When you think about homeschooling, what comes to mind? The family dining room converted to a classroom? Desks lined up just like in a schoolroom and the mother as the teacher? A large family with the girls in prairie-style dresses? Maybe a special-needs child learning at her or his own pace? If you thought of one of these scenarios, you would be partially right. There are certainly homeschooling families that fit these typecasts.
However, families today are homeschooling in a variety of ways and for a multitude of reasons — families just like yours and mine. Some families say they do it because they believe it will help their children keep their love of learning intact. Some say they want to experience the excitement of discovery with their children. What’s more, some families choose to take this philosophy one step further with unschooling (which is essentially homeschooling that is not curriculum based).
Unschooling Pioneer
Barb Lundgren was on the forefront of the secular homeschooling movement. She and her family moved to Colleyville in 1988. With her husband, Steve Eaker, she decided to homeschool their three children, Quinn, Brenna and Ike, who are now 25, 23 and 19 respectively. “Ultimately, I was learning from listening to my children,” says Lundgren. “So I was not inclined to put them in school because the more I learned and dissected the process of learning, the less school made sense to me.”
The North Texas mom chose to unschool her children. “It’s self-designed. By self, I mean motivated by the child, resourced in large part by the parent and unstructured in that every day can be different,” says Lundgren. “A child’s focus on a thing can last 5 minutes or a lifetime.”
Lundgren says she raised her children in an environment where absolutely no boxes exist. She disagrees with criticism that young children are not capable of making their own decisions regarding what they should learn or how they should spend their days. “A child is not equipped to forecast the future at age 5 by saying ‘I want to go to college and this is going to be my path to get there.’ But it shouldn’t be the parents’ job either,” contends Lundgren. “Pleasure comes in the form of accomplishment and responsibility. In an unschooling household, those two things are part and parcel with being alive.”
To this end, Lundgren asserts that there should be no structured steering in a school-aged child’s day-to-day life. Her reaction to a 5-year-old who wants to spend his day holed up in his room playing video games? “Unconditionally, that is what you want to support. If you have raised your child with responsibility and respect, you know that video game is demonstrating what your child needs to experience in the world,” says Lundgren. “Your job as a parent is to recognize if your child is truly joyful about this world he created. That process never means telling your child ‘I know more than you do.’”
When Lundgren’s children were younger, she struggled to find non-religious social groups for her children to join. This prompted the mom to start her own meeting group with a friend — a group that later grew to encompass workshops for new homeschooling (and unschooling) parents. Lundgren now hosts an annual Metroplex conference for like-minded parents, called Rethinking Education.
The Rethinking Education Web site states that a typical unschooling family has two to four children, ages 4-18. Thirty-one percent of the children are ages 4-6, 21 percent are ages 7-9, 29 percent are ages 10-12 and 17 percent are 13-18. Typical household income is $45,000-$75,000, and parents are well-educated, many holding postgraduate degrees or doctorates. The average family spends $1,500 annually on educational materials. Virtually 100 percent of attendees use computers and the Internet as an important learning tool. The typical unschooling family does not unschool for religious reasons — the population holds a wide range of religious beliefs.
Does Lundgren think unschooling “worked” for her three adult children? “I believe that my children are disabled in the real world,” says Lundgren — however, not in the way one might think. “What I have observed in all three of my children is that they do have difficulty fitting in real-world circles because everyone else has so much baggage to complain about nonstop.”
Lundgren would not share her children’s current occupations, saying that they have all focused on things in which they find interest. She says she refuses to measure the idea of success through professional labels, college degrees or dollar signs.
“For a parent to take on unschooling with the idea that their child can still be a doctor or a lawyer, then that would not be true unschooling. That would be very structured homeschooling where you (the parent) are producing a product,” says Lundgren. “A desire to unschool should never be motivated to produce a child with a defined future.”
Freedom to Learn
Karen Nettles Schockmel has a bachelor’s degree in cell biology, and her husband, Nate Schockmel, is a software development engineer. They live in Frisco. The couple decided to homeschool their children, Catherine, 1, Benton, 5, and Alexandra, 8, because Nettles Schockmel had what she calls a “horrible experience in public school.” She believed she could give her children a better experience.
Some families start out with the commitment to homeschool through age 18. Others take it child by child and year by year. The Schockmel family is one of the latter. “We’ll do it as long as it works,” says Nettles Schockmel. “If someone is feeling the drive to go to school, depending on the reasons, we’ll let them try it out.”
School offers a social experience for children that homeschooling does not, and this can loom as one of the greatest concerns for the homeschooling parent. Nettles Schockmel found a secular group that fits for her family called Sharing Adventures in Learning (SAIL). “I think they have more social experience with what we’re doing now than in public school. Anything we do, there are multi-age kids there; it’s not just 8-year-olds. I think it’s a healthy thing to mix it up. They’re learning from the older kids and they’re helping the younger kids.”
The Frisco mom uses some workbooks, but not a set curriculum. Since she is trained as a Montessori teacher, she has Montessori manipulatives available at home. “I’d call us eclectic,” she says. “We’re not totally curriculum, but we’re not totally unschool. Structure sometimes gives comfort. We’ve gone through periods of time when we’ll make a schedule and Alexandra will do it for a week or so. We do have a routine in the morning. Everyone has to have clothes on, hair brushed, teeth brushed and to breakfast, no dishes in the sink (that’s my job). Then we go. That’s my minimum for my family,” she says.
Dads Homeschool Too
The Singleton family of Carrollton has a rare homeschooling setup — dad Bill is in charge of son Brad’s education. Erin Singleton, Brad’s mom, who was a public elementary school teacher for five years, taught the 10-year-old through second grade, then her husband took over.
The initial rationale for homeschooling was so the family could take an extended RV trip. The trip was originally planned for four months, but in the end it lasted more than four years. “These are irreplaceable years,” says Bill Singleton, a master’s-level licensed professional counselor in private practice. “If you’re lucky enough that you can homeschool, it’s a great thing to do. It’s not necessary to be down on the mainstream to homeschool.”
In the Singleton family, Brad not only participates in home life, but also in the family business. “Scale service, this is Brad, how may I help you?” is the bright, professional answer you get when you call Brad’s cell phone. He is an employee of the family business, taking service calls and cleaning coin-operated scales installed in various locations throughout the Metroplex. He receives a paycheck twice a month for $20.
Brad is primarily homeschooled, but he does attend a school in Richardson on Tuesdays called “Where Three Roads Meet.” The school was created by homeschooling parents and is similar to an educational co-op. Instruction is provided by experienced teachers, and the curriculum includes reading, writing, history, some science and physical education. About 60 percent of the academic planning is provided, and Singleton and Brad do math and science independently.
While Brad would like to homeschool all the way through high school, Singleton has a few doubts. “I worry that at about fifth grade, the culture among junior high and high schoolers becomes so specific and so different,” he says. “Brad now lives in a world that is made up of adults and kids. If he jumps into public school in sixth, seventh, eighth grade and up, I worry that he may be really underprepared, and then have a terrible adult image or self-esteem. I wonder if we should go ahead and get him into a regular school in a year or two. It’s a real balancing act.”
A Parent’s Perspective
Sarah and Chris Parent and their children Sadie, 4, and Elijah, 6, live in Keller. They are unschoolers through and through, using no curriculum at all. Before having a family, Sarah Parent worked as a nurse.
The decision to homeschool came when the family lived in New Hampshire. Although Parent didn’t feel that she and her son were ready to be separated, everyone else was putting their children in preschool, so she and her husband began investigating different facilities, finding the best ones filled. Children had already been registered for years.
A director of one of the preschools said that people brought their children to preschool for social connections for their children, friends for themselves and for stimulation if there wasn’t enough at home. Everything was fine in all those areas, so Parent decided to keep her son home, thinking, “If he belongs here at home with us now, why not next year and the year after?”
She began to look more deeply into different educational pathways, including homeschooling. “My husband was absolutely adamant not to homeschool because where we come from, growing up in the ’70s, homeschooling was unheard of,” says Parent. “If anybody did homeschool, it was generally for an odd reason — the child was extremely gifted or had a disability of some sort. We really just felt we were this run-of-the-mill family. Why would we want to homeschool and make our children ‘different?’”
At a homeschooling conference in New Hampshire, Parent and her husband heard a panel of unschooling parents speak about their experiences. “We walked out of that panel that day unschoolers,” says Parent. The family has chosen to unschool K-12 as long as it makes everyone happy. If a child has the desire to go to school, they will discuss it at that time.
In the Parent household, unschooling is something of a child-driven, laissez faire proposition. “When they ask for assistance, we are right there helping them with whatever they want,” says Parent. “But if you start forcing or trying to capitalize on those little learning moments and trying to feed more information than they’re ready for or they desire, then there’s immediately a block.”
Has Parent had doubts? “I had more doubts in the beginning,” she says. “You’re bucking a set-in-stone system that has been in place a very long time. But in the last three years I have seen my children come so far. They’re able to have the time, wherewithal and energy to wholeheartedly pursue the things they’re interested in. So we don’t have any doubts at all about the path we’ve taken.”
Adjusting Schooling to Life
Autumn McGinn and her husband, Justin, are both chiropractors in Dallas. They live and work in a loft space near downtown Dallas, interweaving their work and family lives. They intend to unschool their children, Kaya, 1, and Xalen, 5, all the way through their school years. What if the children want to go to public school? “I’d explore why they wanted to and make sure I was meeting those needs,” says McGinn. “If it was a social issue, or if it was something they really wanted to learn about, I would try to find a class that would help them get that skill. If they really wanted to, I would let them.”
“We chose this way of schooling as a family because we think our children are innately curious about the world,” says McGinn. “They learn naturally. We wanted to allow them to curiously explore their own planet and develop with ease. Part of it was my experience with education. Growing up, the public school system is designed to develop mediocre minds that don’t necessarily question what’s going on around them. I just don’t want my children to have that kind of experience.”
Because of their chiropractic profession, the McGinns trust that human bodies know what to do. “We ended up talking with a teacher in our practice who said, ‘Oh, there’s a group of people who are doing this, it’s called unschooling,’” says McGinn. “She gave me some information about John Holt, who was a teacher in New York and started unschooling. I read about it when Xalen was 2 or 3, and we’ve been pursuing it since.”
The McGinns do not use a curriculum. They use whatever Xalen is interested in as a tool to learn other skills.
McGinn feels that unschooling benefits children and parents. “My son, Xalen, is learning how to play the guitar. We spend time learning that skill rather than filling our day with wasted time. He doesn’t necessarily want to learn that at 10:30 every day. He gets to live his life rather than be on this regimented schedule of ‘it’s 9:30, it’s time to play guitar.’”
Who is qualified to be an unschooling parent? “I don’t think it takes any exceptional quality or genius in education,” says McGinn. “It takes a dedication to your core values and flexibility.
“There is this new face of homeschooling,” says McGinn. “It’s a part of society that has a higher level of consciousness. They have a different set of values. I don’t necessarily consider myself a successful parent if my child grows up and goes to college. I’d much rather know they’re a compassionate human being and have a set of experiences that they value. They’re going to be better people for it. I think the typical homeschooling family is thought of as sitting in little chairs in the corner doing their math homework with mom, and it just doesn’t look like that anymore.”
Measuring Success
Admission to college is a traditional way of measuring homeschooling success. According to a report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) called the “State of College Admission,” dated 2004, 83 percent of colleges at that time had a formal evaluation policy for applications from homeschoolers, up from only 52 percent four years earlier. The report states that, “… between 80 and 90 percent of all colleges require homeschooled students to submit standardized test scores and a transcript or record of grades to describe their educational achievement.” Universities as prestigious as Massachusetts Institute of Technology are willing to consider homeschoolers. Michigan State University, Oregon State University and the University of Texas are just three of the schools that post application procedures for homeschoolers on their Web sites.
Lundgren has “un-graduated” three young adults. As mentioned, she defines the success of her children’s education in non-traditional terms, just the way she defines education. “Ultimately I think that unschooling is a process of living,” she says. “My children are free to fail, to experiment, and are comfortable with that. By that definition, I feel very happy about my success."
