Home Unschooling: Practice

One point I should have made at the beginning of the previous post is the distinction between unschooling and homeschooling. Most home schooling is not unschooling--the parents have a curriculum and are following something closer to the conventional model than we are. And one can do unschooling in a school. Our kids were in a very small private school modeled on Sudbury Valley School for some years. Eventually problems arose, we switched from school unschooling to home unschooling, and on the whole found it more satisfactory. Hence the titles of these posts.

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When our daughter was five, she was going to a local Montessori school. Her mother thought she was ready to learn to read; they didn't. So Betty taught her to read, using Doctor Seuss books. Our son, three years younger, observed the process and taught himself. We heard about the local Sudbury school, new that year, brought our daughter over to visit. She decided she preferred it to the Montessori school, so we shifted her. A few years later we added her brother, a few years after that shifted to home schooling.

The Sudbury model includes classes if students want them. When our daughter was about ten there was a class, lasting somewhat over a year, in math. It started assuming the students knew nothing, ended with the early stages of algebra. That is pretty much all of the formal instruction either of them had. In addition, we required them to learn the multiplication tables, which are useful to know but boring to learn. That, I think, was the closest thing to compulsory learning in their education.

How did they get educated? They both read a lot, and although some of the books they read were children's books, pretty early they were also reading books intended for adults. When our daughter was about nine we were traveling and ran out of books for her to read, so she read the Elizabeth Peters books her mother had brought along—and liked them. A few years later our son, about eight, went everywhere carrying the big one volume edition of Lord of the Rings.

Betty remembered having liked and learned from How To Lie With Statistics--actually about how not to be fooled by statistical arguments--so we got a copy and both kids liked it. Our son likes D&D and other games with dice rolling, so was interested in learning how to figure out the probability of getting various results. It turned out that the same author and illustrator had produced a book on simple probability theory—How to Take a Chance—so we got it and he read it multiple times. The result was a ten year old (I'm guessing—we didn't keep records) who could calculate the probability of rolling 6 or under with three six-sided dice. For the last few years his hobby has been creating games. At the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention he had an interesting and productive conversation with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games concerning a game Bill had invented; currently one of his ambitions is to get a board game commercially published by age sixteen.

I am fond of evolutionary biology, so recommended The Selfish Gene to my daughter. She liked it, found the approach intriguing, and read other things. Currently she is waiting for me to finish The Moral Animal so that we can discuss it. She also likes economics. At this point she has audited four of the classes I teach at the law school, following them at the level of the better students. She also has her own footnote in one of my articles, crediting her with a significant point she contributed to it.

Both kids spend a lot of time online. We discovered that Bill had taught himself to type when the family was playing a networked game on the home network—Diablo or Diablo II—and misspelled words started appearing on our screen. He needed to type because he played games online and wanted to be able to communicate. Later he wanted to learn how to spell so that he wouldn't look stupid to the people he was communicating with. His sister spends a good deal of time on World of Warcraft, some of it writing up battle reports and other essays to be posted on suitable web sites. She too wants her writing to look good and so consults, usually with her mother, on how best to say things.

I am fond of poetry and know quite a lot of it. When our daughter was little, I used it to put her to sleep. Sometime thereafter we were driving somewhere at night and heard a small voice from the back seat reciting "Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore"—the opening lines of "Horatius at the Bridge"—in a a two year old’s lisp. She now knows quite a lot more poetry. When I put my son to bed—my wife and I take turns—we generally talk for a while, then he asks for some poems.

A few years back, I read and recommended to my daughter Duff Cooper's excellent biography of Talleyrand. She noticed the references to Talleyrand's memoirs and decided that, since some of her writing involved politics, it would be interesting to learn about it from a world class practitioner. I found her an English translation; she is now part way through the first volume.

Some years ago our daughter decided she was seriously interested in music. Since then she has participated regularly in two choirs--one at her mother's church, one specializing in early music--and taken harp lessons. She practices because she wants to, not because we make her. She is thinking of majoring in music in college, then trying to get a job as an editor. As some evidence of her qualifications, she has edited some of my manuscripts and done a useful job. Our current plan is for her to do some volunteer proofreading for the firm that published my novel.

But the largest part of their education, after reading, is probably conversation. We talk at meals. We talk when putting one or the other of them to bed. My daughter and I go for long walks at night and spend them discussing the novel I'm writing or the characters she roleplays on World of Warcraft.

Our most recent concern has been getting our daughter, now 17, into college. She doesn't have grades, she doesn't have a list of courses taken. She does have a list of books read—still incomplete, but already in the hundreds.

Without grades she needed another way of convincing colleges of her ability, and standardized tests were the obvious solution. She spent some time studying for the SAT exams, but enormously less than the time she would have put in on those subjects in any conventional school, did extremely well on the verbal, tolerably on the math; her combined score is well within the range for the students at the very selective liberal arts colleges she plans to apply to. Just to play safe she has now taken the SAT exams again, after spending a little more time on math, part of it solving pages of simple equations I produced for her. To keep it interesting, I included a few that no value of X solved, a few that all values of X solved, and a few that reduced to 1/x=0.

Many schools now require two of the SAT II achievement tests—again especially significant for a home schooled student. It turns out that "literature" is not, as I feared, a test of what you have read but of how well you can read, and she reads very well. For a second one she chose American history, read all of Paul Johnson's A History of the American People—well written and opinionated, hence not boring—plus part of a book of primary source material. She spent a good deal of time in the week before the exam using Wikipedia to compile her own time line of Presidents and what happened during their terms. The results of both exams were satisfactory.

What is the result? Our daughter will enter college knowing much more about economics, evolutionary biology, music, renaissance dance, and how to write than most of her fellow students, probably less about physics, biology, world history, except where it intersects historical novels she has read or subjects that interest her. She will know much more than most of them about how to educate herself. And why.

The Case for Unschooling

Unschooling is currently in the news, our children (12 and 15) are unschooled, and the best defense is a good offense, so …

One of the assumptions built into the conventional version of K-12 schooling, private and public, is that there is some subset of human knowledge, large enough to occupy most of twelve years of school, that everyone needs to know. That assumption is false. There is a very short list of skills–reading, writing or typing, and simple arithmetic are the only ones that occur to me–that almost everyone will find worth learning. Beyond that, education involves learning things, but not any particular things. The standard curriculum is for the most part an arbitrary list of what happens to be in fashion–the subjects everyone is required to pretend to learn.

Consider, as examples, English composition, American history, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Each will prove very useful so some people, occasionally useful to more, and almost entirely useless to quite a lot. And, although practically every high school graduate is supposed to have learned each of those things, many, probably a majority, have not--as anyone who has taught college freshmen can testify.

A second assumption is that the way for children to learn things is to be told "this is what you must learn today," assigned some reading, and sat down to listen to a teacher. One result is that children spend most of their time being told things they have no interest in knowing. Another, given the diversity of interests and abilities, is that a third of the pupils in a classroom are bored because they already know what is being taught, a third are bored because they are completely lost, and only the middle third are, with luck, listening, understanding and learning. A sufficiently good teacher can improve those numbers somewhat–but sufficiently good teachers are scarce.

One observed result is that most children regard education as unpleasant work, to be avoided when possible. Another is that schools spend six years teaching things–arithmetic, say–that the average kid could learn in a year or two. If he wanted to. A third is that we end up with high school graduates many, perhaps a majority, of whom do not actually know many of the things they have spent all those years pretending to learn.

There is at least one more thing wrong with the conventional model. Judging sources of information on internal evidence is a very important intellectual skill. In the classroom, that skill is anti-taught. The pupil is told things by two authorities–the teacher and the textbook–and his job is to believe what they say. Here again, a sufficiently good teacher may be able to overcome the logic of the setting and teach some degree of critical thinking–but here again, sufficiently good teachers are rare.

One of the great advantages of the Internet, considered as an educational tool, is that it is so obviously an unfiltered medium, leaving it up to each reader to figure out for himself how much to trust his sources of information. It isn't perfect, but at least it is teaching the right lesson instead of the wrong one.

The views I have been expressing are not based on any extensive surveys, but they are based on experience. I went to a first rate private school, my wife to a good suburban public school. Both of us had a few good teachers and classes, but what we most remember is being bored most of the time. I learned more about the English language reading Kipling's poetry for fun and going through a book or two a day, largely Agatha Christie and her competitors, during summer vacation, than I did in English class. I learned more about political philosophy arguing politics with my best friend than I did in social science.

There are a number of alternatives to the conventional model. The one we have chosen is unschooling–leaving our children free to control their own time, learn whatever they find of interest. I sometimes describe it as throwing books at them and seeing which ones stick. In our case the sticky ones included The Selfish Gene (my daughter at about 12), How to Lie With Statistics (both kids), How to Take A Chance (a popular book on probability theory, of especial interest to my son, at about ten, because of his interest in role playing games), and lots of fiction, much of it intended for adults.

No doubt they will end up not knowing several of the things on the standard curriculum–as will many of those subject to it. But my son has learned more history and geography from books and computer games than he would have in elementary school history classes–and avoided the fatal lesson that learning things is boring work, to be avoided whenever possible. My daughter has some catching up to do in math before she is ready for college–but both kids regard solving two equations with two unknowns (and integer solutions) as an entertaining puzzle.

In the background, as I write this, my daughter is practicing on her harp. Without anyone telling her to.

Unschooling: The Advantage of the Real World

One point raised in comments on my recent unschooling post was that you sometimes have to do things you don't like, a lesson we can teach our children by making them study things they are not currently interested in studying. It is an interesting point, and I think reflects a serious error.

We want our children to learn what the real world is like. One way of doing that is to construct a synthetic world designed to imitate the real one. To teach them that they will sometimes have work to accomplish things, even if they don't want to, we assign them homework they aren't interested in doing and reward them with grades. If grades don't work well enough, we reward the grades with cash, as some parents do.

What this approach leaves out is the causal connection between the work and the accomplishment. Someone else has told you to do unpleasant work, someone else will reward you for doing it, but there is, from your standpoint, no logical connection between the two. Doing homework does not, so far as you can tell, actually produce money.

The alternative to a synthetic world is a real world–the one we and our children are living in. If you don't tune your harp, it won't sound very nice when you play it. If you don't tidy up your room, at least occasionally, you won't be able to find things you want. If you don't sometimes do things your younger brother wants you to do, he won't do things you want him to do. That world also teaches the lesson–getting what you want sometimes requires doing things you would rather not do. And it gets the causal connection right.

Home Unschooling: Theory

Two people commenting on my previous post expressed curiosity as to how we have educated our children. I've decided to do it in two parts. This post describes the arguments for our approach, the next our experience with it.

Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

As some evidence of the failure of that model, consider my wife's experience teaching a geology lab for non-majors at VPI, probably the second best public university in the state. A large minority of the students did not know that the volume of a rectangular solid--a hypothetical ore body--was the length times the height times the depth. Given that they were at VPI they must have mostly been from the top quarter or so of high school graduates in Virginia; I expect practically all of them had spent at least a year each studying algebra and geometry.

As all students and most teachers know, the usual result of making someone study something of no interest to him is that he memorizes as much as he has to in order to pass the course, then forgets it as rapidly as possible thereafter. The flip side of that, routinely observed by parents, is that children can put enormous energy and attention into learning something that really interests them--the rules of D&D, the details of a TV series, the batting averages of the top players of the past decade.

Quite a long time ago, we got our kids gameboys with Pokemon cartridges; at about the same time I heard a lady on talk radio explaining that kids who got high tech toys played with them for half an hour or so and then put them on the shelf. My estimate is that Bill and Becca logged something like eighty hours a month, perhaps more, on those cartridges for many months thereafter-more work and more attention than I, at a similar age, put into all of my schoolwork combined--and continued to play the game at a reduced rate for years thereafter. The skill they were learning, how to find their way around a world and accomplish goals therein, was in one sense useless, since the world was a fictional one. But being able to find ones way around a new environment and accomplish things within it is a very useful real world skill.

3. A related assumption is that you learn about a subject by having someone else decide what is true and then feed it to you. That is a very dangerous policy in the real world and not entirely safe even in school--many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true. A better policy is to go out looking for information and assembling it yourself.

Part of what that requires is the skill of judging sources of information on internal evidence. Does this author sound as though he is making an honest attempt to describe the arguments for and against his views, the evidence and its limits, or is he trying to snow the reader? That is a skill that is taught in the process of learning things for yourself, especially online. It is anti-taught by the standard model of K-12 education, in which the students is presented with two authorities, the teacher and the textbook and, unless the teacher is an unusually good one, instructed to believe what they tell him.

We concluded that the proper approach for our children was unschooling, which I like to describe as throwing books at them and seeing which ones stick. Leave them free to learn what they want, while providing suggestions--which they are free to ignore--and support. Put them in an environment--web access, people to talk with, visits to the library--that offers many alternatives. If, at some future point, they discover that they need something that was left out of their education, they can learn it then--a more efficient strategy than trying to learn everything they might ever find useful, most of which they won't.

Schooling Compulsion, Incentives, and Literacy

There are at least two different ways of getting someone to learn something. You can offer to teach him something he wants to know, or you can compel him to learn something you want him to know. Unschooling uses the first approach, conventional schooling the second. One difference between the two is their effect on the incentives of teachers.

Consider the case of literacy. The ability to read is useful to almost everyone in a modern society, so one would like an educational system that does a good job of teaching it. It is widely believed that the current American system does not.

If the objective is to teach people to read, the obvious starting point is to ask what sorts of things those people would enjoy reading, since it is easier to get someone to do something he likes doing. The answer might be comic books, car magazines, science fiction, fantasy, soap opera summaries, or any of a wide variety of other sorts of written material, depending on the particular people being taught. 

As best I can tell, that is not the approach taken by conventional K-12 schooling. Instead, students are assigned to read books chosen on one of two criteria. Either they are books regarded as good literature—famous books from the past or current books that English professors approve of—or books believed to teach lessons that the people selecting the books want taught. That would include biblical literature in the past, patriotism—or acceptance of homosexuality, depending on the state—at present, and a wide range of other lessons, depending on current and local political fashion. While it is always possible that the books chosen would also be ones students enjoyed—I'm very fond of Kipling, some of whose stories might be assigned reading in English class—that is not what they would be chosen for, so the odds are not very good.

The ability to read is useful to almost everyone. Knowledge of and appreciation for great literature, even if we accept the educational establishment's definition of what qualifies, no doubt can enrich one's life, but on the evidence of what books people actually read it does not enrich the lives of a very large fraction of the population. That suggests that learning the former should probably have considerably higher priority than learning the latter.

In an educational environment where teachers can advise and persuade pupils but not compel them, it will, because the teachers who insist on telling their pupils to read books that the teacher likes and the pupil does not will shortly find their advice ignored. In an environment where teachers can tell students what books to read and, to at least some degree, punish those who fail to obey, on the other hand, there will be a strong temptation to assign the books that the teacher thinks the student ought to read, sacrificing the higher priority of literacy for the lower priority of literature—or, sometimes, propaganda. 

Which may explain why Johnny can't read.

I encountered a different version of the same logic a good many years ago in my own work. My Price Theory textbook was out of print.  I decided to rewrite it into a book targeted at the proverbial intelligent layman, the sort of book that gets read for the fun of it while teaching the reader the basics of an academic subject, in my case economics. My model, insofar as I had one, was The Selfish Gene, a book from which I learned quite a lot about evolutionary biology.

In the course of the project, it occurred to me that there was an important difference between the book I was starting with and the book I intended to end with; nobody would be forced to read the latter. It followed that if at any point the reader decided that it was not worth continuing, I would lose him. To deal with that problem I followed a deliberate policy of starting each chapter with a hook, a puzzle that would sufficiently engage the reader to persuade him to finish the chapter to find the solution. Economics is full of such puzzles; I don't know how hard it would be to do the same thing in another field.

The result, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, has been by a sizable margin my most successful book. 

Incentives matter—including mine.

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In the interest of honesty, I should add that some people are forced to read Hidden Order, because it is occasionally used as a textbook, even though that was not the purpose it was written for. But not, I think, very many people.

Textbooks that are Fun to Read

Wandering around the web yesterday, I came across a forum, I think for law students, on which someone mentioned my Law's Order and commented on how much he had liked it—the sort of thing an author likes to see. Like my earlier Hidden Order, the book is intended to fill two different roles, to be usable as a textbook but also to appeal to the proverbial intelligent layman who would like to learn a subject by reading an entertaining and educational book about it. 

Which got me thinking about what books succeed in that dual role. Textbooks are notoriously boring, in part perhaps because they are selected by the professor who assigns them not the students who read them, and some have the reputation of being seriously dumbed down in intellectual level while unusably broad in coverage. What books are there that are used as textbooks but also bought and read in significant numbers by people who are reading them because they want to?

One of my models was The Selfish Gene; I don't know if it gets used as a text, but it is certainly a readable and informative book. A famous example would be the Feynman lectures. Other suggestions?

I was thinking about the question in part for two reasons. One is that it ought to be important to a professor adopting a book. When I rewrote my Price Theory, a textbook, into Hidden Order, I was very conscious of the fact that if at any point the (non-student) reader lost interest in what he was reading he would stop. I tried to design the book to keep that from happening, by starting each chapter with a hook that would hold the reader's interest to the end. I think the result was a considerably better textbook as well as a book that sold many more copies outside the textbook market.

But the other reason links to my recent discussion of ways in which self-publishing, both online POD and eBooks, may be radically changing the mechanisms by which books get produced and distributed, in the process largely cutting the conventional publishers out of the loop. I have hopes that something similar may be happening, somewhat more slowly, to the higher-ed industry. 

I think there is an increasingly widespread perception that the current model works badly. In large part, it consists of young adults spending four years partying and socializing while pretending to acquire the sort of education that was a social or professional requirement for a small part of the population a century or so ago. There is evidence that a large fraction of those who go to college for four years learn almost nothing of what they are in theory being taught—a result unlikely to surprise any professor who has taught a large required course in his field and observed how many of those taking it are simply trying to memorize enough to pass the exams before going back to doing something they actually want to do. And it is very expensive, especially at the high end, where "high" is more a description of the status of the school and the ability of the students than of the fraction of them who are there mainly to learn what is being taught.

Which suggests the possibility of a more attractive model, in which young adults get on with their lives while educating themselves, in whatever subjects are of interest to them, in a less formal framework. That could mean working, it could mean getting married and rearing children, for those with a little inherited money and simple tastes it could mean trying to write novels, or do volunteer work, or engage in some other activity that they find a satisfactory way of spending their time. It could even mean a life centered on parties and socializing, supported by parents or whatever minimal investment of paid labor it requires, just done outside of the expensive framework of college or university.

And meanwhile getting eduction by reading books, perhaps using educational software, interacting with people online. A sort of higher-ed version of the unschooling I have discussed here in the past in the K-12 context. It is how I got quite a lot of my education; I like to describe myself as having taught at the graduate level at respectable schools in two different fields (law and economics) in neither of which I have ever taken a course for credit.

Role Playing Games Considered as a Creative Writing Course

My casual impression is that successful authors of fiction do not have a very high opinion of college creative writing courses. Quite a lot of them, however, seem to have developed their skills in the context of Dungeons and Dragons or similar games, as dungeon masters and/or players. A role playing game is, after all, an exercise in collaborative story telling. The things that make it work or not work are, to a considerable extent, the same as the things that make a novel work or not work. And, unlike a creative writing course, the participants are doing it because they want to, for the fun of it, not because someone else has told them that this is what they have to do to learn to write.

I was reminded of this observation recently by conversation in World of Warcraft in which a player was discussing with others his problems in writing. It was clear, in context, that the writing was neither a school assignment nor an attempt at a publishable novel or short story, but posts to one of the World of Warcraft forums. Such posts often take the form of fictionalized accounts of things that actually happened in the game. I will not be surprised to discover, ten or twenty years in the future, that some of the new generation of authors, especially fantasy authors, got their start there.

My own non-fiction writing largely developed during the years when I was producing a monthly column for The New Guard, a conservative student magazine on which I was the token libertarian columnist. There too, I was writing not as a school exercise but because I actually had things I wanted to say.

All of which fits into my general views on the advantages of unschooling, education that takes the form of doing things one wants to do, learning things one wants to learn, over the approach to education embedded in the conventional K-12 curriculum and many college courses.