Some Questions and Answers with Clark Aldrich about Unschooling Rules

What is your book Unschooling Rules about?

The most powerful new ideas about education are coming from the people who have given up on school - the homeschooling and unschooling families. This book, from all-new research, distills 55 core insights that will help anyone responsible for children begin to re-examine and perhaps unlearn our current habits around schools and rediscover authentic education.

For example, some Unschooling Rules insights include:

• Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful.
• Twenty five critical skills that are seldom taught, tested, or graded in high school.
• The ideal class size isn’t thirty, or even fifteen, it’s more like five.
• Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are.
• Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea.
• Tests don’t work. Get over it. Move on.
• Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know.
• Schools are designed to create both winners and losers.

For whom is this book?

This book is for everyone who wants to make education much better than it is today – teachers, parents, and lawmakers. So Unschooling Rules is for homeschooling families as they try to re-imagine education. But it is also for families who will never be homeschoolers. To meet this goal, it is also accessible, practical, and affordable. It is as much Life’s Little Instruction Book as Waiting for Superman.
It is also for people who are just curious why today’s school activities, both legacy and innovative, always seemed to fall short.

Why did you write this book?

The epic failure of so many good ideas and innovative programs in K-16 education, plus school’s ballooning costs, made me consider if we were simply too far down the wrong track. I began looking at lower and lower level root causes. One, for example, is that education as a process has been over-industrialized including over-standardized. I begin Unschooling Rules with the question, what if a person's diet consisted only of food available in the frozen section of a supermarket? What if we need to return some authenticity and diversity of approaches to the learning experience?

What is your background?

My background is a combination of a more traditional education with developing alternative learning models. I worked at an environment education foundation for years, while I was getting my degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University.

Then, while I worked at Xerox, I was the Governor's appointee to a Joint Committee on Educational Technology. I also was involved with Xerox CEO David Kearn’s (and other CEO's) work on education. I then studies and advised Military, Corporate America, and distant University programs as a Research Director for Gartner.

Then, professionally, I started designing educational simulations and serious games for all types of organizations, including business schools. Over a dozen simulations, a patent, hundreds of speeches, and four books later, I became a recognized world authority in the area. This work in highly interactive education content shed further light on the opportunities and limitations of school curricula and content. Ultimately, my quest for places where evolution was evolving the most quickly led me to home- and unschoolers.

Is this book advocating homeschooling?

This book advocates a diversity of approaches. I would hope that ten years from now there are more alternatives and acceptable approaches to education than there are now.

Is this book anti-school?

It is anti-school as we currently define and structure them. We are suffering from a tremendous lack of imagination. But it is not anti-teacher, principal, student, parent, or legislature. All stakeholders will be needed to productively evolve the models.

Most parents still want their children to go to traditional schools. Is this relevant for them?

Anyone who reads this book will find places to improve, both big and small. Given that, the magnitude and specific "rules" with which to start are up to each person. The best analogy may be to the journey of improving one’s diet, moving from highly processed foods to exploring less processed and increasingly local foods.

For many people, the change will be incremental. Any politicians, parents, and school administrators can make a few improvements a year to an incredible cumulative effect. Different people will see different “low-hanging fruit” in their own lives.

But for some people, the decisions inspired by the thinking in this book may be bigger. Some families may decide to home school or unschool as a result. Some politicians may decide to greatly reduce testing or otherwise increase the options available to children.

Meanwhile, at a national level, there will be some sponsors of new approaches to education, such as from non-profit foundations and government agencies working on improving our nations’ science and math skills, which may realize their own resources are better spent developing new approaches for students outside of the mainstream school system initially, and only after successes there to bring it within a traditional school structure.