Posted on 08/02/2021
While it's helpful to incorporate some designated times for book work and traditional school subjects, you really don't want to re-create a classroom environment at home for multiple reasons. In this year when at-home learning has become more normative, we all do well to learn from some parents who have been homeschooling on the regular. In what's being termed the "Imagination Age," out-of-the-box thinking is increasingly valued. And with increasingly mobile workplaces and blurred lines between work time and the rest of life, flexibility and a more holistic view of learning seem to be even more valued than it has been in the past.
Re-Thinking Traditional Educational Models
In most schools, teachers are educating the masses according to a prescribed scope and sequence, often required by governmental authorities. And the environment is stilted, at best, including "bells and buzzers signaling when students could come and go, the tedium of the work, the straight lines and emphasis on conformity and compliance, the rows of young people sitting passively at desks while obeying their teachers." Many parents, entrepreneurs, and educational professionals, like Kerry McDonald, are increasingly criticizing this model of education, considering our shifting cultural values: "While the past belonged to assembly line workers, the future belongs to creative thinkers, experimental doers, and inventive makers."
Considering Alternative Forms of Learning
If your only formal experience of education was in a traditional classroom, it may be difficult to even imagine how anyone could learn something any other way - but really, you've learned a lot since your own school years, haven't you? It's just probably not according to anyone else's requirements, but simply based on your own needs and desires. And an increasing number of parents and thinkers believe this to be an ideal impetus for education. As she encourages re-thinking the traditional educational model, McDonald goes on to explain: "Cultivating passion is nearly impossible within a coercive schooling structure that values conformity over creativity, compliance over-exuberance. This could help explain why the unschooling, or Self-Directed Education, movement is taking off, with more parents migrating from a schooling model of education for their children to a learning one. With Self-Directed Education, passion is at the center of all learning."
Making the Educational Transition
Whether or not you decide to pull your child from the school system and jump completely into the ocean of unschooling, you can at least splash around in the puddle of deschooling, during the summer months. What's the difference between deschooling and unschooling? Deschooling is a transition time, to help your child start to think outside the box of traditional education and often involves decompressing and unlearning "habits that the rigid school environment has taught them." What does deschooling look like? It will vary based on your child's personality, school experience, and more. But the best part is that it will probably look like a whole lotta fun and thinking and creating. And that's what education should be.
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