Imagine you get sent, day in and day out, to a random company to work without pay. Each workday starts with an hour-long meeting followed by another meeting, and another meeting and so on and so forth. All meetings are on different, seemingly random corporate objectives: focus on x, improve y, remember z. Your primary job: sit down, shut up, listen to your supervisor and take note. And when you think that the day is finally over, you are told to take some of the work home.
Sounds like a horrific corporation, doesn’t it? This, however, is the perceived reality of many young people in what’s called a twenty-first century school. So how did we happen to end up here? Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, came up with the idea of modern factory schools.
The emperor was inspired by Plato who argued that the ideal city requires ideal individuals, and ideal individuals require an ideal education.
And so the King introduced compulsory education in 1763 with the mission to unify Germany, increase literacy, and boost the education of all its citizens – including the very poor. The early Prussian school system provided eight-years of instruction in reading, writing, music and religious studies. It imposed a strict ethos of duty, discipline and obedience. And that worked. The model turned into a big cultural, economical and military success that inspired rulers from Tokyo to Washington.
Not long after, state officials all around the world started writing curriculums, and public education became both: a child’s right and duty. In 1938 the Germans then went one step further and made school attendance compulsory.
Ever since it’s not parents, but the state that makes sure kids go to school. Today 85% out of all adults worldwide are literate and access to information is abundant. Should government officials still have a monopoly on how we learn?
A growing number of parents don’t think so and want to take control over their own child’s education. They advocate for what’s called unschooling.
Unschooling is the process of learning through life, outside institutionalized classrooms. Similar to homeschooling it usually happens at home or in other places. But while homeschooling usually follows a formal curriculum, unschooling doesn’t.
Schoolers learn through their natural life experiences including play, chores, travel, books, elective classes, board-games, internships, mentors, and living in a community. Parents or tutors play a big role. They provide resources, facilitate the learning experiences, and help the child to reflect on their progress. So how come parents choose to unschool their children when it’s much more convenient to send them to school? There are 6 key reasons.
Schools can negatively affect the parent-child relationship, often replacing it with an atmosphere of fear. Institutionalizing kids in a one-size-fits all classroom is an inefficient use of their time and potential, because it requires each one to learn a subject in a particular way, and at a pace that doesn’t take into account a child’s interests or any pre-existing knowledge they might have. In school, children are primarily taught how to follow instructions, which means they don’t practice doing things independently.
Schoolers have to solve problems by themselves all the time. They learn to work autonomously.
School children are told all their lives what to do.
As a result, they later often have no idea what they want and hence simply conform. Unschoolers practice making their own decisions every day. They learn to know what they want and are more likely to question social ills. School focuses almost exclusively on what to learn all day.
Schoolers learn to ask the much more important question: why learn it? Schools cover only a few subjects someone thought of a few hundred years ago.
Unschoolers can explore way more interests, and look into topics at far greater depth. John Holt, a pioneer of unschooling, said it as follows: “The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know. What do you think?
What are the good and bad sides of unschooling? And more broadly, should the state or parents decide what to teach a child and what to leave out. Who should have the ultimate say? Please share your thoughts in the comments below! If you like how we explain complicated ideas in simple cartoon animation, you can support us!
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