Unschooling and Increased Examination of Education

Recently, my colleague, Clark Aldrich published an ebook titled Unschooling Rules. Always provocative and thought provoking, Clark’s book explores 50 Perspectives and Insights he has gained from observing home schoolers and from his work within the field of learning.

While the book has a number of fascinating comments and insights, what I particularly liked was his stance on how school trains students perfectly for…more school. (and his comment about embracing technology) but, let’s stick with the training of students to be students.

What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom

The teacher can be talking about history or math. But
what students in a traditional classroom are learning is
how to be students in a classroom.

And they are learning it very well. Students are given
ample opportunity to practice this skill in a variety of
settings and contexts. As if they were playing a rigorously
designed (albeit it drab) computer game, students
in school systems over the course of a decade
are put in ever more challenging situations of sitting
in a classroom.

One argument that I have with this section is that Clark asserts that the best students are rewarded by “running the planet” but I think we reward them by letting them run the educational system.

People who never finished college like Bill Gates, Dave Thomas, Rachel Ray and Walt Disney make a impact on society while CEOs with degrees from the “best schools in the country” do only just as well as CEOs with degrees from “any old school” and state schools are the preferred place to recruit for corporations as opposed to the “top colleges.”

Clark’s argument about unschooling in his new book and the increased scrutiny on the value of education and what it is worth along with major efforts on school reform by Gates and the Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook Inc., who donated $100 million to redo Newark NJ schools.

A very interesting book available only as an ebook. I recommend you downloading the book on your favorite reader and checking it out.

Here is a Carousel of all of Clark’s books:

Also, if you need a reader, consider a Kindle.

Which is another way of unschooling by getting away from traditional, linear text book model.