great article about unschooling

Hopefully I won’t get in trouble for posting a few paragraphs of this… to see the whole article go to:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/10/03/unschool/

click the button at the top to watch the advertisement, and then click another link to go to the article…

Endless summer

Unschooling is a radical branch of home-schooling where kids control what and when they learn — free of teachers, schedules and tests. Unschoolers say it’s intellectually empowering. Critics call it irresponsible.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Oct.  3, 2005  |

Celine Joiris has never failed a test. Never eaten crappy cafeteria food. Never been picked last during gym. It’s not that she’s a supernaturally lucky 16-year-old — she’s simply never been to school. “I like the idea of studying, but school is just like incarceration,” she explains. Her brother Julian, 17, agrees. “My approach is, planning, schedules — OK. Tests, OK. College, OK. Whatever. But I don’t really want to think much about it,” he shrugs. “I can’t tell you where I’ll be in two years.”

What’s that? A smart 17-year-old without a plan? A bright, middle-class teenager who’s not stressing out about SATs and admissions essays? In an era when college prep begins in preschool and adolescents need Palm Pilots to manage their after-school activities, such nonchalance has the power to shock. What about all those stories about home-schooled kids dominating national spelling bees and hogging spots at Harvard? Surely “whatever” is not in their vocabulary.

But Celine and Julian Joiris are not your typical home-schoolers — they are unschoolers, followers of a radical approach to education that rejects not just the routines of traditional school, but the authoritative ideology it represents. Unschoolers make up approximately 5 to 10 percent of all home-schoolers. They learn without teachers, curricula or exams; rather, their whole lives are laboratories in which skills and smarts are acquired piecemeal, through casual interaction with the world around them.

article continued online at the above link.