What Is Unschooling?

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For those who may be new to what is often referred to as “unschooling,” or self-directed learning, I would like to suggest that you take the time to read John Taylor Gatto’s brief book (145 pages) in which he explains what this is and why he, a New York City public school teacher for more than 30 years, a teacher who won every award available in the State of New York and New York City, walked away from all his years of training and experience in public school education and threw his support behind home education. 


You can find a good pdf version of this book, Dumbling Us Down, here:


https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxpaGVmaWxlczF8Z3g6NzdiMzQ5OWVkNTNlM2FmOA


You might even want to download this or print it out for future reference. It will make you think about education in a whole different light. 


The other John Taylor Gatto book that I highly recommend is his larger volume, The Underground History of American Education, which you can start reading here:


https://lvassembly.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/underground-history-of-america-education.pdf 


This link provides only the first 124 pages of this 412-page book. But you will get a good idea of how our system of public education was founded. You can buy these books and should be able to find them in your local library, too. I am supplying links because so many libraries are not open now and are not processing reserves on books at this time due to the coronavirus pandemic. 


Sadly, John Taylor Gatto died in 2018, but he left several books and lots of articles to help us figure out what we really want to consider when choosing how to educate our children. The first thing you might want to consider is the whole idea that we must learn “readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic” from college-educated teachers with specific degrees in education. To make his point he compares how the state elects to prepare us to drive a vehicle:


"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling? An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You’d have to be an idiot to agree with my plan — at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence. And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven’t even considered the battering ram aspect of cars — why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone? 

 

Now consider the intellectual component of driving. It isn’t all just hand-eye-foot coordination. First-time drivers make dozens, no, hundreds, of continuous hypotheses, plans, computations, and fine-tuned judgments every day they drive. They do this skillfully, without being graded, because if they don’t, organic provision exists in the motoring universe to punish them. There isn’t any court of appeal from your own stupidity on the road. I could go on: think of licensing, maintenance, storage, adapting machine and driver to seasons and daily conditions. Carefully analyzed, driving is as impressive a miracle as walking, talking, or reading, but this only shows the inherent weakness of analysis since we know almost everyone learns to drive well in a few hours."  From John Taylor Gatto's The UNDERGROUND HISTORY of AMERICAN EDUCATION.

 

Hope this plants some seeds and helps you consider your options for educating your children. If you read either of the two books I’ve listed above you will definitely understand that you can probably do just as well, perhaps even better, than what our state-supported schools with licensed teachers might provide.

 

Norma Curry

CATCH Founder and The Unschooler’s Parent’s Guide Co-founder



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