I was asked in an interview the other day to summarize what the key implications of Unschooling Rules are. Here they are, by group:
- For families of children in schools: You do have a choice. Traditional school may be the best option, but understand several alternative options anyway. It will make you stronger. Further, traditional schools do a lot of things horribly. They are businesses and, no matter what they say or imply, do not love your children nor are they committed to their long term success. They have scalable processes not answers. You need to budget as much time for compensating for schools as supporting their programs.
- For families of home- and unschooled children: Treat childhood as you treat adulthood. There are no single answers or paths. Your family members are education entrepreneurs. There are some rules, but not that many. The future belongs to the creative working.
- For teachers and schools administrators: You are stuck in a broken monopoly. It is not your fault. You are given an impossible task. Still, you are powerful. Think of your job as protecting the authentic education journey of each child from the system and pressures around them. And look for other jobs, again for back-up. You cannot be effective if you believe you have no career choices.
- For policy makers: Embrace and encourage real alternatives to school as much as possible. De-emphasize test scores and other standardization attempts. Think of home- and unschoolers as a fifteen year research and development experiment. Be prepared, over time, to try to make institutional schools more like homeschooling, not the other way around. Here are two thought games. First, what would you do if half of what schools taught was useless? Second, what if you had to cut the budget for schools in half?
- For foundations and think tanks: Those who have tried, through brilliant arguments and generous donations, to improve schools over the last thirty years have suffered epic failures. If you want to have been influential in improving schools two decades from now, put every last dime and neuron into supporting and enabling home- and unschoolers today. Think of how often you have thought "If only schools could..." Well, home- and unschoolers can.
