Tag Archive - Education

Home/Unschooling Intentional Communities

March 17, 2010 in Education, Life, Radical Unschooling with 14 Comments

A post about how the Universe answers my questions.

So, while I was browsing through various links friends had posted on Facebook, I came across an article (from 2000 written by Jerry Mintz) talking about homeschooling & unschooling cooperatives, learning centers and so on. He mentions a private school that is really a community in Texas where the students & teachers live together. I posted a link to this article to the Facebook crowd with a plea for information about the community in Texas that Jerry mentioned. Currently, no one has said that they know anything about this community.

I posted that on Monday night.

I went grocery shopping on Monday afternoon. While at the co-op, I glanced over and saw the magazine Communities. It was the Spring edition and the focus was on Family & Raising Children in Intentional Communities. I have to admit that I scoffed at the price, but was compelled by the Universe to purchase it.

I finally finished reading it last night and there towards the back, where the ‘Letters’ section was continued, was a short letter from Jerry Mintz (who BTW is the director of AERO, in case you were wondering). Jerry basically asks why it seems that children’s education is usually so low on the list of priorities for intentional communities, something that I’ve wondered myself. I’ve also wondered why many of the communities that do address education for children seem to insist that it either happens outside of the community OR that it happens at the school that the community has established. AND by school, I mean, it usually amounts to a school…not as terrible as most of us have endured, but rarely are they democratic or egalitarian (which is terribly funny when so many communities with this issue ARE democratic or egalitarian! Compulsory education is neither democratic nor egalitarian!) and though they might be freer and looser than a traditional public/private school, they aren’t Free (Free as in Liberty, not Free as in beer) and Unschooling seems to be a foreign concept.

Jerry goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why groups of homeschoolers haven’t gotten together and started intentional communities. Good questions, right? He says he only knows of one of these communities and then (Eureka!) he also mentions Greenbriar School in Texas! This would be the school in the article above that I wanted to know about! Well, they’re website is not very informative, but I suppose that’s why they list contact information!

No, I don’t want to move to Texas and no, I don’t want to enroll my son in a school run by an intentional community, but I DO want to make more of an effort to build a community of fellow Unschooling families up around us. I DO want to find more people who are willing and wanting to start an intentional community with families who are Unschooling or those families needing the extra support of a physical community to make the transition to Unschooling. I DO like the idea of living in a community where everyone is in the same book, if not on the same page, with each other’s philosophy of children and living in Freedom and Harmony with them.

I know White Hawk Ecovillage has a couple Unschooling families, but the aim of the community is not to gather up Unschooling families.

There is the blog that asks the question about an Unschooling community.

On Radical Unschoolers Network, there’s the group that stemmed from the blog and there’s always ‘talk’ by people who want a community on the forums there.

Maybe there are communities out there that for some reason don’t have a huge-ass banner announcing themselves. Well, please, start little. Start here and leave a link to your community that already exists and embraces Life Learning children.

If you are wanting to relocate to a community or have ideas for when/how/where for community, please leave your idea here or a link to your idea here.

And if you happen to be in or around Pittsburgh, PA and have been living under a rock…crawl out, leave a comment and let’s get together!

Peace & Love
Michele

If you are coming to this via Facebook, feel free to leave your comment in both places.

 

‘Radical Parenting’ on Discovery Health

March 4, 2010 in Education, Media, Parental, Radical Unschooling with 3 Comments

So, I just got done reading Heather Burditt’s review of the Radical Unschooling segment of the show on her blog here.

This is the reply I left her and how I felt about the segment in general:

“eh. It was alright. I highly agree that only portraying one radical unschooling family was a poor choice. While I am a fan (maybe that’s not the right word) of the ‘Clan of Parents’, seeing a variety of families, especially at least one with older or grown unschoolers, would have been better. I also didn’t like how the ‘experts’ didn’t have to support their (what seemed like) opinions with any research, statistics or examples. I also didn’t like that the Parents weren’t able to speak back to the experts or that there wasn’t a pro-radical unschooling ‘expert’ to offer counter arguments. In all, I didn’t see it as really balanced…not to mention that the way it was cut up seemed kind of staged and almost like it all happened in one day. An entire hour with equal time from both sides of the argument and at least two more families, might have made began to make a difference.”

Sarah Parent and her family were representing Radical Unschooling and I think they did a fine job, given how the footage was cut and the fact that they really didn’t get to speak to anything that the ‘experts’ said.

Did you watch it? What did you think? Did you write a review (leave me a link)? Were you one of the people mysteriously contacted by Discovery Health prior to the airing?

 

Say What You Mean; Mean What You Say

November 25, 2009 in Education, Parental, Radical Unschooling, Religiosophy with 6 Comments

So, I’m going to just be linking & leaving it up to you to decide what you read or if you read anything concerning the matter. There’s been a lot of buzz about what ‘we’ say & how we say it. Idzie wrote a little post about her issues with the word ‘teaching’ and then followed it up with another post here. In that second post, you’ll find a link to a post titled The Unschooling Police. I left the comment below at that post:

I think a lot people who are new to unschooling benefit greatly from avoiding words or concepts like ‘teaching’ or ‘rules’. It’s kin to packing up/throwing away/lending out all your packaged curriculum & textbooks until you are convinced that learning really happens without all that, lest you be tempted after a week of ‘nothing’ but Legos & Cartoon Network to start trying to use them again.

It’s easier to find the *need* for & Joy of classes while fully submerged in an unschooling life, than it is to find the *need* for and Joy of an unschooling life while fully submerged in compulsory schooling.

For those of us who ‘get it’, it can seem overkill to eschew certain words…but over seven years ago (before I was a mother) when I started hitting the discussion boards and being reprimanded or corrected for word usage & certain beliefs, I was extremely grateful for the wake-up call. Having the words I use & the meanings I attach to them challenged was a good thing.

I hate that I have been doing this for so long that I’ve almost become ’sloppy’ with word choice & communicating my Value Set of Anarchism & Radical Unschooling…conversations like these are necessary more for those of us who have been at this awhile than for newbies.

I know my son *teaches* me tons of things on an almost daily basis. I choose to listen & *learn*, because I am genuinely interested in what he has to share (usually).

The other thing I wish I had addressed was about the difference between Unschooling & Radical Unschooling. Some people in the community really say that Radical Unschoolers are the only true/pure unschoolers…I might secretly agree with them…

I know I’ve talked about Radical Unschooling before & how I realize how you ‘could’ have an educational or academic only unschooling, but that the very concept behind unschooling seems to say otherwise. I find it hard to believe that if someone fully embraced the concept that Life Is Learning, that every waking moment & decision made is Learning, that they wouldn’t naturally find themselves leaning towards Radical Unschooling or Whole-Life Unschooling.

Let’s take sleep for an example. At any age, our children learn tons about themselves, their bodies & human nature when they, for example, experiment with bed times & varying lengths of sleep/sleep deprivation. What’s more important, *they* learn how much sleep *they* need & when *they* need to sleep. Us forcing them to bed when *we’ve* ‘had enough’ or when we think they should be in bed doesn’t help them find their own sleeping rhythms, but they DO learn not to trust us about sleep & that bigger/older people can use force over smaller/younger people.

I was going to use Media as my example, but I hate long debates about media. Media is flush with innumerable learning opportunities & resources. To limit media is antithetical to unschooling — whole-life or not.

There are some people who really *need* to have things in their life that they can control…it’s understandable, especially if their childhood was largely OUT of *their* control. I know several academic only unschoolers & have had plenty of conversations with them about their ideas, principles & how they view unschooling. They are great people who *need* things to control. They are loving parents, but not always as respectful as most of the radical unschoolers I also know. Their relationship with their children tends to be strained in areas where it wouldn’t be if they could find a way to give their children back some control over their own lives.

Invariably, their need for controlling things bleeds over into their children’s education, their ‘unschooling’. This leads to ‘pushes’, “heavy encouragement” (not my words), forcing of certain materials/classes/practices and ultimately, a not-so-child-directed education. It happens with an almost unnoticeable force from the inside. One day either their children speak up about it or they realize their own unhappiness with ‘unschooling’.

Life goes from, wear what you want to you can choose between the red shirt or the blue shirt. *That* is NOT unschooling.

I (and SO many before me) have seen, experienced & learned that there is a way of parenting or way of seeing Life & our interactions with those we share it with that is beneficial for unschooling, almost imperative for an Unschooling Life to be as broad & open as possible.

Yes, one can be a traditional parent or an ‘AP’ parent & ‘unschool’ their children in an academic sense, but I can’t help but think about what they AND their children could gain from shedding parental control issues & living an over all more respectful & consensual life with one another.

 

More Community; Less Schools

August 2, 2009 in Education, Politics, Religiosophy with 0 Comments

Over at Radio Free School, there are excerpts from John Taylor Gatto’s We need less school not more-Families, Communities, Networks and the Proposed Enlargement of Schooling (1991)

Makes me think about my challenge I sent the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Gatto continues, “Networks like schools are not communities in the same way that school training is not education. By preempting 50 percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables-and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways-net work schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly piece of mechanism.”

Community on the other hand is a place “that faces people at each other over time in all their human variety, good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible, lives of engagement and participation. This happens in unexpected ways but it never happens when you’ve spent more than a decade listening to other people talk-and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools.”

 

Kindergarten at the Children’s Museum

July 31, 2009 in Education, Pittsburghian, Religiosophy with 2 Comments

No, it’s not nearly as “cool” as it might sound. The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is hosting it’s 5th annual hey-let’s-convince-parents-and-kids-that-prolonged-separation-and-early-indoctrination-is-awesome celebration. What’s better, you ask…it’s FREE and they give you stuff!

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Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh’s 5th Annual   Kindergarten!…Here I Come! Celebration
A free celebration will be held from 9 am to 1 pm on August 15 for children going to kindergarten this fall.  This is an exciting event to celebrate this milestone and create a healthy transition not just for children, but for their parents as well. We also work to strengthen the idea that community support that is essential as part of our kids’ development of character and emotional well-being.

Children can:

Meet Mr. McFeely
Receive a “Class of 2022″ t-shirt and kindergarten story book
Meet community helpers such as a crossing guard
Climb aboard a real school bus
Take part in activities such as making a craft for their first memories of school and a  lot of other “fun” hands-on activities
Have free hearing, vision, speech and language screenings
Take part in a live radio broadcast
Parents and caregivers receive valuable information on preparing children for kindergarten and can consult with experts in nutrition, after school programs, bullying, proper immunization and more.

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While I do give the museum credit for having good intentions and trying to make the inevitable transition from home to school for lots of 5/6 year olds less stressful and seem fun, I have a much much better idea. Why don’t all these children whose parents think that they *have to* send their children to school, want to send their kids to school or need to because of family/financial dynamics get to spend kindergarten at the museum? What I mean is that instead of being trotted off to an institution and made to sit still, color in the lines and ask permission to go to the bathroom (this one really gets my goat — prison-like…no wait, most prisoners have toilets or at least holes in the ground in their cells), they would get to PLAY at the museum during normal school day hours. No actual compulsory “classes”, no testing, no grades, just an open building of fun stuff to explore and LEARN from. AND what is even best about this is that they would be exposed to older and younger children who are members and attending with their families throughout the day as well as an ever changing traveling exhibit and all the neat special events, story times, plays and so on that the museum is known for doing. The children would still experience (and better experience) the “community support that is essential as part of our kids’ development…” as the museum claims it’s Celebration thingy promotes, socializing with diverse groups of people and develop meaningful skills (aka, learn stuff).

What’s EVEN better…is that it wouldn’t have to stop with just kindergarten…

I don’t find this solution better than being free and at home or at worst attending an actual Free School, but it does sound better than going to school in the traditional sense of the word. I’d divert my tax dollars to this effort and even throw in a few extra dollars…

So, how about it? Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, are you up for the challenge?

 

Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning

July 13, 2009 in Education, Media, Radical Unschooling with 0 Comments

Just added a link to The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education (JUAL) to my sidebar under “Educational Freedom”. I wanted to quickly post it here for those who might not browse my sidebar often.

Here is a link to the newest issue.

 
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