by Mark Zeiger

Created on: November 22, 2008   Last Updated: February 20, 2011

Our teenage daughter crouches among chair-sized rocks on a windswept beach, carefully taking aim with a digital camera. Below her in the water, a family of river otters swims past, diving occasionally to resurface with a palm-sized flat fish clamped firmly in strong jaws. The camera whirs as she takes photos, careful to hold her breeze-swirled hair out of the viewfinder. At intervals she quietly sips from a mug of cocoa. Next she adjusts a small set of headphones, listening carefully as an otter dives near the hydrophone she has suspended in the water. She is in her classroom, hard at work.

Hers isn't a normal classroom, nor does she live a normal life. We live in a log cabin on a homestead at the edge of Alaska's Lynn Canal. She's a mile-and-quarter hike from the nearest road, and seven miles from the nearest town. Home schooled in the "unschool" theory, the world is her classroom, and school is always in session.

Unschooling, a philosophy developed by educator John Holt and advocated by author Grace Llewellyn, particularly in her Teenage Liberation Handbook, is the most common sense approach to education we've ever encountered. Unschooling recognizes that humans are self-teaching creatures from birth, perfectly capable of learning anything they need or want to know without organized, institutionalized education. In fact, the teaching methods of our educational systems often depress the natural tendency and ability to self-teach, and discourage a love of learning! Unschooling advocates unstructured, self-directed learning through experience, personal inquiry, and exploration.

My grandfather, a high school teacher himself, wrote of his own experiences with this sort of learning, although the "unschool" label had not been coined at the time. He described his extra-curricular education in the fields and forests of his native Illinois in the early part of the 20th century. He called it his "barefoot university," and fondly extolled the value of learning through non-structured life experience.

We began home schooling when we moved to our homestead. We did so to allow the family time to live and grow together. One of us leaving every weekday through most of the year would diminish that.

Unfortunately, seven years of institutional learning shaped our daughter's ideas and expectations of education, and instilled in her some bad habits. In school she learned to passively wait to be told what to learn and when, and how to proceed on projects. It taught her that homework

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>