Unschool

In Roland Tharp's and Ronald Gillmore's (1988) seminal text, Rousing Minds to Life: Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Context, they discuss the meaning of the term, school, and in many ways target the tensions felt today. Consider:

When citizens and their leaders hear of places and things calling themselves "schools" and those places and things do not correspond to the nation's internalized and shared vision, a deep offense is experienced, an offense to all the components of basic meaning-- the intellectual, emotional, activity, and historical components of the meaning of the word "school." The tendency of society is to gather back to the flock any errant geese.  It is no accident that the political movement for greater emphasis on higher academic goals has labeled itself the back-to-basics movement....Any social system will attempt to recapture those who deviate from its shared and internalized symbols; schools wander off the well-worn path at their peril. (p. 266).

Against this felt desire to maintain the known, there is also public dissatisfaction with schools. This leads to reform after reform regardless of how it is dressed that carries with it the subtext that "we're going to make it more like it was than ever before" (p. 267). Tharp and Gallimore write:

Political school-bashing and teacher-bashing are almost always based on the assumption that schools are no longer adhering to their real purposes: teachers are less knowledgeable than they should be; students are not as disciplined as they should be; the basic skills of reading, writing, and ciphering are not emphasized as they were in good old schools. (p. 267)

Tharp and Gallimore state that "intersubjectivity of the nation is the root problem--the shared meaning of school, the common history of schooling...the continual dousing of innovation and the restoration of the school to the comfortable conformity to the internalized image are reliable and reassuring political acts" (p.267).  Twenty-three years later, has much changed in the way we view "school"? Tharp and Gallimore conclude that "true school reform can come only about with a radical change in the meaning of school" (p.268).

In many ways the voucher programs and charter school movement hold the promise of something shiny and new, but nonetheless maintain the fundamental structure of school as a place students go to learn a prescribed curriculum. Yes, students may go to a charter school for a longer period of time during the school year. Charters may look more focused on the surface as they may be formed with connection to some type of occupation (the arts) or disposition (school of problem solving). Central here though is that the fundamental understanding of school as a location where students come to learn from teachers remains largely unchanged. And that's a problem.

I've been thinking a lot lately about learning and less about schooling.

Although still formative, what is emerging is an unschool: think of it as a commitment to learning that young people and some not so young make and in doing so form alliances based on interests, curiosities, questions, and passions. These alliances are not located solely in one geographic place, but can and do exist both in real and virtual spaces. Unschools have no prescribed state of national standards as the idea of a single prescribed curriculum runs counter to the stated goal of helping young people to compose themselves as learners.  Some critical ways of coming to know are privileged however, and find expression as composing and consuming--problem solving and problem generating, as well as the development of heuristics. Learning decisions are informed by mentors and peer-learners in concert with unschool community members, as well as peer-learner defined "expert practitioners". The mentor and peer-learner work is largely to fashion personalized learning that is inherently iterative and attends to the critical ways of knowing and doing. Peer learners, like mentors, are not restricted to a single place as virtual learning is part of the unschool design, although it is expected that there will be mentors and peer learners who will come together in real space for certain work.  Self assessment is privileged, alongside some external norms that the mentor and peer learner determine jointly.

That's what I am seeing currently and I would love to know what you think. Unschools will make most of us uncomfortable as they resist our understanding of school. As such, imagining unschools is difficult, especially as the remembrance of our own "schooling" is often romanticized and will be of little practical value, except in pointing at what it is not like.  Instead, it is better to think of a deep learning experience you have had that did not take place at a school and consider how that learning evolved, and trace as best one can the often nomadic journey of such learning.


There will be lots of ideas and content that unschool learners won't know.  What they will know and have experience with are the challenges, frustrations ,complexities, beauty, and perseverance necessary to learn well and deeply and to share that learning in meaningful ways.