Alternatives to Standardized Tests for Homeschooling Families

Editor's note:  The information here targets homeschooling families, but these really are great ideas for all families.
Cross posted from Parent at the Helm with permission from Linda Dobson

From Susan and Larry Kaseman:

Your interest in your homeschooling child’s academic standing is understandable. Fortunately, we homeschooling families have many opportunities to observe our children’s development. We watch them exploring the world and, when necessary, translate what they do into conventional academic language. (Sorting rocks is science. Building with blocks is geometry and spatial relations. Recognizing one’s name is reading.) We can see the processes our children go through and support their early efforts just as we recognized and responded to their first words. We gradually come to understand that learning about baseball or horses develops basic academic skills.

Alternative Assessment for Worried Homeschooling Parents

When we get concerned about academics (yes, even confident, experienced homeschooling parents sometimes worry):

• We can review what our children have already learned. What can they do today that they couldn’t do a few months ago? Write a note? discuss current political issues?

• We can look at the big picture. As homeschooling parents, we know our children better than we would if they were attending a conventional school. We see their increasing understanding of the world; their growing ability to interact with others; their increasing self-reliance as they learn to ride a bike, drive a car, travel abroad; and their increasing maturity as they take responsibility for increasingly complex projects.

• We can realize that to become mature, responsible adults, children don’t need to follow the path prescribed by conventional schools. Children learn best by following their own timetable, at different rates in different subjects. As homeschooling families, we have the flexibility to encourage this. Many grownup homeschoolers who are doing well didn’t learn to read until they were eight, ten, or older. Many who write well and are comfortable with math would earlier have been considered “below grade level.” Had they been pressured to learn these things earlier, they might have concluded that they could not learn them. A great gift we can give our children is the ability and courage to be true to themselves, to set their own standards, to identify problems and not be overwhelmed by them, to consider a wide range of alternative responses and then act. This will them well whether the problem is a car that won’t start, a health crisis, or simply the causes of the Civil War.

• Perhaps the best preparation is the ability to learn new things. (Consider people now using computers who did not study them in school.) We can ask: Do our homeschooling children recognize when they don’t know something? Are they confident enough to admit that they don’t know it? Do our children know how to find information they need using resources such as their common sense, the library, the Internet, and assistance from other people?

• Finally, it’s great that you want to avoid standardized tests. They interfere with learning and are inaccurate, unfair, and biased against minorities, women, and anyone who does not have the same experiences and values as the developer of the test. Taking a test often undermines self-esteem. Test scores show only how well a given person performed on a given test on a given day, not how much one knows.

But test results tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies. Why would we want to put our homeschooling children through difficult experiences that produce unreliable results that may be harmful to them?

The Hidden Lessons of Standardized Tests

Contributed by homeschooling veteran Ann Fisher

Standardized tests, in addition to being narrowly focused and frequently misused comparative measurements of academic progress, are powerful teachers in their own right. Are these the kinds of lessons you want your children to learn?

• Someone else knows what I should know better than my parents or I do.

• Learning is an absolute that can be measured.

• My interests are not important enough to be measured.

• The subject areas being evaluated on the test are the only things that are important to know.

• Thinking is not valued; getting the “right” answer is the only goal.

• The answer (to any question) is readily available and indisputable, and it’s one of these four or five answers here. There’s no need to look deeper or dwell on the question.

• My worth can be summarized by a single mark on a paper.

• The purpose of learning is to get a high score. High test scores are the only purpose of testing.

• If I score very well, I am better than other people who do not score as well.

• Poor test scores mean that I am a failure. If I score poorly, there is nothing I can do to change it. Why try?

• I haven’t learned to read yet. I am not smart.

• Since I am tested once a year so we can continue homeschooling, my parents and I have to spend the rest of the year preparing for the test.

• The test was too hard. I am not smart.

• The test was easy. I don’t have to learn any more.

• The test was easy [hard]. Public [home] [private] school kids are dumber [smarter] than I am.

• The questions on the test are what is important. What I have been studying is not important.

• I have to get a higher score next year to show that I am learning.

For more information on the wonderful world of homeschooling, check out Linda Dobson’s The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices.

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Why going to school to learn is no longer necessary

I was recently interviewed for “Class Dismissed,” the first full-length documentary devoted to exploring homeschooling as a viable alternative to the industrial school model. Class Dismissed will challenge its viewers to take a fresh look at what it means to be educated, the difference between education and schooling and speak to the many misconceptions that surround homeschooling, while offering up a radical new way of thinking about the process of education.

In this video excerpt I explain why we no longer need to go to school to learn what we need for success.  

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Homeschoolers outperform publicly schooled youth on traditional measures

I've become interested in home education after discovering how amazingly well home educated children are learning. Once I dug a little deeper I began learning about families who were home educating following a philosophy that leans more toward unschooling also known as learning naturally via a life without school. As a result many of the myths I had been lead to believe about learning were quickly shattered.

Why is this important for someone who is passionate about public education and in fact has been a part of the system for more than a decade? Because educators have a lot to learn about learning from home educating families. In fact, if we don't, we are doing young people a disservice and moving further and further toward the irrelevance and disconnection that leads so many young people toward tuning out or worse, dropping out with rates around 50% in cities like those in which I've lived (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York).

One belief educators and parents often come back with is that home education can't possibly be the best for learning because young people deserve highly trained professionals, not just their parents, to best support their learning. Here are some reasons this belief is flawed.

• First, it is important to note that homeschooling doesn't mean you isolate your children and only one person supports their learning. Home educated young people learn from a variety of experts who are both experienced in teaching and in their profession as well as from peers, others, and from just doing stuff. You'll often hear home educated individuals praise the fact that they get to actually do so much stuff as opposed to school kids who spend a lot of time reading and hearing about other people doing stuff.  
• Second, the research shows that teacher certification does not correlate to higher student achievement. Additionally, when we go to the numbers, we see that home educated youth are outperforming their publicly educated peers.

Homeschooling author Linda Dobson shared this infographic with me and members of the homeschooling / unschooling / DIY learning group. (See her take here.) It provides an overview of some of those numbers.


Created by: College At Home

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Four Key Performance Indicators in Praise of Homeschooling

An article recently came out that takes on the National Education Associations anti-homeschooling position revealing 4 performance indicators that demonstrate the value of homeschooling. If you weren't aware, The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. They say, when home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress.

Not only is it disturbing that the NEA supports intruding in the lives of families when it comes to what is best for their children, the facts are that home educated students do better than those in public schools. 


The article points to the following four performance indicators along with links to sources for each one.

• Key Performance Indicator #1: Academics
• Key Performance Indicator #2: Socialization
• Key Performance Indicator #3: Finances
• Key Performance Indicator #4: Values

You can read about each performance indicator in the original article here.

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Dropping Out was a Great Idea

Editor's Note: I had the extreme pleasure of joining the author of this post, Nicholas Perez, as a guest on Paul Allison's Teachers Teaching Teachers. In the episode we discussed who drops out and why. I was invited on the show as author of the Teen's Guide to Opting Out of School for Success. Nick was invited because he was a teen who opted out of school to find success. I LOVED what Nick had to say and asked him to please consider sharing his story as I know it will be inspiring to parents, teachers, and teens across the globe. The following post is the result of several month's work. It provides amazing insights and lessons for every educator, administrator and parent. It also happens to be the most important post I've published. So, without further adieu, please read Nick's story. This is the first time it is being shared publicly.



“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.” - Frank Zappa

       

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of questions raised about how innovations in technology will change education as we know it - Can machines replace teachers? Do internet resources provide everything needed to develop professional skills? What happens if you replace school with online learning? I’ve spent my life trying to find out, and the answers I have are both promising and a little horrifying.

The good news is that it worked. I’ve developed a wide range of interests and skills, with my lifelong field of choice being software. I have a software development job that I love, I have no student debt, and I feel secure about my long-term future. I’m pretty sure that this is what most students dream of. The path here wasn’t easy or well-traveled, but the experiment has been a success.

The bad news is that along the way, I discovered that public schools are not prepared to fairly compete for their students’ attention. This has resulted in a long series of slightly traumatizing events. From the prescription drugging, to the humiliation of being singled out from the rest of my peers, to the threats of litigation, it’s been a long road. I left school at the age of 17 after deciding that I’d had enough of my school district’s attempts to forcibly shift my attention toward the classroom, and away from my independent studies. This didn’t happen because of human evils, but because of old, rigid systems that have yet to bend and break under the pressure of progress.

One of the arguments in favor of schooling that I hear most frequently is that the diversity of curricula changes the way students view the world - it exposes them to things they never would have explored otherwise, and it’s the perfect recipe for a well-rounded individual. While that sounds great on paper, it is an obsolete notion. In the information age, exposure to new ideas is inevitable. The diversity of ideas being shared online and in the real world far exceeds the diversity of a single school’s curriculum, and it is highly unlikely that this will ever change. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in tech, media, skincare/beauty products, marketing, and education. I’ve interned in a professional recording studio and written hundreds of my own songs.  I’ve had discussions and debates with people from all over the world, with passions ranging from evolutionary biology to international philanthropy to psychology to social activism to mechanical engineering to the arts. Opportunities to explore new ideas will always be incredibly abundant, but I’ve found it more important to focus on the things that I’m devoting my life to.

It is now easier than ever to discover your passion at an early age.

There has been no subject of interest that I’ve found to be more captivating than technology. I spent most of my early childhood playing video games and learning how to use my old DOS PC. In the mid-to-late 90s, computers began to transform our culture in a huge way. I figured out how to use e-mail to stay in touch with my aunt who, at the time, lived across the country in California. I learned how to browse the web and download games. Magazines started including interactive CD-ROMs with every issue as the downfall of paper media began. I could learn about anything imaginable with Encarta ‘95. As a curious elementary school student, I was witnessing and being a part of one of the biggest changes that humanity has ever faced in all of history. When the time came to get off the computer and sit in a classroom for seven hours, I felt reasonably preoccupied.

My experiences in classrooms largely consisted of staring at a clock on the wall and waiting for a bell to ring so that I could go home and learn about more interesting things. While I thought I was just “playing on the computer”, I was really developing indispensable skills and fully experiencing the joy of education. The enjoyment of  learning is a feeling that I cannot find words to describe, and a feeling that often seems to be lost on society. In the eyes of my school, this was not considered ‘work’, and I was failing.

The Westfield school district has what they call a “child study team”. They were called in to save the day. Their job was to figure out what was wrong with me, to completely disregard the dangers of a confirmation bias, and to have me somehow classified for special-education. The idea of a student primarily learning outside of the classroom was unheard of. It especially confused them when I scored highly on tests, despite ignoring all lectures and homework. I was always told that I had potential, but because I wasn’t doing the work that they provided, I wasn’t living up to that potential. School “experts” recommended that I see a psychiatrist. After all, it’s easier to fix a child by giving him a bottle of pills than to actually attempt to fix the bureaucratic, factory-like conditions that exist in public schools. I underwent a psychological evaluation and was diagnosed with ADD. I was placed in a ‘supplemental’ class where I could do my homework during school hours, and was placed on Adderall (an amphetamine) at 9 years old.

When I was 10 years old, my aunt noticed how inspired I was by technology, and paid for me to attend a computer camp over the summer. I was completely in awe of the realization that I could use my mind to build things for others to use. The possibilities will always seem endless to me, but these things are particularly enthralling when viewed through the lens of a young imagination. When I got home from camp with all of my new books and knowledge, my journey in independent education truly began. I knew that if I put enough effort into learning how to code, I could change the world. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to do this in school. The inability to devote my time toward the pursuit of my dreams made me miserable. I began to stay up late into the night to write code, which resulted in exhaustion, lateness, and absenteeism during school hours.

If you defy the system, expect it to slowly tear you apart.

When Adderall failed to make me care about school, they decided to try more drugs. Wellbutrin gave me a seizure. Prozac made me irritable and hostile. One day, while on Effexor XR, I experienced a dangerously rapid heart-rate, turned pale, and couldn’t stop vomiting. I was too young to understand what it meant to take mind-altering drugs, and was unaware of how it was affecting me. The belief that chemicals are the answer to low classroom motivation is not only incorrect, but also extremely dangerous and completely unforgivable.

After failing to accomplish anything positive through the use of amphetamines and antidepressants, the Child Study Team came up with the bright idea of having a paraprofessional follow me around all day to keep me on top of things. She was a wonderful person, but everyone knew that this was an odd arrangement, and it became really difficult to develop socially. This was the beginning of my isolation in school - when I really started to believe that there was something horribly wrong with me, and I didn’t belong. Everyone else was normal, and I wasn’t. I still knew I was gifted in some way, but felt that I was broken in every other way.

Treat a student differently, and rebelliousness will become a survival tactic.

Lacking a healthy social life in school, I had to look elsewhere. At 13 years old, I started hanging out with a group of high-school students who loved to party. We drank a lot, smoked a lot, and wrote a lot of music. It was a huge comfort to know that even though I felt like an idiot in school, I could feel like a badass outside of school. We did a lot of stupid things, but in hindsight, it all ended up doing less harm than the prescriptions. One day my school district found out about our little party scene, and then they had a reason to call me a troublemaker.

The more my school insisted upon treating me like a problem child, the less I wanted to subject myself to it. My family started receiving legal threats from the school district because I so frequently refused to go to school. To this day, I’m proud of every moment of schooling that I missed. I felt confident and comfortable outside of that environment, and skipping school gave me a significant amount of extra time to focus on positive things that were important to me. I composed music prolifically. I learned about 3d modeling, the inner workings of synthesizers, databases, Internet security, reverse-engineering, and at this point I had coded in about a dozen different programming languages.

It became very apparent to me that compulsory schooling was working against my favor, and skipping school wasn’t just a form of protest, but also a necessity. My school wasn’t helping me in any of my areas of interest, and options like homeschooling & private schools weren’t feasible. My mom was raising three kids on her own and could barely afford to pay the rent, so there was a lot of stress and uncertainty about what was going to happen to us. Unless I wanted to surrender all control over my education to a system that was simply not equipped to provide what I needed, this was the best I could do.

Things could have been worse.

I graduated from Roosevelt Intermediate, and felt like I had just survived a long walk through hell. It almost seemed like the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, but it always can. Next, it was time to go to Westfield High School.

For many, high-school is considered to be one of the most important stages of life. The social development that takes place during these years, in these environments, is irreplaceable. That’s what I’d heard, at least. I would never find out for myself, because I would never be allowed to experience a regular high-school class. From day one, my good friends in the Child Study Team decided to place me in a program called The Bridge. My ADD diagnosis was not a severe enough diagnosis to have me placed me in The Bridge due to Least Restrictive Environment laws, so they did another psychological evaluation and concluded that I was “emotionally disturbed”, which is not a legitimate term in psychology - it is an umbrella term invented exclusively for the purpose of placing severe classifications on students who can not be diagnosed with an actual severe disorder. Google it. The number of students in the program was constantly changing, because some would leave due to jail-time, pregnancy, etc, but it was typically between 5-20 kids, which is all age-groups combined.

There’s a threshold of desperation in schools, beyond which grades become a currency.

The Bridge was never challenging, and there was always a focus on convincing us to do a bare-minimal amount of busywork so that we could get a passing grade for the day. The teachers cared about us, but it was clear that the bar had been lowered due to our unwillingness to participate. I think we all realized that our grades didn’t stand for anything valid - in The Bridge, grades are an imaginary currency. There were attempts at having actual classes, but they were frequently interrupted by things like fights breaking out, or students yelling “Man, this is bullshit!” It wasn’t much of a healthy learning environment, so passing grades for each day were typically offered in exchange for good behavior and a boring worksheet. The whole program is an attempt to get the least motivated students through high-school, whether actual learning is occurring or not. I’m sure it makes the district look great on paper, but I find it shameful that our flawed metrics for success could cause a school to forget what its primary purpose is.

I didn’t want the bar lowered. I wanted to focus on my work. I didn’t want to be isolated from my peers. I wanted to feel normal. Westfield High School has an enrollment of over 1,500 students, and I was one of them, but I was one of approximately 5-20 students who were placed in a single room all day, and not allowed to be a part of the larger community. No matter how much I expressed that I wanted to be in a normal high-school classroom, they didn’t listen. In return, I didn’t listen to them either. I completely stopped going to school and was left back a year. In a strange act of desperation, they offered to let me take a regular science and phys-ed class with students who were a year younger, which was awkward, and kind of defeated the purpose. That was when I realized that it was too late.

My school had wasted my time until there was no time left.

I had my education covered all along - what they didn’t understand is that they had failed to fulfill the single greatest responsibility of a high-school, which is to provide an environment that promotes healthy social development. From an early age onward, I was denied the right to exist normally, all because I had the audacity to challenge the notion that compulsory schooling holds a monopoly on my education.

I left, and I still feel cheated sometimes, but it isn’t over yet. After leaving school, I realized that there exists a massive movement of current and former students, teachers, parents, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who believe traditional schooling is a mediocre and obsolete educational approach. The old-fashioned learning institutions that are failing our communities will be replaced by something better, and now is the time to build it.

The world outside of the public education bureaucracy is enormous, and the alternatives to traditional schooling will continue to rise up, until they’ve risen above everything that is currently considered to be the norm. There can be no tolerance for the dying breed of traditional education professionals who mismanage groups of children in destructive ways when they choose the alternatives. There is no ‘fixing’ traditional schooling to adapt to the age of information. We will need to re-evaluate our needs from the ground up, and the result will not resemble our current Industrial Age institutions. The reinvention of schools won’t be easy, nor will it be met without resistance, but one thing that history teaches us repeatedly is that progress cannot be stopped. I think it’s time to accept that the role of educators is changing, because classrooms literally face a world of competition, and I can confirm that the competition is unprecedentedly powerful.

____________________________________________________________________ If you are, have been, or know a School-Free Teen, you can keep the conversation going here or find out how to opt out of school for success here. If you are a parent who is living or is considering a school-free life for your child, join others who are doing the same here.

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WHY SETH GODIN AND OTHER EDUCATION REFORMERS SHOULDN’T DISMISS HOMESCHOOLING

 Guest post by Patricia Zaballos | Cross posted on A Wonder Farm blog 

         Recently, author and changemaker Seth Godin published the e-book Stop Stealing Dreams, a manifesto on the future of education. It’s a sweeping declaration of why schools are broken and how they ought to be fixed. In section #121 Godin gets to homeschooling: “Thousands of caring and committed parents are taking their kids out of the industrial system of schooling and daring to educate them themselves.” A promising first line! Then suddenly, without even a paragraph of consideration, Godin swats homeschooling aside, as if it were a senseless idea in a brainstorming session. It’s too challenging for most parents, too big a time commitment. It doesn’t give kids enough freedom to fail.

            Sigh.

            I wished right then that I could have Godin over for a cup of coffee to explain a few things. Hey, I’d include a whole crew of education reform folks in the invite—I’d rent one of those big silver coffee urns and bake blueberry muffins. I wouldn’t gather them around my kitchen table to convince them that everyone should homeschool. No, I believe in their cause; I believe that it’s time to reinvent schools. Instead, what I’d want to tell them is this: we homeschoolers could teach them a thing or two about the models they’re proposing.

            Because what is a futuristic model to education reformers is a way of life for many homeschoolers.

            I’ve been a homeschooling parent for sixteen years, since my oldest became a preschool dropout. Before that I taught third grade in a public school. People unfamiliar with homeschooling often assume that as a homeschooling parent, I simply replicate what I did as a teacher with a smaller group of students, at home.

            They assume wrong.

            Sure, when we started out, I modeled our days on my classroom experiences, as do many new homeschooling parents. We’d do math activities every day; we’d write in journals every morning. But here’s the part that those unfamiliar with homeschooling don’t understand: most homeschoolers shift from the school model rather quickly. The degree of this shift varies widely: some do it in small ways, deciding that a particular math textbook isn’t working for their child, for example, and eschewing it for another. Some shift in much more radical ways, tossing out the school model altogether, and trying an alternative approach such as unschooling, which values interest-driven learning based on life, rather than a curriculum. Even those who begin as unschoolers are likely to experience this shift, finding themselves becoming braver and more freethinking as they go.

            Talk to any homeschooling family who has been at it for a while, and you are likely to hear that they’ve made such a shift. A shift away from the school model and towards something different. A move away from society’s expectations and towards the needs of their particular children.

            Take heed, school reformers! Let us show you why this happens, and how.

            Why do we shift? Because the needs of the child become so clear in a homeschool setting. When we watch our kids learn about something that electrifies them, that has them lost in thought, or talking fast, or reading into the night, or endlessly crafting, creating or building—we want more of that for them. We see the power of their engagement, and come to understand what real, deep learning means. And we try to help that happen more often.

            We also witness when learning doesn’t work, when a child is bored, or frustrated, or simply sleepwalking through a task. This is the point when many homeschoolers let school-thought creep in. We worry that we need to push our kids through it, that they need to experience boredom and challenge because this is stuff of life. But then we recall those other moments, those times of engaged learning when we surely saw sparks in their eyes, and we begin to move past the school way of thinking. We begin to realize that any kid who develops passions will come across real-life obstacles in pursuing those passions—and that’s where they’ll learn about effort, perseverance, and doing things they don’t want to do. We don’t have to force those experiences on them in the guise of learning. It’s a waste of their time.

            We also shift because we can. We aren’t bound—in most states anyway—by government standards or the requirement to use particular texts or curricula or lesson plans. And unlike private schools, we aren’t accountable to a company of tuition-paying parents. If something isn’t working for our child we can change it. Tomorrow. Today. This minute.

            Many of us stop calling ourselves teachers altogether, as we watch our role shifting from teacher to facilitator. While our children dig deep into their fascinations with primates or Ancient Egypt or the films of Quentin Tarantino, we learn how our children learn. And our kids learn that too. They become quite expert at understanding how they learn. Recently a dental hygienist discovered that my ten-year-old son is homeschooled, and she said to him, “So your mom is your teacher?” He replied, “I’m my teacher.” She smiled: how cute. I knew better; I knew he believed it. And I believe it too.       

            Most homeschooling parents change and evolve as educators far faster than teachers ever do. We simply have more freedom and flexibility to do so. Plus, our incentive to change isn’t theoretical, or for improved test scores, or out of a passion for our career. Our incentive is our own children. Even the most conservative homeschoolers—those who employ a school model at home—tend to become more child-centered as they go. The needs of our children are too compelling to disregard. We change because our kids need us to change.

            School reformers seek change. Seth Godin’s manifesto is charged with good ideas for change. When he recommends “precise, focused instruction rather than mass, generalized instruction” we homeschoolers nod our heads. When he writes about the “transformation of the role of the teacher,” we cheer him on. When he trots out the phrase “lifelong learning” we find ourselves high-fiving our computer screens.

            And when he uses the word passion forty-two times in his manifesto, we understand why. We get it.

            So why does Seth Godin not get us? Why does he dismiss homeschooling so hastily, without letting us inform his goals?

            There are a few reasons, I’m guessing. For one, these reformers like ideas that are “scalable.” They’re searching for solutions that can be applied to all schools, everywhere. Since everyone can’t, or doesn’t choose to homeschool, reformers skim ahead to the next big idea. But the main reason they move on, I imagine, is that thinkers like Godin haven’t spent much time talking to actual homeschoolers. Like most people, Godin seems to believe that same creaky myth: we’re just replicating the school model at home.

            Consider Godin’s response to a post on his manifesto at the Simple Homeschool blog. I was impressed that he took time to comment, but stopped short when he wrote, “I think that talented, passionate, focused homeschooling is amazing.” I appreciate the support, but he’s missing the point. He’s still stuck in a traditional, top-down model that puts too much emphasis on the role of the “teacher” for success. As Simple Mom’s editor, Jamie Martin, wisely responded, “I’m not sure ‘talent’ is needed to be successful in homeschooling as much as ‘commitment.’”

            School reformers, if you don’t understand the distinction I’m making here, you might want to find some experienced homeschoolers and strike up a conversation.

            Some progressive thinkers already have. In Drive, Daniel Pink’s bestseller on the power of motivation, Pink proposes ten ideas for parents and educators regarding kids and motivation. Idea #9: “TAKE A CLASS FROM THE UNSCHOOLERS.” Psychologist and Psychology Today writer Peter Grey is exploring unschooling through a series of articles and an extensive survey of unschoolers. Education writer and analyst Clark Aldrich’s most recent book, Unschooling Rules, lays out what Aldrich has learned from homeschoolers and unschoolers, and ultimately proposes this notion: the future of education will be a synthesis of today’s schools and unschooling. And here on the Innovative Educator, of course, Lisa continually shares how she’s been inspired by homeschoolers, and how that might influence classroom learning.

            These thinkers promote ideas quite similar to Godin’s; the difference is that they’ve found inspiration in the experiences of homeschoolers. Doesn’t that make sense? Across the board, big thinkers in education are saying that today’s schools, modeled on Industrial Age values, aren’t serving the needs of the modern child. Schools need a radical change, a tectonic shift. Wouldn’t it be wise to pick the brains of those who have successfully made a similar shift? I can’t have every education reformer over for coffee—although my invite to Godin, should he find himself near San Francisco, still stands—but I’m not the only homeschooler to talk to. There are more than two million of us in the United States, according to recent estimates. Find a few, especially experienced ones. Talk to the parents. Ask what we thought about learning when we started as homeschoolers; ask how our notions evolved. Ask how our kids learned, and how we changed to help their learning. Ask what our kids taught us. Talk to our kids: young ones, grown ones. Ask what learning means to them. Ask about their passions; find out how they’ve cultivated them. You needn’t consider homeschooling as a scalable solution to the ills of schools (although with substantive school change years away, if you have kids of your own, you may be tempted.) Just hear us and muse on our experiences. We homeschoolers have been doing this for decades now; we’ve shifted from the old school model. We have insights that can influence education’s future, if you’d only listen.

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Patricia Zaballos is a writer, writing educator and longtime homeschooling parent. She was once an elementary school teacher, which has been both hindrance and help in her life as a homeschooling parent. She writes about homeschooling, writing with kids, and interest-driven learning on her blog, Wonder Farm: http://patriciazaballos.com

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Teen Who Left School Explains Its Flaws

Guest post by Line Dale - 14 years old | Cross posted at Writing is Fun
Updated by author - April 3rd

I speak about education from an unflattering point of view, maybe because it is destroying our fascinating, curious minds.

I don’t claim to be an expert in education, I am still a student and I speak for myself. I believe that students should have a voice in the education system today, because mainly they are the ones who are being educated. The control of education should be in the hands of students. They should be centered first and foremost.

Many people have written about ways to change education, but what good has it done if we are leaving out the voice of the students?

Years continue to pass, some students graduate, some fail out, some drop out and nothing really changes. The education system reminds me of a dictator that is unwilling to step down.

Now I’m aware no education system is perfect. In fact, I believe all education systems in the world are the same. We memorize, teach/study for the test, and forget, only to know ten years later what an atrocious world we have been creating.

As a student I have the rights to share my thoughts and ideas about education. I feel strongly that our methods in schools are destroying creativity. Students have lost their capacity of creation, simply because our teaching methods didn’t stimulate innovation and creativity. With every minute that passes, we should be aware that we are creating robots.

I remember being a kid, wanting to play around. No one told me “how” to use my imagination or taught me how to be creative. I played with LEGOS. I pretended to be an astronaut, and imagined jumping on the moon while traveling from galaxy to another. I was naturally creative.

I asked questions like “Why is the grass green?” “Why do fish swim in the water?” “Are we alone?” questions that a wise man cannot answer.

Then came school, famously known as the child’s worst nightmare. I learned to live in a rotten environment, and my classmates made fun of me because I was different and worst of all, I had this teacher that told me to stop dreaming and live in the real world. So what did I learn at school? I learned to stop questioning the world, to go with the flow, and there is only one right answer to each question, circle the correct bubble and I’ll will get an A.

The “whys” I have always wanted to ask are never on the test, and they are omitted from the curriculum.

Creativity isn’t a test to take, it is not a skill to learn, and it is not a program to develop. Creativity is seeing things in new ways, breaking barriers that stood in front of you for some time. Creativity is the art of hearing a song that has never been written, or seeing a work of art on empty canvas. Its essence is in its freshness and the ability to make dreams come to life.

Imagine this: A normal classroom with cheerful faces. Students’ excitement to start school ignites the classroom. The teacher stands up and asks the students to draw a tree. Some students were highly talented, others were okay, and some students couldn’t give a visual figure of a tree. Then the teacher comes up and rates every student’s work. Some students get A+, some get D and others get a big fat F.

Those students who got A’s now believe in their highly talented, artistic skills, but those who got F… well, they start to think they are losers, failures, and their works is just rubbish.

From this “Draw a Tree” assignment, creativity starts to linger in the air and then, by time, fade. This is why many adults say “I can’t draw!” Yes, the answer comes from the schools.

In school, children are “taught” to draw careful shapes like a “perfect” triangle, circle and a square. Everything is “properly” drawn. Whenever a child attempts to color something, the teacher screams in panic “Do NOT color outside the lines!”

I’m not writing about art specifically, I’m talking about creativity generally in every field. Schools in general don’t recognize creativity, what’s worse is that they destroy it. Here’s are examples:

• Thomas Edison’s teacher told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.”
• Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4 and did not read until he was 7. One of his teachers described him as being “mentally slow, unsociable, and drift forever in foolish dreams.”
• Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him “hopeless as a composer.”

In the 21st century the world demands students who can think creatively and critically. As technology develops, we will have robots to do all the basic work for us. However, it is our mission to ensure that the next generation will be full of inventors, musicians, painters, mathematicians who will, in turn, bring humanity to a whole other level.

Sir Ken Robinson said in his TED Talk “Schools kill creativity” that in school instead of growing into creativity, we grow out of it. Students all over the world have had more years of schooling than they care to count. During this process, students are taught that making a mistake is a sin. How are students going to learn if they don’t make mistakes? We have planted in our students’ minds a picture of a perfectly, carefully drawn life.

I go golfing every day, and for those of you who are familiar with golfing vocabularies you’ll understand what I mean. Sometimes when I’m putting I focus too much on the line and suddenly forget where I was aiming. The same thing is being applied to schools. We focus too much on standardized testing and grades that we forget what the real aim of education is.

Today’s education system is taking the beauty out of learning.

Diminishing creativity from our student’s mind is a serious flaw with a wide-reaching effect.

How exactly are schools diminishing creativity?

We learn that being “good” means sitting still and nodding yes, while being “bad” means challenging the status quo and attempting to do things differently.

The cycle of sitting still, memorizing, testing and getting a job have existed for a long time now and few dared to challenge it. However, those who dared to drop-out of school and challenge the status quo like Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, and Walt Disney have changed the course of history.

I understand that memorizing is the fastest way to get good grades, get into a good college, and get a job = Good Life. We are being educated for the promise of money. As a student I know one thing for sure: I never want to be a product living my life in a factory. I want to cherish my brilliant mind. I want to imagine, to create, to be the best I can possibly be. I never want to be a robot. I want to argue, to challenge and define the impossible. I cannot possibly let you assemble my life.

Youth have fresh original ideas, but we cannot express them because we are not given a voice. Our voices have been stolen.

How do we expect students to be creative if we give them the outline, the title, the structure of their “free, creative writing assignment?” We give students model answers to memorize, we give a specific title to write a poem about, and we truly give them everything but freedom to express their ideas. I have lost marks when I was in school because I was simply “writing my opinion”.

While teachers complain that students are spending an awful time on social networking, they forget to mention that this is the only way we, the students, can get our voice heard.

Education isn’t facts being stored in our minds so we can get tested. Education is the beauty to nurture creativity, to fuel curiosity and most importantly to create a well-rounded person.

America is battling its way out to the top and promising that no child will be left behind. Behind this competition, we forget the purpose of education. Schools become business, and factories where children come out as pale as ghosts with everything being structured “perfectly” and “properly” in their minds.

Somewhere in our race and pursuit of meaningless papers, diplomas and money, we have lost the true meaning of being educated.

During our insane worship to win the race, during our mad love to become number one, we forget that our schools are raising children that are racing to No-where.

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Line Dalile, is a homeschooled teenager. She is a Tedx speaker, a passionate writer, published author, and poet who is interested in education reform and learning. You can read Line's blog here. You can read more about Line here.

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