one of my kids came to me and said: ‘I really want to go to school,’ I would let them. Most of the unschooling families I know feel that way.”

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Some experts, however, have raised concerns that the approach isolates children and deprives them of the opportunity to develop critical socialization skills.

“How do you appreciate the diversity in society? How do you learn social skills without interacting with other children?” asked Edward Zigler, director of Yale University’s Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy.

Zigler says he admires the learning philosophy but has reservations about the process.

“It’s a cocoon existence, at some cost to the child,” he said. “There’s a kind of hothouse quality to these children, even the ones who are quite successful.”

The aim of unschooling is to cultivate children’s natural curiosity rather than force-feed them with information that they may or may not use later.

As unconventional as that approach may seem, Zigler said it is the same philosophy by which most preschools operate.

“This is the core of our thinking in early childhood education--to go with the child,” said Zigler, who in 1965 co-founded the Head Start program. “If that’s what unschooling is, it’s not a terribly new notion.”

Zigler, who applauds the approach, says he wishes more elementary and secondary schools would adopt some of its concepts.

“In preschool, you can’t stop kids from learning,” he said. “Look at them; they’re joyous when they learn things. Their curiosity is respected and they lead the way. Then they go into kindergarten, where they’re made to sit at desks and are given work sheets. It’s a terrible transition, which is very hard for kids.

“At the same time, the ‘back-to-basics’ people argue that we have to have more standards, and that we don’t do enough learning readiness at the preschool level,” he added. “My feeling is there ought to be some way to combine these two things, teaching the basics and encouraging kids’ natural love of learning. Some good schools already do. But not all.”

Dissatisfaction with traditional school systems led many parents to assume the teaching tasks at “home schools.” Unschooling was the logical next step: Why not learn skills through real-life experiences rather than from books?

Willette’s children, for example, are interested in astronomy. “Between the Jupiter comet crash, the solar eclipse, this year’s comet and a lunar eclipse, we’ve had some better-than-usual events,” she said. “Since we live in the country, away from city lights, we get to see the constellations on a regular basis.”

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Marianne Marshall of Tucson uses the phone book to teach her daughters to alphabetize. Speaking of 9-year-old Alli, she said: “I would ask her to find a friend’s phone number or a favorite store. . . . Not only has she learned how to alphabetize, she can do it to the last letter.”

She is tutoring Samantha, 6, in reading, “but it is just as long or as much as she wants to do,” Marshall said. “I found that when I forced her to do it, it was just a fight.

“She likes to read to her dad before bed and has learned a lot more doing this than with workbooks that drill phonics. I think she has figured out most of the rules of reading by reading.”

Alli said she enjoys being with her family and doesn’t make the distinction between “learning” and what she does at home.

“I’d rather be here because it’s easier than being in school,” she said. “I can sleep a little later than my friends and I don’t always have to do the math work-sheets all of the time. My mom tells me what I can do, and what I don’t have to do.”

She said she especially enjoyed being able to go on field trips with her mother and sister when other children had to be in school. Recently, they visited an observatory and a museum featuring Native American history.

“Sometimes I hear kids say that regular school is better than home school because they have all their friends right there,” she said. “But I like this better. I’d rather be at home with my sister.”

Robbins said she believes that children’s “love of learning gets beaten out of them in the schools. . . . Children should have the right to be children and explore what they want to do. Exposure is the key thing.”

Robbins’ four children learn at their own pace, she said.

“I would have a difficult time with structure,” she said. “I think if they’re not ready, they just won’t get it. It will be a great frustration for them, and not a joy. My son learned how to read when he was 5--and then didn’t read a thing for two years. Finally, at 7, he asked for R.L. Stine’s ‘Goosebumps,’ ” and he hasn’t stopped reading since. Now he’s into books about Greek mythology.”

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Helene Sue Rock of Los Altos, Calif., who is unschooling her 9-year-old daughter, Mia Lieberman, said Mia learns most effectively when she is following her own interests.

“I don’t want her with one person, incarcerated, for six hours a day,” Rock said. “So I ferret out opportunities for Mia to learn.”

As part of her unschooling, Mia is writing a book for the county “Young Authors’ Fair” and participating in a local opera production, Rock said. She also likes to attend the opera; she and her parents recently saw “Madame Butterfly.”

“At the ripe old age of 9, Mia has seen many more real, full-length opera productions than she has Hollywood movies,” Rock said, adding: “Fine with me.”

Home schooling is legal nationwide, although state and local laws vary about how it must be conducted. Generally, parents are required to tell local authorities that they plan to educate their children at home, although notification requirements differ.

Some states require home schoolers to submit a general list of subjects they hope to cover; others may ask for more detailed plans.

California does not have a law specifically establishing the right to school children at home, said Barbara Alward, a board member of the Home School Assn. of California, a support network.

Home schoolers here have three options: They can establish an “independent study program” with their school district and implement the local curriculum at home. They can obtain a “tutorial exemption,” which requires having a state credential to do tutoring.

The third option is the most popular--obtaining a “private school exemption” to the rule that children must go to public school. This, in effect, establishes the home as a private school.

“You file an affidavit with your county superintendent of schools that you are a very small, private, exclusive school,” Alward said. “You don’t have to be a credentialed teacher to teach in a private school.”

California does not regulate private schools, she said, so there are no testing requirements imposed by the state.

Students can, if they want, take the GED to get a high school degree. Sheffer, editor of Growing Without Schooling magazine, said that many local schools award home-schooled students diplomas, as will independent and correspondence courses, but that colleges generally do not require applicants to have high school diplomas.

“It’s a misconception that you need a diploma to get into college,” she said, adding that most home-schooled students submit detailed descriptions of their work as part of the admissions procedure.

Some parents, Rock among them, work with their local school systems in developing independent home-study programs. Others develop their own curricula separate from the public schools.

In many regions, home-schooled children must take standardized tests to demonstrate they are learning basic math and reading skills. In some places, all that is required is that a certified teacher regularly review a portfolio of the child’s work.

Marshall said her older daughter, who was tested last year when she was 8, scored in the 99th percentile in every subject except math.

“She was scored at 6.5 grade level for reading and comprehension, fifth grade in science, fourth grade in social studies and 3.5 grade level in math,” Marshall said. “She was second grade when she took the test.”

Unschooling is criticized most frequently not because children do not learn the three Rs but because they lack social contact.

Most unschoolers insist they take this into account when planning their programs.

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“Every day, Mia does a lot of things with other kids,” Rock said. “She takes gymnastics. . . . She takes a hands-on science class with a bunch of other home-schooled kids. Being in this local opera will teach her how to get along in the real world with a diverse group of people. She’ll learn how to work in a group situation toward a commonly shared goal.”

Robbins said her children participate in Scouting, church groups, 4-H and other activities. The socialization question, she said, “is the one most frequently raised and the one most easily dealt with.”

Some unschoolers, in fact, are not so sure that interactions are always good.

“My children spent last summer playing with a little boy who is 7 and who attends public school, [and] they learned in a very short time to hate each other,” Marshall said. “They fought constantly and called each other names. They were just not themselves.”

Once the boy returned to school and no longer had time to play with them, she said, the sisters “started to be each other’s best friend again.”