If you want to try unschooling, you believe that a life of self-directed learning may be the best path for your child. But this new way of thinking about education may terrify the other people who love your child….
How can our kids learn the things they need to even if we aren’t chemists, literary scholars, biologists, volleyball coaches, and master-craftspeople? If we act intentionally, unschooling allows children to have more exposure to a wider swath of grown-ups than the modern educational paradigm.
I’ll begin to answer this question with another question: How do grown-ups go about making friends? How do people who aren’t forced to go to the same building every day make friends?
When I first learned about unschooling, I had trouble envisioning exactly what that meant. I heard about an approach to life where kids were free to do whatever they wanted, with whomever they wanted, for as long as they wanted, I was understandably skeptical.
Today, Governor Sununu signed SB 8, a town tuitioning bill often referred to as the Croydon bill. SB 8 clarifies that any town – not just towns that share a border with other states – may include non-religious private schools in their town tuitioning plans.
School choice will certainly create some wonderful outcomes for some people, so we should pursue it. Viewed this way, the debate over school choice is about whether we will choose to focus on fear or hope — that is, on what might go wrong, or on what will go right. It is about whether we will let fear compel us to cling to models of schooling from the 19th century, or whether hope will spur us to embrace the chance to let education move forward into the 21st century. Personally, I believe that John F. Kennedy was wise to counsel that ‘we should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes’.