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To many, learning at schools is like eating food from the frozen section of a supermarket. What initially appears to be sustaining, convenient, and diverse is really over-processed, expensive, and homogeneous.
It’s not surprising why. Schools today are stuck in a rut. Few even question anymore that in so many schools across the world: children en masse get dropped off, where they become the recipient of linear “teaching” and then tests. They go home, do homework, and start over again the next day, for the goal of preparing them for the next level of school and meeting broad and dubiously constructed standards.
And the consequences of this single approach are huge. It is reasonable to assume that for 95% of all students, the experience of K-12 schools will not significantly change in the next thirty years.
They are striving to evolve new approaches, not from the once-removed vantage of politicians or board members or even smart individuals grinding through the Sisyphean task of trying to get a few policies changed, but by abandoning the model and starting over.
Perhaps the hardest part of this revolution, however, is parents realizing how ingrained the traditional school habits of teaching children are. Homeschoolers and unschoolers have to adopt the genuine best practices of schools, while leaving behind ineffective legacy processes and industrial conceits, and then fill in the gaps. This book, whose name is both an oxymoron and a double entendre, is the result of my research to identify and frame the guidelines that these home and unschoolers are uncovering in childhood education.
To best present them, Unschooling Rules is organized by The Seven C’s of Education:
- Curricula: The selection.
- Content: The pieces.
- Coaching: The adult.
- Customization: The flexibility.
- Community: The peers.
- Credit: The documentation.
- day Care: The place.
