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How Will ChatGPT Impact Education, Self-Directed Learning, and Schools?

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The advent of advanced AI models like ChatGPT is set to revolutionize the way we approach education and learning. With its ability to generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions, ChatGPT has the potential to enhance self-directed learning and transform the role of schools in education.

Self-Directed Learning

One of the key benefits of ChatGPT is its ability to provide instant answers to questions and provide explanations for complex concepts. This can greatly aid students who are seeking information on a particular subject and can help to facilitate self-directed learning. This technology can also provide a personal tutor-like experience for students, enabling them to ask questions and receive real-time feedback, making the learning process more engaging and effective.

Schools

ChatGPT also has the potential to impact the way schools function and the role they play in education. With its ability to generate content and answer questions, ChatGPT can be used as a teaching assistant, freeing up teachers to focus on other important tasks such as classroom management and individualized support. This technology can also be used to create personalized learning experiences for students, taking into account their individual needs and learning styles.

Moreover, ChatGPT can also be integrated into online learning platforms, providing students with a 24/7 virtual assistant that can answer questions and provide support. This can greatly enhance the online learning experience, providing students with access to a wealth of information and resources at their fingertips.

In conclusion, the impact of ChatGPT on education is likely to be far-reaching and transformative. Its ability to facilitate self-directed learning and enhance the role of schools in education makes it an exciting technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach learning and education.

(This article was written by ChatGPT after asking the question in the title.)

The Father of the Unschooling Movement: John Holt

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“Well how do kids learn? Is the parent the one that teaches the child at home?”, says the interviewer, a young polite woman who seems befuddled by John Holt’s answers as to why schools are failing and homeschooling should be the norm. He gently answers, “Your question is a very important one because it throws a light on one of the most common and mistaken notions about teaching and learning. And that is that a knowledge is sort of a liquid and teaching is the act of pouring it out a full vessel into an empty one.” As someone who had come to be known for speaking so eloquently on  the nature of how children really learn, you would never guess that he entered education much later than most teachers.

Originally born in New York City, he obtained credentials in “industrial administration” (He is quoted as saying “whatever that is”). He then went into the Navy and worked on submarines for three years (He refuses to reveal much on his credentials). After the military, he joined the World Government Movement, a now seemingly forgotten coalition to join the world under one centralized government. He got rather high up the ranks, only to find the goals unattainable and left. His first teaching job came in his 30’s on the recommendation of his sister after he moved to Colorado. There he found his actual passion – watching and analyzing how children learn firsthand. He liked to see what worked, and what didn’t. He claims he didn’t imagine or try in that first job to be visionary and social reformer – he just wanted honest relationships with his students and genuine success for them. But then he was fired for what he believed was his challenging of the authoritarian way of disciplining and raising students. He believed “Convincing people that most of our present schools are bad for learning is not going to do much to change them; learning is not principally what they are for.”

It was then he took to writing books to spread the ideas he wasn’t allowed to in the classroom. His bibliography consists of an impressive eleven books (two seemed to be published posthumously). The first and most notorious one How Children Fail (1964; revised 1982), gets right to his point about how modern schooling needs to be dismantled. Even the better sides of it and better schools only serve to stand in the way of real learning, he challenges in that book. He argues that children, by nature, want to learn. His most provocative point is that children only “accomplish” anything in schools as a means of appeasing adults. These are the main aspects actually taught in schools:

1. Do what you’re told without questioning or resisting, whenever I or any other authority tell[s] you to do something.
2. Go on doing what you’re told for as long as you’re told. Never mind how dull, disagreeable, or pointless the task may seem. It’s not for you to decide.
3. Do whatever we want you to do, willingly. Do it without even having to be told. Do what you’re expected to do.
4. If you don’t do these things you will be punished and you will deserve to be.
5. Accept your life without complaining even if you get very little if any of what you think you want, even if your life has not much joy, meaning, or satisfaction. That’s what life is.
6. Take your medicine, your punishment, whatever the people above you do to you, without complaining or resisting.
7. Living this way is good for your soul and character.

It started (or added a lot of fuel to the fire of) a national debate on the quality of schools.  He also started a bimonthly newsletter, “Growing Without Schooling” on how to teach kids at home (They can all actually still be read here). It is almost jarring to read them. I picked a random issue and just started reading. This one was written in the 80’s, but the events easily read like something you could read in the New York Times or the like now. In this issue, he speaks of how the hand-wringing about how bad the schools are from the The President’s commission on Excellence in Education. In his typical gentle and intelligent snarkiness, Holt says “What did the commission recommend? A longer school year, tougher courses, fewer electives, higher standards (code for “flunk more kids”), better teachers, more money.” He easily could have been talking about Common Core or No Child Left Behind.

Some would argue these seem particularly cynical by today standards (at least in theory). But DeVos rolled back many Obama era regulations about how schools could punish students. I myself went to a charter school that was supposed to be the “humane” alternative to public schools: each of these feels as true as they did in 1964. If you go and look at any review of his books on Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc, you will find many people saying that his books are just as relevant nowadays.

An interesting point about him that does bear translating from that time to this: he did not actually prefer the term “unschooling”. He preferred to refer to it as “living”, as he believed the idea of separating out figuring out yourself in the work was inextricably tied with learning, and schools desire to separate out the two as absurd.

Unfortunately, we lost John Holt rather early  – he died of cancer at 62 in 1985. One can only wonder how much more he could have influenced the current system had he lived longer. Perhaps he could have helped Common Core and No Child left behind from failing or gaining as much traction. Still, we have much of his work to influence future decisions. We can only hope that policymakers, school administrators, and most importantly parents read his books and teachings. Perhaps than school choice and homeschooling would be less about inducting children into cults and and letting them learn how to be social, active learners in their own right. After all, in his second book, How Children Learn, he argues that learning comes to small children “as naturally as breathing”.

How the Pandemic Forced Us to Re-define What Education is

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Whatever your opinion on if, when, or the exact manner in which schools should have closed down, there is no denying that education in the U.S. is changed forever. One major way it has changed, is by bringing in the old to deal with the new. Unschooling seems like a new trend the “uber-liberal and passive millennial parents” are doing. But it actually started in the 70’s when a certain John Holt got disillusioned with the traditional school system and started championing the rights of children to dictate their own learning. It has been rather niche, until a certain pandemic made it seem more practical than counter-cultural.

You probably have seen Facebook and LinkedIn posts about compromises and hacks of parents trying to survive the pandemic. This a particularly well-known and extreme one:

Or is it? Isn’t it a parent’s ultimate goal to do what is best for their child? The fear of losing their job and contracting Covid can easily overshadow the fear of shame from others. It is not important anymore that your kid can’t pay attention to several zoom lectures in a row (I mean, neither can many adults, nor should they). What if one could have their cake and eat it too? What if you didn’t have to chase after your kid for every “class” and pay for tons of equipment that they may use for only one year? All this, and be able to focus more on your job?

The whole premise of unschooling and self-directed learning (SDE) is that kids are naturally motivated to learn, and will at their own pace. This has long been the anti-thesis of the current school system, which is based off the premise that kids cannot learn on their own and must be scheduled all day for five days a week to become productive members of society. For the most part, the latter argument won out as it seemed to make more sense. I think it only made sense because schooling was abstracted away, with the main result parents seeing (andtold that mattered at all) being grades and college admission results. What was behind the curtain got revealed when most of the students got sent home for virtual learning. They listened to teacher’s bark at students based on what they saw on a screen, saw the arbitrary and ridiculous schoolwork, and watched their kids’ existential crises implode along with their own.

The reality of it is, the pandemic forced us to re-think many aspects of day-to-day life. As far as here is concerned, we need to ask “What is school?”. To answer that, we then need to ask “What matters?” Well, we can start with the obvious. The safety of our children, and their well-being. That is why they were pulled out of in-class school in the first place, when we weren’t sure about the true nature of the spread of Covid-19. Then there is their preparation for adult life. This is a contentious problem that so far we have seeming to to be trying to solve by doing the same broken solutions more (see Common Core, No Child Left Behind). Essentially, we think that the more tests a student can pass, the better citizen in a functioning society they can be. You say it that way, it sounds insane, doesn’t it? I feel like I have met more people than not who share this opinion. I have definitely met ex-teachers who have left because of all the increased testing. Schools have become essentially testing centers at the expense of the well-being and development of the students. We expect them to stress out for tests that only tell us how well they might do in college (which is only one of many paths).

Now parents’ well-being matters too. After all, the kids can’t be alright if the parents are not alright long enough (see above tweet). This is the more complicated part as school is (and was made) to provide parents respite. They could keep trying to force their kids to a certain schedule as they are barely able to keep to their own. I think this is why SDE and unschooling are appealing to more families. Detractors might say that this lack of standardized ways to educate your kids just puts more work on the parents. I argue that the standardized traditional schooling is the way that adds more stress. What is the best educational plan will vary from student to student, family to family. The lack of standardization is the whole point of SDE. Some parents lay out a schedule for their kids at the beginning of the day for when to do their work. Others let their kids decide for themselves. Maybe you have older kids that can teach the younger ones. Doesn’t this all sound better than forcing your kids to a schedule other people decided, who don’t know your kids? Moreover, also don’t know your responsibilities outside your kids you have to keep your kids housed and fed?

So we answered what education shouldn’t be. But what should it be? To understand the conclusion many families came to, you will have to open your mind, rather than change it. As a child is growing up, what isn’t considered learning? Well, to start, many parents would be quick to say the mass amounts of time on Fortnite or Minecraft isn’t learning. The data suggests otherwise: Minecraft has inspired as high as 85 million to learn to code. I myself have met more than a handful of people who got started coding by creating mods for Minecraft. Well, what about the massive multi-player games? Also don’t have to be a waste of time. Kids can learn valuable interpersonal skills and how to communicate effectively virtually (as a remote freelancer, I can personally attest to the need). Now that kids are home from school, they can spend more time cooking. That presents many opportunities to learn basic chemistry, fractions, cooperative skills, etc. The limits are only within your mind. Older kids can help with taxes and the family budget more, or even shadow you at your job.

As for actual resources outside of the textbooks and workbooks, the sky is the limit as well (or however high the internet exists). I recommend going on TikTok and exploring for a second. Yes, there is a lot of “cringey” and low value content (as anywhere), but many people have taken to sharing tidbits about their culture, lifestyle, identities, and favorite subject. The hours your middle-schooler spends on TikTok might be more educational than the day of schoolwork ahead. I know for a fact I learned more on YouTube than the low-effort charter school my parents paid way too much for me to go to. If you want to know what I am talking about, look up CrashCourse, ElectroBoom, Ask a Mortician, and Butterfly Spanish on YouTube. You will immediately see what I am talking about, and probably start watching some videos yourself.

While many parents will be glad to just send their kids back to school and return to the way it was, many will not. There will be special-needs kids who were found to do better at home. Parents who got proof that no, Tommy isn’t just over-sensitive, his teacher is actually a sociopath. Teenagers who promise to learn to self-teach so they do not have to return to school as to evade cliques and bullying. We probably did not need a pandemic to tell us that the traditional schooling system isn’t working for many bright young minds, but perhaps we did need one to compel us to change.

Sources:

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19-coronavirus-unschooling-homeschooling

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/homschooling-boom-pandemic/616303/

https://www.mother.ly/child/unschooling-kids-during-coronavirus

How Schools Promote Bullying

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What I am about to say will be quite controversial so I would like to declare up front what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that teachers, school officials or administrators, school owners or school boards themselves actively promote bullying or are secretly in favor of bullying. Though I am not discounting the fact that some of these people can themselves be the biggest bullies of all. But in general, I will readily assert that most of these people are good and kind-hearted and only want the best for our kids.

What I am asserting when I say that schools promote bullying is that the traditional SYSTEM of schooling itself provides the structure and breeding ground of bullying, REGARDLESS of the desires or intentions of those who run the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor at the Department of Psychology of Boston College, names at least 3 structural elements in school that promotes bullying (in the book Free to Learn):

  1. Grading/Ranking
  2. Age Segregation
  3. Lack of Free Play

Top Ten, Honor Roll, Honors’ Class, Valedictorian, Salutatorian, Gold Medal — from the time children start school all the way until they are of legal age, these terms ingrain upon their minds that school is ultimately a place for competition. Since the highest honor in most schools is to be the valedictorian, the implication is for each student to look out for himself or herself rather than to help others. Cooperation is not the highest goal, not if it means sacrificing one’s grade.

In the words of Dr. Gray, “By design, it teaches selfishness…Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper…Some of those students who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers, more interested in beating others than in helping them.”

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, it is the design, the system itself that teaches selfishness. I am certainly not saying that teachers teach selfishness, but that the structure itself rewards selfishness — and kids can see that very early on. They are more perceptive than we think.

Now of course, not everyone can be academic achievers and kids understand this very early on. So they try to find a niche where they can be at the top. They will try to excel in sports, in the arts, or in being the most fashionable, the coolest, the most notorious, the most daring, and so on. And while the latter may not earn them any medals from the school, they earn approval from their peer groups — which they will come to value more than any recognition they get from the school.

So although the school may have a system for ranking the best in academics and even the best in behavior, the students themselves have unconsciously devised a way of ranking themselves in other ways, inspired by the basic idea that life is about ranking and gaining approval even at the expense of others.

The stage is now set for bullying, and the atmosphere is exacerbated by the other two factors.

Part 2

Before schools came along, there was no age segregation. Children were a natural part of the community. They would easily and freely interact with whoever — older kids, younger kids, and even adults. There was no formal distinction made between what a kid ought to be doing vis-a-vis other kids. One kid could be happily playing by herself, another could be helping his dad harvest the potatoes.

In older hunter-gatherer tribes, kids could be tasked with adult responsibilities like climbing trees for fruits or setting traps or even hunting wild animals — as long as they could show that they were up to the task. Age was not so much a factor as was ability and interest. A teenager may not be strong enough to bend a bow but may show an aptitude for plants and can assist the tribe herbalist in creating potions and medicines.

With mass schooling came the idea to group children together in batches, according to their age, and then expecting them to learn the same things at the same time. This was a novel idea and proved to be very efficient — much like mass production in factories. Children were yanked from the playgrounds, from the fields, and from whatever nook and cranny they were hiding in, and placed in neat little rows of desks listening to an adult delivering lectures on history, mathematics, science, and whatever else adults thought was important for the kids to learn.

Now, because of grades and the ranking system (discussed in part 1), the survival instinct to excel and be number 1 becomes more pronounced with batching. Kids were now being forcibly compared with others of their same age. “Hey, the neighbor’s boy can read already at age 7. You’re almost 8. Why can’t you read yet?”

So here people are labeled as “bright”or “dumb” and no matter how much we lecture on political correctness or tell people that kids have multiple intelligences and may develop in different degrees and speeds, the system itself makes us still use those two labels, even if only in our heads — because we are too polite or ashamed to say them out loud.

Even in play and sports, age segregation has a negative effect. Studies have shown that mixed-age play triggers the nurturing instincts of older children. At Sudbury Valley School, for example, where there is unrestricted age-mixing — a game of basketball could be played by a mixed group of teenagers and 8 year olds. The interesting thing one would notice is that the kids will naturally form opposing teams that would more or less have the same number of teenagers and 8 year olds. The teenagers would not group themselves together and say, hey, let’s pound those 8 year olds.

Even during the game, the teenagers would bump and shove against other teenagers but they would not be rough towards or even guard the 8 year olds — leaving the other 8 year olds on their team to deal with them. This allows the younger kids to learn and enjoy the game.

The same principle could hold true for any other endeavor. Kids like learning from older kids because they are, in general, contextually more in tune with them than adults. And older kids enjoy a sense of accomplishment when they are able to help younger kids.

This dynamic is lost in age-segregated schools. No matter how much we lecture on bullying, how to prevent bullying, and so on, the problem persists and gets even worse because we haven’t changed the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, says, “The age-segregated, competitive atmosphere of school…provides the ideal conditions for the generation of competitive coalitions, or cliques, which provide a foundation for bullying. Children who are not accepted into any of the prevailing cliques may be picked on mercilessly, and they have no way to escape.”

Part 3

Adults often underestimate the value of play. They look at it as merely recreation, a break from the serious stuff, a way to de-stress from work. Take a look at how school is structured and you will see that very little time is devoted to play. 15 minutes of recess in the morning and then another in the afternoon. The rest is devoted to work.

Class activities that include games don’t count. Playing according to a teacher’s rules, without the option to not play, is not really play. It is still work. The child is not playing because they want to, but because an adult said so, and disobedience can have serious consequences.

Real play is about freedom — doing what one wants instead of what one has been told to do, and along with that is also the freedom to quit when one doesn’t want to play anymore, or to do something else. Playing, then is not just about the activity, but one’s state of mind in doing certain tasks.

When I write these articles, I am playing. It is something I want to do, and something I have immense fun in doing. That doesn’t mean I write gibberish and nonsense. I even induce pressure on myself by always writing in the early hours of the morning before the deadline. Does that contribute to my stress levels? Certainly not. I have fun beating the deadline this way and I’ve been doing it week after week for more than 6 years.

The benefits of play are enormous. A study published in 2002 by Howard-Jones, Taylor and Sutton on The Effect of Play on the Creativity of Young Children During Subsequent Activity found that children who were put in a playful mood 25 minutes before engaging them to create picture collages were assessed to have more creative outputs than those who were conditioned to do serious work (like copying text) before the actual task.

Other researchers have created similar studies, all showing that a playful mood results in creative, insightful and out-of-the-box problem solving.

Dr. Peter Gray writes, “Learning, creativity, and problem solving are facilitated by anything that promotes a playful state of mind, and they are inhibited by evaluation, expectation of rewards, or anything else that destroys a playful state of mind.”

So let’s go back to the title of this piece. What does all this have to do with how schools promote bullying?

By the act of forcing children into age-segregated classrooms; restricting their free play; coercing them to listen to lectures they may or may not be interested in, and then evaluating and judging them based on those; by hinging their self-worth on grades, promotion to the next level, commendations and medals; by imposing arbitrary rules on things like haircut, uniforms and the kind of shoes one ought to wear; by the explicit or implicit glorification of the sciences over the arts; by all these and more, the school system, and those who perpetuate it are the biggest bullies of all.

Part 4

A problem that is systemic in nature cannot be solved by good intentions, high ideals or hard work. A teacher who sees the problem and tries to remedy the situation might get away with small changes here and there, but those don’t really do much. Sooner or later, she is going to come up against a principal who will tell her to not rock the boat too much, to follow the system, or else.

A principal radical enough to allow teachers certain freedoms will sooner or later come up against a district supervisor, or the government’s Department of Education (DepEd) telling him to stand down, or else. The system is more likely to swallow individuals than have individuals change it. Those in their comfortable seats of power rarely want to do anything that might jeopardize their position, and of course people with new and interesting ideas would more often be seen as a threat and a potential rival, rather than as a welcome guest.

This is what Dan Greenberg saw when he decided to start Sudbury Valley School. This is what Ken Danford and Joshua Hornick realized when he decided to start the North Star Center for Self-Directed Learning. This is what Tomis Parker and Arthur Brock realized when they started Agile Learning Centers. Change cannot come from within the system. It is too huge, too political, too entrenched for any individual to really do anything about them.

Let me share a couple of anecdotes. My eldest daughter homeschooled her senior high year. Last year, we went to DepEd asking about their placement test for homeschoolers. This test was supposed to be a diagnostic exam that would determine the equivalent grade level of the student on the K-12 system. Guess what we found out — there was no such test in place for grade 12. This was in 2018, seven years after K-12 was first implemented. I wonder what DepEd has been doing all these years.

Here’s another encounter that I had. Since we had plans to open a school, we went to DepEd early this year to get a list of the requirements. The first thing we were told was that we had to submit everything by August 2019 and the earliest we could open was by 2021. I mean, really? It takes them 2 years to approve? And included in the list of requirements is the school building, facilities, and even a full roster of faculty — all of which will supposedly sit and twiddle their thumbs for 2 years waiting for approval.

I mean, really, this is the agency that’s going to accredit my school and determine if it is up to standard? No thanks. And if you want to understand bullying on a large-scale systemic level, you need look no further than this.

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Reposted with permission. Original series of articles were published on Andy Uyboco’s blog Freethinking Me.

The ADHD Overdiagnosis Epidemic Is a Schooling Problem, Not a Child One

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Childhood exuberance is now a liability. Behaviors that were once accepted as normal, even if mildly irritating to adults, are increasingly viewed as unacceptable and cause for medical intervention. High energy, lack of impulse control, inability to sit still and listen, lack of organizational skills, fidgeting, talking incessantly—these typical childhood qualities were widely tolerated until relatively recently. Today, children with these characteristics are being diagnosed with, and often medicated for, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at an astonishing rate.

While ADHD may be a real and debilitating ailment for some, the startling upsurge in school-age children being labeled with and medicated for this disorder suggests that something else could be to blame. More research points to schooling, particularly early schooling, as a primary culprit in the ADHD diagnosis epidemic.

Over the last several decades, young people are spending more time in school and school-like activities than ever before. They are playing less and expected to do more at very young ages. When many of us were kids, kindergarten was mellow, playful, and short with few academic expectations. The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet.Now, 80 percent of teachers expect children to learn to read in kindergarten. It’s not the teachers’ fault. They are responding to national curriculum frameworks and standardized testing requirements that over the past two decades have made schooling more oppressive—particularly for young children.

The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet. Last fall, Harvard researchers found that early school enrollment was linked to significantly higher rates of ADHD diagnosis. In states with a September 1 school enrollment age cutoff, children who entered school after just turning five in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born in September who were about to turn six. Immaturity, not pathology, was the real factor.

Marilyn Wedge, author of A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became An American Epidemic, sounds the alarm on ADHD overdiagnosis. In a Time Magazine article called “The ADHD Fallacy,” she writes:

By nature, young children have a lot of energy. They are impulsive, physically active, have trouble sitting still, and don’t pay attention for very long. Their natural curiosity leads them to blurt out questions, oblivious in their excitement to interrupting others. Yet we expect five- and six-year-old children to sit still and pay attention in classrooms and contain their curiosity. If they don’t, we are quick to diagnose them with ADHD.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percent of very young children (ages two to five) who were diagnosed with ADHD increased by over 50 percent between 2007/2008 and 2011/2012. As of 2016, data show that 9.4 percent of all American children, or over six million kids, had been diagnosed with ADHD, and almost two-thirds of current ADHD-diagnosed children were taking medication for it. A March 2019 report on ADHD by Blue Cross and Blue Shield found that among commercially insured children of all ages, ADHD diagnosis rates increased 30 percent in just eight years.

While the symptoms of ADHD may be troublesome, looking first at the environment, rather than the child, may be an important step toward curbing the ADHD diagnosis epidemic. In his book, ADHD Does Not Exist, Dr. Richard Saul, a Chicago behavioral neurologist, explains that individuals diagnosed with ADHD either have external factors that exacerbate normal symptoms or have some other underlying condition that should be identified and treated. In the latter instance, he finds that once the underlying condition is discovered and treated, the ADHD symptoms usually disappear. In the former instance, changing the environment is a key step toward improvement. This is true for both children and adults with an ADHD diagnosis. Dr. Saul writes:

Like many children who act out because they are not challenged enough in the classroom, adults whose jobs or class work are not personally fulfilling or who don’t engage in a meaningful hobby will understandably become bored, depressed and distracted. In addition, today’s rising standards are pressuring children and adults to perform better and longer at school and at work.

Addressing an environmental mismatch for ADHD-diagnosed adults could mean switching one’s job or field of study or pursuing a true passion. Maybe you’re an accountant who wants to be a carpenter or a nurse who wants to be an entrepreneur. For ADHD children, changing the environment could mean removing children from restrictive schooling altogether. As Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray writes:

What does it mean to have ADHD? Basically, it means failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling. Most diagnoses of ADHD originate with teachers’ observations.

Jennifer Walenski saw firsthand how transformative removing her ADHD-diagnosed child from standard schooling could be. She shares her family’s journey at The Bus Story and told me:

Our kids were actually in public school originally. Our son also was diagnosed with both ADHD and autism while he was in the school system. And they wanted to medicate him. But we said no. Then we took him and his sister out of school and began homeschooling them. Fast forward several years, he has absolutely no need at all for medication. He is just a normal boy who did not belong in that kind of environment. And most of us don’t. Think about it.

Walenski’s experience echoes that of other parents who removed their ADHD-diagnosed children from standard schooling. In an informal survey analysis, Gray discovered that when ADHD-labeled children left school for homeschooling, most of them no longer needed medication for ADHD symptoms. Their ADHD characteristics often remained but were no longer problematic outside of the conventional classroom.

Gray’s analysis also revealed that the ADHD-labeled young people who fared best outside of standard schooling were those who were able to learn in a more self-directed way. He found that the

few kids in this sample who were still on ADHD medications during homeschooling seemed to be primarily those whose homeschooling was structured by the parent and modeled after the education one would receive in a conventional school.

Replicating school-at-home can also replicate the problematic behaviors found at school, whereas moving toward unschooling, or self-directed education, can give young people the freedom to flourish.

Ending the ADHD overdiagnosis epidemic depends on a societal reality check where we no longer pathologize normal childhood behaviors. Much ADHD-labeling originates from forced schooling environments with learning and behavioral expectations that are developmentally inappropriate for many children. Freeing young people from restrictive schooling and allowing them to learn and grow through their own self-directed curiosity can lead to happier and healthier families and children.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

self-directed education

How Self-Directed Education Prepares Kids for the Gig Economy

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The growth of freelancers, or those working in the “gig economy” as their own independent contractors, is reshaping the way many Americans approach work. A 2016 Stanford University study found that independent freelancers comprise about one-quarter of the U.S. workforce and estimated that half of all workers could be independent contractors by 2020.

Second (and third) jobs have always been a reality for many Americans who take on additional work for financial reasons, but the majority of today’s gig economy workers choose freelance work on its own merits. A McKinsey study reveals that 70 percent of today’s independent workers are pursuing this employment path by choice rather than out of necessity.

Gig Work Goes Hand in Hand with Educational Freedom

The increasing popularity and feasibility of gig work create more opportunities for work/life balance, particularly for parents who are often juggling employment and child-rearing responsibilities. The flexibility that independent contract work can offer opens up possibilities for parents who may be dissatisfied with conventional schooling options for their children. Some of these parents are turning to unschooling either as homeschoolers who embrace a self-directed, interest-based approach to education or by sending their children part-time to a self-directed learning center or “unschooling school.” Or both. These parents see the gig economy as the future of work in the same way they view unschooling as the future of learning.

For Isabel Azalia, working in the gig economy and unschooling blend together well. She and her husband, who was born in Nicaragua, both have graduate degrees in engineering and worked for Fortune 30 companies. When they became parents, they began exploring other work options. Isabel dabbled in art and photography, and her husband took a different job that enabled him to work from home full-time. They decided to homeschool because they were underwhelmed by their local public school options in Florida and equally dissatisfied with private school choices.

Homeschooling allowed the freedom and flexibility for learning that she and her husband were looking for, and they embraced a non-coercive, self-directed approach tied to their children’s interests.

“I did really well in school,” Isabel says. “I was a straight-A student, got a full-ride scholarship to the number three school in the country for computer engineering, but I was miserable in school. I hated it. I felt trapped in school the whole time.” She wanted a better experience for her children but still thought she would send them to school. “I was fine with sending them to school because I would have more time to work, but when I started looking at the schools, I thought: How have they gotten worse?” Homeschooling allowed the freedom and flexibility for learning that she and her husband were looking for, and they embraced a non-coercive, self-directed approach tied to their children’s interests.

Now, Isabel has crafted a designer photography business focused on museum quality artistic photographs. Her husband, who already has numerous patents, is looking to venture off on his own as an inventor. The parents share homeschooling and work obligations, but they are optimistic that a new self-directed learning center may open soon nearby, enabling their children to spend a couple of days a week there while they grow their respective businesses.

“I feel like it would be a game-changer for us,” says Isabel. “I could get more work things accomplished, get my marketing plan done and still be fully present for my kids. And my husband could work on his inventions.” She is clear, though, that she wouldn’t want her kids, who are four, seven, and almost ten, to attend a learning center more than part-time and instead would rather prioritize the time they spend at home as a family and throughout their community learning together organically. “Right now, my son is really into the physics of roller coasters, so we spend a lot of time on that,” she says.

More Freedom for Both Children and Adults

Independent contractors who choose freelance work are often frustrated by traditional work arrangements and rigid schedules and are seeking more freedom, flexibility, and autonomy.

The gig economy and unschooling share common traits. Independent contractors who choose freelance work are often frustrated by traditional work arrangements and rigid schedules and are seeking more freedom, flexibility, and autonomy. Similarly, many unschooling parents find conventional classrooms to be highly standardized, test-driven environments and want their children to have the freedom, flexibility, and autonomy that they as adults also value. Isabel sees many connections between entrepreneurship and unschooling. “They both leave you feeling free at the end of the day,” she says.

Like the gig economy, unschooling is also growing. Newly released 2016 data from the U.S. Department of Education reveal that 20 percent of homeschoolers report “always” or “mostly” using informal learning practices, a jump from 2012. Additionally, independent, self-directed alternatives to school are sprouting up across the country, supporting more unschooling-inclined families with flexible attendance options.

As more American workers look to the gig economy to provide the freedom and opportunity they want, many may also choose to grant their children more freedom, as well. The gig economy, particularly in conjunction with the growth of self-directed learning centers, can help more families move from schooling to unschooling. Like conventional workplaces, conventional classrooms may soon be a thing of the past.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Why Many Unschoolers Become Entrepreneurs

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Almost by definition, entrepreneurs are creative thinkers and experimental doers. They reject the status quo and devise new approaches and better inventions. They are risk-takers and dreamers, valuing ingenuity over convention. They get things done.

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that many unschoolers become entrepreneurs. Able to grow up free from a coercive classroom or traditional school-at-home environment, unschoolers nurture interests and passions that may sprout into full-fledged careers. Their creativity and curiosity remain intact, uncorrupted by a mass education system intent on order and conformity. Their energy and exuberance, while a liability in school, are supported with unschooling, fostering the stamina necessary to successfully bring a business idea to market. Like entrepreneurship, unschooling challenges what is for what could be.

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that many unschoolers become entrepreneurs.

The numbers are startling. In a survey of grown unschoolers, Boston College professor Peter Gray, along with his colleague Gina Riley, discovered that more than half of the grown unschoolers they interviewed were presently working as entrepreneurs. Many of the respondents indicated that their careers were directly linked to childhood interests that they followed into adulthood. Interestingly, the correlation between unschooling and entrepreneurship was the highest for the always-unschooled group, as compared to intermittent unschoolers.

Unschoolers Make Amazing Entrepreneurs

Anecdotally, the link between unschooling and entrepreneurship is fascinating. Karen Leong is a 19-year-old custom cake designer with her own flourishing small business. Unschooled throughout her childhood, she learned about cake design from watching YouTube videos when she was 11. That triggered a sprouting interest, and she pursued additional, months-long courses in cake design and pastry work. Today, her business is expanding and she credits unschooling for playing a large role in her current entrepreneurial pursuits. In a recent interview for New Straits Times, she says about her upbringing: “My parents were very involved in my unschooling. It’s essential that parents are very proactive in their child’s unschooling journey, maintain open communications and have a strong relationship with their child.”

Karen Leong is a 19-year-old custom cake designer with her own flourishing small business.

Another grown unschooled entrepreneur is New Jersey contractor, Zachary Dettmore. In a recent interview with the Lyndhurst Daily Voice, Dettmore describes how growing up unschooled enabled him to pursue his interests, including his passion for building and construction that emerged when he was around eight-years-old. According to the article: “I was always interested in building and how things worked,” he said, “so my reading as a child was geared towards non-fiction topics that interested me. I wasn’t pigeonholed into a one-size-fits-all education methodology.” At 13, he took a timber-framing course and became increasingly committed to a career as a contractor. Now 29, Dettmore runs a successful custom contracting business with a couple of employees.

Entrepreneurship Is at the Heart of Unschooling

Successful entrepreneurs are self-starters, driven by their own passions and goals to create something new and different that has value to others. As self-directed learners, unschoolers are given the freedom early on to discover these passions and commit to these individual goals. They are allowed the time and space to explore, to tinker. Whether with their family, or while attending a self-directed learning center or unschooling school, unschooled children are surrounded by supportive adults eager to help connect their budding interests with the larger resources of their community, like classes and mentors. This process of pursuing individual passions while being supported by caring adults creates the ideal conditions for aspiring entrepreneurs to imagine new possibilities and leap into unknown enterprises.

As the American entrepreneur and author, Jim Rohn, once said: “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” While all of us can benefit from his advice, unschoolers have a great head start.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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In the Wake of Mass Shootings, Parents Reconsider Mass Schooling

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In the wake of recent tragic school shootings, anxious parents are contemplating homeschooling to protect their children. After February’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Miami Herald reported that more parents were considering the homeschooling option. And after Friday’s disturbing school shooting in Sante Fe, Texas, a local ABC news affiliate in Alabama reported the increasing appeal of homeschooling.

“If I had the time, I would teach my kids myself, and I would know that they’re safe,” a father of four told ABC station, WAAY31. A public school teacher interviewed by the channel disagreed with the idea of homeschooling. According to the news story, the teacher “says resorting to homeschooling is teaching your children to run from reality.”

But that raises the question: Is compulsory mass schooling “reality”?

Public Schools Are Consuming More and More of Kids’ Time

Segregating children by age into increasingly restrictive, test-driven classrooms where they are forced by law to be unless a parent or caregiver liberates them is hardly “reality.” What’s worse is that young people are spending increasingly more time in this coercive “reality” than ever before.

In the case of teens, spending more time in school and school-like activities may be further separating them from the actual real world.

For young children ages six to eight, schooling increased from an average of five hours a day in 1981-82 to an average of seven hours a day in 2002-03. And for today’s teens, schooling consumes much more of their time than it did for previous generations, seeping into summertime and other historically school-free periods. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 42 percent of teens were enrolled in school during July 2016, compared to only 10 percent enrolled in July 1985.

In the case of teens, spending more time in school and school-like activities may be further separating them from the actual real world in which they previously came of age. As Business Insider reports: “Almost 60% of teens in 1979 had a job, compared to 34% in 2015.” Spending more time in the contrived reality of forced schooling and less time in authentic, multi-age, productive communities may be taking its toll on today’s youth.

Compulsory Mass Schooling Is Hurting Our Kids

New findings from researchers at Vanderbilt University show a disturbing correlation between time in school and suicidal thoughts and attempts by young people, which have been increasing over the past decade. Whereas most adults see suicide spikes in July and August, most kids see suicide dips in summer. Children’s suicidal tendencies appear strongest during the school year.

Boston College psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray believes that increasingly oppressive schooling is leading to serious psychological damage in some children. He writes on his blog at Psychology Today:

Children now often spend more time at school and at homework than their parents spend at their full-time jobs, and the work of schooling is often more burdensome and stress-inducing than that of a typical adult job. A century ago we came to the conclusion that full-time child labor was child abuse, so we outlawed it; but now school is the equivalent of full-time child labor. The increased time, tedium, and stress of schooling is bringing many kids to the breaking point or beyond, and more and more people are becoming aware of that. It can no longer be believed that schooling is a benign experience for children. The evidence that it induces pathology is overwhelming.”

Recent school shootings may be extreme examples of this rising school-induced pathology.

Choosing to Homeschool Isn’t “Running from Reality”

Instead of overreacting, parents who decide to remove their children from school to homeschool them may be acknowledging the disconnect between the inherent coercion of compulsory mass schooling and the freedom to live in the genuine world around us. Rather than sheltering their children, parents who select the homeschooling option may be endeavoring to widen their child’s community, broaden their experiences, and restore their emotional well-being.

Former New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, writes in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling about his growing disillusionment with mass schooling:

I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”  

Parents who remove their children from the confines of the conventional classroom are not running away from reality. They are running towards it.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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Our Homeschooling Freedoms Must Be Protected

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Homeschoolers today have it easy. Many of us were in diapers when, in 1977, educator John Holt created Growing Without Schooling, the first newsletter to connect and encourage homeschooling families. Holt and other social reformers provided the support and facilitated the networks that would ultimately lead to homeschooling becoming legally recognized in all U.S. states by 1993.

I sometimes wonder about the courage it took those earlier homeschooling parents to remove their children from school before it was fully legal, to chart an alternative education path for their children when they were often the only ones on that road. I sometimes wonder if I would have had the same courage.

Homeschooling Is Going Mainstream

Most of us no longer worry about truancy officers knocking on our doors or wonder where we will need to move next to find a community more accepting of us.

Now, homeschooling is a legitimate education option with the number of homeschoolers hovering around two million nationwide. With expanding numbers come increased diversity as families of all races, classes, religions, ethnicities, ideologies, and academic philosophies tailor homeschooling to their distinct needs and lifestyles. For example, the number of African Americans choosing to homeschool continues to accelerate, often propelled by concerns of institutional racism in schools, and Muslim Americans are reported to be one of the fastest-growing homeschooling demographics.

As homeschooling has become widely accepted and more reflective of our pluralistic society, it is easy to become complacent. Most of us no longer worry about truancy officers knocking on our doors or wonder where we will need to move next to find a community more accepting of family-centered education. We happily play outside on a spring weekday morning without fear that passersby will worry why our children aren’t in school. We choose from a vast assortment of pedagogical approaches, selecting styles that best suit the needs of our children—not school personnel.

We may forget what a recent privilege all of this is. Our freedom to homeschool as we choose is owed in large part to those courageous parents who came before us. Their choice, and their activism, made our homeschooling choice possible and pleasant.

But the Freedom Is Precarious

Our modern homeschooling freedoms also come with the responsibility to protect those freedoms. While we may not have had to fight to secure our homeschooling rights, we should certainly fight to keep them. As homeschooling moves from the marginal to the mainstream, it can trigger state efforts to curb freedoms, heighten regulations, and increase oversight.

Whether or not we would have had the courage to create these homeschooling freedoms we now enjoy, we must have the courage to keep them.

We are seeing this effort mount in California, as the egregious case of alleged abuse by the Turpin family has led to recent legislative efforts to crack-down on homeschooling in the state. Current proposed legislation aims to rein in homeschooling families and require government monitoring, including forming an advisory committee to investigate, and potentially “reform,” homeschooling. As NPR reports: “That could be anything from home inspections to credentialing teachers to setting specific curriculums.”

Now is the time for those of us homeschooling today to show our gratitude to those who came before us by continuing their fight. It is up to us to preserve our homeschooling freedoms from government encroachment so that we may continue to a live a life free of school and school-like thinking.

Whether or not we would have had the courage to create these homeschooling freedoms we now enjoy, we must have the courage to keep them.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Ansel Adams

How to Solve America’s Creativity Crisis

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Prompted by my nine-year-old’s son’s emerging interest in photography, I have been introduced to the life and legacy of Ansel Adams, the renowned 20th-century American landscape photographer. As a curious and energetic child, with an innate need to move and act, schooling was not a good fit for Ansel. In his autobiography, he describes his “native hyperactivity,” and explains how trapped he felt in school. Ansel writes:

Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside.”

The Courage to Preserve Childhood Creativity

Childhood creativity and ebullience are boundless. They are not dulled merely by age, but by circumstance.

Ansel’s father recognized his son’s natural exuberance and determined that Ansel needed more freedom to thrive. When Ansel was 12, his father removed him from school and homeschooled him, granting him abundant freedom and opportunity to pursue his own interests and passions. At home, Ansel learned to play the piano, becoming a professional musician before devoting his life to photography.

In 1915, his father gave his young teenage son a year’s pass to the World’s Fair. Ansel went every day, absorbing the wonder and ingenuity of the grand exposition. His father told him that would be his school. On a family vacation in 1916, Ansel visited Yosemite Valley for the first time, becoming enchanted by the place that would ultimately occupy his life and photographs for the next six decades. While there, his parents gave him his first camera. The rest is history. Ansel writes in his autobiography:

I often wonder at the strength and courage my father had in taking me out of the traditional school situation and providing me with these extraordinary learning experiences.”

Creativity flourishes in freedom and shrivels with force.

Childhood creativity and ebullience are boundless. They are not dulled merely by age, but by circumstance. When children go to school, their creativity can be eroded by the pressures of conformity, their energy stifled—even sanctioned.

Declining Creativity

As schooling has expanded over the past several decades, consuming more of childhood than ever before, and becoming more standardized and restrictive, it should be no surprise that American creativity has simultaneously plummeted. In her extensive research on creativity, KH Kim of the College of William & Mary analyzed nearly 300,000 creativity scores on the well-regarded Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. She found that American creativity scores increased each year between 1966 until 1990. From 1990 on, however, creativity scores have steadily declined. Most concerning is Kim’s finding that the sharpest drop in creativity scores occurred in elementary-age children from kindergarten through 6th grade. Kim shares her startling findings in her book, The Creativity Challenge: How We can Recapture American Innovation. She writes:

The bottom line is this: Americans are less creative today than they were twenty-five years ago. Furthermore, this decline continues with no end in sight—Americans continue to become less creative over time.

While Kim points to a host of possible culprits for declining creativity, increasingly standardized schooling is a prominent one.

Creativity flourishes in freedom and shrivels with force. Some of our most creative children are ones like Ansel Adams, whose “native hyperactivity” may be even more essential in our fast-paced, rapidly changing culture. Their urgency for action, their unwillingness to entertain the mundane, their ingenuity and tolerance for the unknown are precisely the characteristics necessary for success in a new age of accelerating information and innovation.

Children already possess the skills and characteristics that will enable them to thrive in a society that has no idea what jobs will exist five years from now.

According to a 2016 report on “The Future of Jobs” by the World Economic Forum, many of the jobs and specializations that are now in the highest demand did not even exist five or 10 years ago. These jobs did not exist. Creative, energetic, entrepreneurial individuals with the eagerness to educate themselves will be the ones most capable of adapting to and succeeding in such an ambiguous, variable future.

The good news is that we don’t need to train our children how to adapt to this post-industrial age. We simply need to avoid training out of them their natural creativity and exuberance. Children already possess the skills and characteristics that will enable them to thrive in a society that has no idea what jobs will exist five years from now.  

As parents, we need to take responsibility for nurturing our children’s natural creativity, energy, and capacity for self-education. We need to grant our children freedom over force, allowing them to grow in their own way, revealing their own talents and gifts. We need to provide the educational conditions that enable childhood creativity to bloom, rather than wither under a system of coercion and conformity. As Ansel Adams writes of his father’s choice to remove him from school:

I trace who I am and the direction of my development to those years of growing up in our house on the dunes, propelled especially by an internal spark tenderly kept alive and glowing by my father.

Parents are the ones most capable of preparing children for an unknown future by keeping their present spark alive.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.