On discipline

It is disgraceful to call them hurtful names... Keep an eye on that Brother who slaps the students and see to it that he stops doing it.St. John Baptist de la Salle

In general, the system we ought to adopt is called Preventive, which consists in so disposing the hearts of our students that they ought to be willing to do what we ask of them without need of external violence. I would like to think that coercive means are never to be used, but only and exclusively those suggested by patience and charity.~ Don Bosco

I found this about St. Anselm, but couldn't find the original quote: It’s best brought home to us in a story about St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. An abbot told Anselm of the difficulties he was having in bringing up boys in his care. The abbot was a disciplinarian, beating the boys for each and every misdemeanour. Anselm could not contain his disagreement: "In God’s name", he burst out, "I would have you tell me why you are so incensed against them. Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?" The boys, he said, need "the encouragement and help of fatherly sympathy and gentleness", not just blows.

"Just as love is the supreme commandment with regards to the personal God, so too only love can be our fundamental obligation toward the human person, created in God's image and likeness." JPII, Memory and Identity

Free At Last!

The title of a book published by the Sudbury Valley School where students from preschool through high school age explore the world freely, at their own pace and in their own unique ways.

Sounds unschooly.

The book has some great snippets on learning through life. As does the website.

The whole time I was enrolled, I wasn't concerned about my education. I never felt I needed to create a "program of studies" for myself; I didn't ever again feel that was an important thing to do. I knew enough people outside of school to feel like I wasn't any worse educated than they were! I never asked myself, "Am I satisfied with the way I'm being educated?" I usually just came to school and tried to figure out what was going on, and if there was something going on that I was interested in, then I would do it. If there wasn't, I would go read. In general, I don't remember thinking, "Is what this person is doing ok?" I had the idea that it wasn't really my business what someone was doing. He was doing what he was doing and that was sort of the beginning and the end of it. The first thing I remember clearly spending lots of time doing was the Plasticene Village, a table in the art room taken over for full-time use for plasticene. On some days, I would do it from the moment I got there to the moment I left. I don't know how long it lasted, but it seems like it went on forever! We made houses and people; those were pretty basic. The more complicated things were machinery and stuff like that. You had to convince people your machinery worked, so you needed some superficial knowledge of how it ought to work, and you had to be able to point to where the different parts were. It was wonderful fun. All of us graduated many years ago, and it turns out that it wasn't a bad thing at all to be doing plasticene all day for a year or so! But I don't know how I would have dealt with that if I was a staff member then, and a parent said to me, "I can't believe it. My kid is playing with plasticene for a whole year. This is terrible." It's hard. I'd have to tell the parent, "Look, what's wrong with your kid doing this? He's having fun, he's probably learning stuff, although who knows what." I don't know how the staff dealt with it. From If you're doing one hard thing, it's not that different from doing another hard thing.

"Where do you work?"
"At Sudbury Valley School."What do you do?"
"Nothing."
Doing nothing at Sudbury Valley requires a great deal of energy and discipline, and many years of experience. I get better at it every year, and it amuses me to see how I and others struggle with the inner conflict that arises in us inevitably. The conflict is between wanting to do things for people, to impart your knowledge and to pass on your hard earned wisdom, and the realization that the children have to do their learning under their own steam and at their own pace. Their use of us is dictated by their wishes, not ours. We have to be there when asked, not when we decide we should be.
Teaching, inspiring, and giving advice are all natural activities that adults of all cultures and places seem to engage in around children. Without these activities, each generation would have to invent everything anew, from the wheel to the ten commandments, metal working to farming. Man passes knowledge to the young from generation to generation, at home, in the community, at the workplace and supposedly at school. Unfortunately, the more today's schools endeavor to give individual students guidance, the more they harm the children. This statement requires explanation, since it seems to contradict what I have just said, namely, that adults always help children learn how to enter the world and become useful in it. What I have learned, very slowly and painfully over the years, is that children make vital decisions for themselves in ways that no adults could have anticipated or even imagined. From The Art of Doing Nothing

Why do you unschool?

On the Unschooling Catholics email list ( see sidebar for link..) someone asked - why do you unschool?

There are a myriad of reasons for choosing to unschool. And I hope to hear your thoughts.

Why do I choose unschooling?

I think unschooling works best for academics - unschooling encourages kids to follow passions and not learn just to pass tests.

I think unschooling is better for relationships - we really get to know each other and spend time together and question paradigms and seek joy.

I think unschooling is better for passing on our Faith - we share our faith in our day to day living and we live an open book life with our kids.

I think I unschool because unschooling works!

How does unschooling work?

Read How Unschooling Works.

Schooling works by pouring expertly selected bits of the world into a child. (Or trying to, anyway!)
Unschooling works by the child pulling in what he wants and needs. It works best by noticing what the child is asking for and helping him get it. It works best by running the world through their lives so they know what it's possible to be interested in.

And ~

That's how unschooling works. Kids build up knowledge about what interests them. They have a vested interest in understanding what interests them.
Unfortunately for new unschooling moms, what interests them usually doesn't look academic. It looks a lot like playing. (Play is how kids are created to learn!) Learning looks like video games and Harry Potter and making videos and reading and watching TV and playing with friends and pretend and chatting on line. It's really only after kids are grown and following their interests into college and jobs that we can see how what they did led to where they got. But the ongoing process doesn't look at all like school.

Unschooling Mathematics

I unschool except for Maths. Do you say that?

How do we unschool maths?

Every family approaches this differently. Some do formal Maths regularly. Occasionally. Seasonally. When kids ask. Others see Maths in every day life. Set up maths games and activities. Cooking. Thinking aloud. Use TV shows like Numbers. And others just live and not worry about subject guidelines.

Looking for ideas? Some maths links ~

Developing an Unschooling Non-Curriculum - Math
I thought I'd share a bit of our math non-curriculum with the list.
First, it's a non-curriculum because it doesn't have a timetable attached to it or particular exercises to be completed. We do have specific ideas about what learning math involves, the steps involved in learning math and how math mastery occurs. There is definitely an agenda. I personally feel that numeracy is very important.
So, how do we encourage our children to become numerate, to learn math?
First of all, we act as examples. We use math daily, hourly. We have animated discussions over, for example, the number of tubs of Black Jack we'll need to seal our driveway or how much it costs us to feed electricity to our two computers. We care about the results, we make mistakes, and the mistakes have real-life consequences.
We also use math for fun; often trying to estimate, for example, the number of bananas we eat in a year or how many eggrolls would it take to reach the moon. I'm afraid we often get silly and laugh a lot while we're doing these problems. I hope that doesn't bother any of you who are very serious about math, but there it is.
We let the children stew in their own juices a bit when they're confronted with a problem that requires math. We let them get a bit frustrated. I think that it's important that children learn how to solve problems themselves. It's important for them to realize that they need to use their own brains to figure things out. So, we let them struggle with their problems

Unschoolers and Mathematics
Wild math looks different than domesticated math It looks more like conversations, using numbers to figure out something the child wants to know, video games, allowance, weighing things in the grocery store, finding the best deal among several choices—that is not as a lesson but what you would normally do—board games, figuring out “how long until?” when she asks, budgets, doing a rough estimation of the items in the grocery cart to see if you have enough money, baseball statistics, crafts, origami, wrapping presents ...

Unschooling math
Real life math probably bears the least resemblance to its schoolish counterpart than any other "subject". Because real life math is about discovering how numbers work rather than memorizing formulas to impose on numbers.

Real life math is, as an example, casually encountering percentages in a dozen different contexts and therefore slowly building up an idea of what percentages are and how they're used.

It's similar to the process of how we acquire new words. Usually when we're reading or listening to conversations we don't run and get the dictionary to look up a word we don't know. Generally we can get a good enough idea of its meaning from the context. And the next time we encounter it we add another facet to our understanding and the fuzzy impression of what the word means gets a bit more clear. And so on. The process probably accounts for our often not being able to define a word for someone else that we've not only read and heard dozens of times but even used.

For some reason people think multiplication and division are such difficult subjects that, after algebra, that's the one thing they question under "how will they learn?" But once a child realizes that multiplication is just a fast way to do repeated addition and that division is just a fast way to do repeated subtraction, a great deal of what causes math phobia in adults disappears. Multiplication and division aren't mysterious at all. They're just addition and subtraction short cuts.

One thing I've found helpful is expressing things in a couple of different ways. When we've come across percents, I've said "17% or 17 out of every 100," or "25% is the same as a quarter."

Another thing is solving problems out loud without pencil and paper so they can see how numbers can be manipulated. So for instance to add 138 + 53. (Hmm, a bit tougher than I normally pull off the top of my head! ;-) but kids do pick up on the process when they hear similar processes dozens of times.) 39 is almost 40 and 53 is almost 50. 40+50 is 90. But we added 2 to the 38 so we need to take away 2 from 90. And we subtracted 3 from the 53 so we need to add 3. That brings us up to 91. Then just add 100. So 191.

Radical Unschooling.

On the Unschooling Catholics email list, there has been a fantastic in depth discussion on radical unschooling for Catholics.

How much freedom do we allow our children? Do we have bedtimes, curfews, gaming or food or other limits? Or no limits?

And how does no limits fit in with our Faith?

I encourage you to join our discussion ~ see the sidebar for details.

In the mean time, may I share some links?


Sandra Dodd Radical Unschooling

Joyfully Rejoycing

Radical Christian Unschooling

Freedom

He who is allowed to sin, sins less

Parenting as Structure - from Willa

Melissa Wiley on Radical Unschooling

Unschooly Books

Come on - add your titles to the list.....

The Secret Garden

The Little Princess

The Adventures of Pippi Logstocking

The Swallows and Amazons series

To Kill a Mockingbird (Kids learn so much from life around them)

Whalerider
Mary Poppins
Heidi

Nims Island

Bridge to Terabithia

Surviving the Applewhites
A Vicarage Family ( and other similar books) by Noel Streetfield ( she wrote many)
101 Dalmations by Dodie Smith – also I Capture the Castle by the same author
Vanload to Venice – Verily Anderson
The Saturdays by Elisabeth Enright
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler by E. Konigsburg
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell ( not fiction but autobiographical)

Unschooly Movies

Good Will Hunting (adult in many places, but great movie about doing things your own way)

Finding Nemo (letting kids go and trusting them)

Can't Buy Me Love (being yourself)

Chocolat (never shows girl at school, letting your child learn from surroundings, letting kids and selves be free)

Scent of a Woman (more anti-school maybe, than unschooling, but sooooo good!)

The Secret of Roan Inish

Uncle Buck (more anti-school, but also being yourself, having fun, doing things diffierently)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Kids learn so much from life around them)
Whalerider

Mary Poppins

Heidi

The Sound of Music

Searching for Bobby Fischer ("Innocent Moves" is the British title)

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang

Whistle Down the Wind. (starring Hayley Mills and Alan Bates)

The Snow Goose (starring Alan Bates)

October Sky

School of Rock

The Wild Thornberries
Pippi Longstocking! I just love her!
Fly Away Home (based on a true story)
Explorers (14yr old science whizzes build a spaceship in their homemade lab in lieu of getting beat up at school)

Goonies
Lord's of Dog Town. Its' an excellent movie and very unschooly. About skateboarding

Stand and Deliver

The Astronaut Farmer

Captains Courageous

Nim's Island

School of Rock

The Secret Garden

The Little Princess