Schooled in Unschooling in The Big Apple: Reflections on clarity, curiosity, and what “better” really means in education
"This seat is open. Please, join me," I said to the woman looking for a spot on the terrace.
We were fellow travelers in New York City, enjoying much-needed refreshments 23 stories above the street, with a spectacular view of the Hudson River at sunset. Light jazz drifted through the speakers. I felt like a much older and wiser Annie Hall (rest in peace, Diane Keaton).
My new dining companion had just flown in from Idaho for an intensive week of culture. She had tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, jazz shows, Broadway productions, and a concert at Carnegie Hall. This was a person I wanted to know better!
I don't know exactly how it happens, but in nearly every conversation I have with new people, there is a component about schooling or education. It might be theirs, or their children's, or simply a commentary on the state of education at that moment. Two hours into the conversation, the sun had set, the crowd thinned, and we were on to tea. I considered her a friend by then. Her name was Julia.
She talked about her daughter. She spoke about how they traveled as a family across the country in an RV for a year and across Asia another year. I was familiar with her town and some of the schools there, both public and independent, but not one with that kind of flexibility.
"Where do you send your daughter to school?" I asked.
She hesitated. "Do you know a lot about education?" she countered. I felt a change in her, a tentativeness that had not been there before.
"I suppose so," I said. "I'm a consultant, and I work with private and independent school leaders across the country. We work to resolve the sorts of things that cause a budget shortfall."
Julia smiled, relaxed, and said, "Okay, then. My husband and I have chosen to unschool our child. I don't like to get into it unless someone has a good sense of educational options because people get very judgey about our decision. And I'm not up for it anymore."
I am familiar with many types of schools, from the gamut of progressive schools to faith-based schools, homeschooling to online schools, therapeutic schools to wilderness schools, traditional day schools to boarding schools, and a lot in between. I served on the board of a microschool. But I was not familiar with unschooling.
Julia explained that when her daughter was preschool-age, she looked at all the options in town, feeling pressure from family and friends to choose a school. She and her husband talked about their own school experiences, which were very traditional. One attended public school, and the other attended midwestern private schools. Each was an alum of a well-known college. They concluded that conventional education had not served them well, and they did not want that for their daughter. They read about the founders of progressive education, Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey, and later innovators A. S. Neill, John Holt, and Daniel Greenberg. They considered the local Waldorf school and the Montessori school but decided against the rigidity of any school schedule or a set curriculum.
"She's 16 now," said Julia, "and has never attended school. Two of the tenets of unschooling are having faith and trust in the child, and that learning happens all the time. We have put our family first and we are partners in our daughter's unschooling path, which makes us all unschoolers. We are an unschooling family."
Unschooling has no set curricula, no Common Core standards, and no assessments. Every experience is a learning experience. Parents are facilitators of learning, guided by the child's interests.
Julia and her husband wanted to create an environment where their daughter could be curious and take her curiosity to its logical end. They wanted her to feel confident in her abilities and in her process toward mastery. The project could take an hour or years. Mastery was measured only by her daughter's drive to achieve it. There was no "pass or fail," no arbitrary grades or grade levels. Everything was up for consideration. Her daughter was the only one who decided that an avenue of learning was of interest and therefore worth pursuing. I deeply admired her commitment to her educational choice.
I couldn't help myself. Spending years raising my daughters and getting caught up in the dreaded college acceptance competition, as well as hearing how some of my clients market their success to parents with their college acceptance lists, I had to ask.
"Do you think she will choose to go to college?"
Again, Julia shared a knowing smile, "I doubt it. It is there if she chooses it, if she thinks it will serve her goals. But right now, she is focused on coding and design. There is a firm overseas that she will be working with next year. We are coordinating the logistics for us all to move there for a few months. You know," she continued, "that seems to be the most common fear or hurdle for people to maneuver in their understanding of our choice of unschooling. Traditional schools thrive on a fear, if you don’t do this, your kid won’t succeed. Outcomes, measures, benchmarks, testing. It’s exhausting and undermining to kids and families. But who gets to decide what success is? We prefer to allow our family to determine that."
I was fascinated. This educational choice expanded my understanding, and I was grateful for that gift.
The waitstaff cleaned up around us, and soon we were the only ones on the terrace. A siren wailed, cars honked far below. Buildings much taller than ours lit the skyline. We promised to write (and we have), hugged, and said goodbye.
As I thought about that magical experience shared by two travelers in one of the most iconic cities on our planet, I considered this: parents who have the privilege to choose a specific type of education for their children expect it to work. They expect their children to come out of it better than if they had not made that choice. "Better" is defined by their child's personality and strengths, their own school experience, and their perception and definition of success as an adult. As one would expect, those parameters are different for every family, sometimes significantly.
So, as a school leader, how do you describe your school to families so they know it will put their kid on a path to "better"? Can you convince a family set on unschooling to choose your school? No, probably not. Can you compete with the school that looks mostly like yours? Yes, and you do compete every day, whether you want to or not. By articulating what you do, why you do it, who is best served, and most importantly, what you don’t do and never will, is a key to your school's viability.
Whether your school is 20 years old or 120 years old, consider the evolution of your mission and philosophy. Does it still hold true, or has it crept away, expanding and changing to accept more students who may not be mission-aligned, but keep your doors open? Has that mission creep created a school that is hard to market? Do you find yourself talking about your school as the one it once was, waxing poetic about alumni successes from decades ago, but now, looking around, you're not sure the description is accurate to the lived experience of your students, parents, and faculty?
I thought about all that in the elevator after my fortuitous evening with Julia. I continue to think about it with each new conversation with school leaders who feel the pressures and challenges of leading a school amid debilitating budget constraints and increasing competition of all sorts for the privilege of educating young humans.
Let's think about your school together.
The author, Jill Goodman, is a consultant who works with independent school leaders to address budget concerns by increasing enrollment retention, building capacity in development, and enhancing leadership skills.
Photo credit: Jill Goodman
