Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Brief interview, "Mornings" show



I didn't hear it on the day, but in the recording I can hear that the interviewer was about to suggest that my children sounded gifted. Their biggest gift was time to develop in their own way, in an enriched environment, with lots of parental attention. 

One of the interviewer's comments was interesting, but not really fair or true: "Your point was that you were an educator, you were taught how to educate your kids at home…" I was taught about classrooms and groups of kids, about record keeping and assessment. Those things aren't useful for unschoolers.

It's true that the open classroom method is what unschooling is, only without the limitation of a classroom or a schedule, but it's NOT about teaching. It's about providing resources, answering questions, facilitating their learning. For some people, having been a teacher is detrimental to their ability to be good unschooling parents.

Some of the very best of unschooling parents have zero "teacher training" or classroom experience. It's not at all required, nor helpful. But it IS true that there are many unschoolers who were once teachers. More than anything else, their common knowledge is that learning all happens inside the learner.

3 comments:

Kirsty said...

Enjoyed catching up on this interview online after the Always Learning Live conference with Sandra at the Gold Coast. After watching our two daughters learn to read at ages 4 and 6 without being taught I find it amazing that people like this man still believe children need to be taught literacy and have such little faith in the natural learning process.
Kirsty

Sandra Dodd said...

I think it's a classic case of seeing school as the real world, without ever having been in the wide world of not-school.

I could have lived my life that way, had I kept teaching. I had loved school since I entered it, and had dreamy visions of always having a classroom, someday having an office, retiring as a teacher (award-winning teacher, maybe :-) )

That is one world, but it is small and isolated from what even professional educators so often refer to as "the real world" beyond its walls and "schoolyears" and assumptions.

~Katherine said...

Of all the people to do an interview like that impromptu, it was very cool to see that. Thanks for what you do, Sandra.