To many, learning in a classroom is like eating food from the frozen section of a supermarket. What initially appears to be sustaining, convenient, and diverse is really over-processed, expensive, and homogeneous.
Here are 55 rules for unschooling.
- Learn to be; learn to do; learn to know
- Focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic
- Learn something because you need it or because you love it
- Twenty-five critical skills are seldom taught, tested, or graded in high school
- Don’t worry about preparing students for jobs from an Agatha Christie novel
- Avoid the academic false dichotomy of “The Cultural Literacy Track” or “The Vocational Track”
- Throughout life, everyone unschools most of the time
- What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom
- Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful
- Animals are better than books about animals
- Use microcosms as much as possible in learning programs
- Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests.
- Include meaningful work
- Create and use periods of reflection
- If you care about learning, start with food
- Embrace all technologies
- Listen while doing
- One computer + one spreadsheet software program = math curricula
- Have a well-stocked library
- Read what normal people read
- Is it better to be “A Great Reader” than “Addicted to Computer Games”?
- Formally learn only what is reinforced during the next 14 days (you will forget everything else anyway)
- Build more, consume less
- Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership
- Expose more, teach less
- Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor
- The ideal class size isn’t thirty, or even fifteen, but more like five
- One traditional school day includes less than 3 hours of formal instruction and practice, which you can cover in 2
- Homework helps school systems, not students
- Every day, adults are role models of learning (whether or not they want to be)
- Avoid the Stockholm syndrome
- Schools are designed to create both winners and losers
- In education, customization is important like air is important
- There is no one answer to how to educate a child. There may not be any answers
- Be what schools pretend to be, not what schools are
- Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are
- Feed passions and embrace excellence
- Children learn unevenly, even backwards
- Five subjects a day? Really?
- Maturing solves a lot of problems
- Socialize your children. Just don’t use schools to do it
- Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea
- Minimize “the drop-off”
- Increase exposure to non-authority figure adults
- Tests don’t work. Get over it. Move on
- The future is portfolios, not transcripts
- Keep a focused journal
- Use technology as assessment
- College: the hardest no-win decision your family may ever make
- Outdoors beats indoors
- Walk a lot
- Under-schedule to take advantage of the richness of life
- Parents care more than any institution about their children
- Children should be raised by people who love them
- The only sustainable answer to the global education challenge is a diversity of approaches