Theology of Unschooling - Part 2
This post is about certain elements of 'unschooling' that I wrestled with. A Catholic worldview doesn't really mesh with a secular one in terms of child rearing.
The problem of authority and limitations in unschooling. As a Catholic I think I have a God-given authority over my children. My authority isn't there just to insure that my kids are safe (which I often thought unschoolers limited their parental authority to - keeping kids somewhat safe), though that is certainly part of it, but it is there so that I can nurture and raise children to be potentially the very best individuals they can be, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. In the truest sense, raising a child as a Catholic is holistic!
One problem I have with radical or secular unschoolers (and I should probably define those terms better at some point!) is that while they will often concede the need to keep children safe, other premises they work from don't seem to include the other elements of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health so much. And this is because they are coming from a different position in terms of authority and in terms of how they see what a child is!
This is one reason I rejected much of the 'self-regulation' premise of radical unschoolers, especially as promoted by Sandra Dodd. I actually experimented twice with my kids in letting them learn to self-regulate with TV consumption. But they simply got addicted! I think as parents we need to understand brain development and what a growing body needs. Children need tons of physical exercise and activity to develop their bones and muscles and even balance brain chemicals. Too much screen (TV, videogames) is addicting and unhealthy. It just is. And kids are often too young to resist something so addictive. Adults struggle with this too. And it isn't because things are only addictive if we deny them to the children. That somehow the child will rebel and whatever is denied becomes irresistible forbidden fruit. That can happen, but not necessarily at all. We can also develop habits that are healthy by providing our children with balanced healthy engaging daily rhythms.
One size does not fit all.
Whenever anyone homeschools their children, let alone unschools them, they do so within the context of their homelife. There is a certain landscape already set up which the child is born into. If you are a military family, your landscape will be different from someone living an urban lifestyle or someone in the suburbs or someone living on a farm out in the country. The parents' jobs, temperaments, the number of children, the financial opportunities, whether extended family is nearby or not, etc., all these factors play into what sort of landscape the homeschool is set in. And religion also plays a major part. If a family is Catholic then living out that faith, going to Mass on Sundays, preparing for sacraments, living the liturgical year, daily prayers, all will be part of what the child's upbringing. In this way, there are natural factors that place both limitations and opportunities in the child's life. If your child lives in the suburbs for instance, they will probably have a backyard to play in, to garden in, a place to build catapults or forts. In you live in the city, the child may not have those opportunities but perhaps having to go to the park for outdoor time means it is easier to socialize. Or perhaps being able to visit museums or other interesting sites in the city, is something the child in the suburb won't have as much of, what with having to deal with driving into the city and finding parking, etc.
The other thing that ought to provide natural guidelines and limitations on childhood is the parents' understanding of child development. In a first world country like our own, as we begin our journey of parenting we have recourse to many 'experts' who can clue us in to what is going on developmentally with our children as they grow. There's a lot of confusing stuff out there, so I would say avoid the extremes and go for what looks like the most objectively true and least ideological. Also maybe stick with Catholic sources, if like me, you are Catholic. But if we know generally what makes for healthy development, we probably wouldn't be forcing kids to read at age 3 or worried that our 7 year old fidgets too much as we push him through a mountain of workbooks! The pressure is on in our society to raise 'successful' children and that always seems to mean sooner and faster rather than respecting the natural unfolding development of the child.
As I was stumbling through homeschooling in the early years, I kept trying to engage in the secular unschooling sphere, but I never could fit in. And I actually came to reject secular unschooling for two reasons: they assumed everyone's landscape was the same, (in other words, one size fits all) and 2) they often disregarded sound scientific developmental principles (even as they were acknowledging some of these principles that the school system seemed bent on ignoring).
I realized that the problem I had with certain maxims of radical unschooling stemmed from different world views. As a Catholic I think that we are created in God's image but also that we are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God. Radical unschooling comes from a concept of children descended from the writings of Rousseau. That is, children are born pure but are corrupted by society. Rousseau espoused the idea of the noble savage. But Catholics are closer to Charlotte Mason's understanding that children are born with capacity for both good and evil (or perhaps CM's Anglicanism borrowed this viewpoint from Catholicism!). To me, Rousseau's vision is an idealized ideological one, whereas Mason reflects a more realistic understanding of humanity.
Here are the three secular or radical unschooling notions that I encountered and that I came to reject.
The first one I encountered was this: ADD and learning disabilities are made up by the school system to control kids. I came to disagree with this. We do live in a fallen world and that means that perfection doesn't happen this side of heaven. People can be born with disabilities, physical, mental, emotional.
The second is the maxim that children will naturally learn to self-regulate. While I do think some kids at certain times, for certain things can self-regulate, I also think there is such a thing as temptation to sin, bad habits, addiction, etc I also think children are immature and don't see the bigger picture and need to develop self-control and prudence.
The third is the idea of treating your child as a guest. This, to me, is so foreign an idea. No, I believe in family. I think this idea of guest was put forth by people who had been damaged by authoritarian parenting. But I came to terms with my God-given authority to guide and nurture my children. This gave me the right to say no and to create routines that I saw as beneficial to the family. Not in a cruel, controlling, arbitrary way, but in the way that God gives up rules so that we can better love Him and each other.
I remember Sandra Dodd herself scolding me harshly because I called my kids dyslexic. I had kids I had been reading to since in utero! I taught via phonics because that is how I learned to read myself. I thought my kids would read early as I did. I actually learned to read by playing school with my older sister. We had beginning readers lying around the house and she parroted her teachers to me. She wrote letters up on the chalkboard in our playroom and made me repeat the sounds. I turned 5 in April, 1965. That summer we loved playing school and at some point reading clicked for me, By the time September rolled around and I started Kindergarten I was already reading simple chapter books. I thought my kids would learn to read like that. But they didn't. My son at 5 still couldn't name colors accurately or recognize the letters of the alphabet well either. And he was so hyper, we couldn't go out. To take him shopping or to a restaurant was hell! Everything overstimulated him and made him either super impulsive or highly irritable. I didn't understand what was going on. He was eventually diagnosed as ADHD. How could an unschooled 5 year old be ADHD if school was the cause for this?
I do think that ADHD gets over-diagnosed. And I recognize the fact that schools today are not developmentally appropriate in their demands on children. The forcing of academic skills and expectations on children before they are ready, like early reading being a must instead of something that happens on age spectrum from 3 to 9 or 10, is one such example. Taking away recess or diminishing physical activity so that kids can't get their wiggles out, is another example. I think all that contributes to this over-diagnosis. But that doesn't mean that the condition doesn't exist. I think there are other factors that influence this. Not that I'm an expert, but I personally think something is going on especially in the U.S. or western world where something is disrupting proper development (maybe hormones in our food and water?) and this is causing the rise in autism and ADHD which might very well be part of the autism spectrum.
Anyway, back to the dyslexic issue. My kids weren't learning to read. My oldest attended the nearby public school for Kindergarten and 1st grade. She wasn't learning to read. I remember the pressure to get my kids reading was enormous. I felt this from the school system, from all parenting resources, from other parents who bragged about how well their kids were reading, and from my own preconceptions.
I was caught between the seductive ideology of the unschoolers and my own anxiety and expectations. What really helped me was just after being scolded by Dodd (and feeling cut to the quick because at the time I was so vulnerable), I got a call from my sister. She had had a baby recently and the baby wasn't doing the normal baby thing of trying to stand in her lap. She noticed he never tried to put weight on his legs. This worried her so she took him to the doctor. The doctor said that his hamstrings weren't developing properly and that he needed physical therapy to to learn to stretch them out and bear weight on his legs. So she took him for therapy for a number of weeks or months (I can't remember) and lo and behold he began to put weight on his legs. This young man grew up to play football in high school and just completed his basic combat training in the military! So he turned out fine. But the big thing that hit me was that he wasn't developing naturally. And walking was a big example unschoolers gave for leaving kids alone and letting them learn in their own good time. Except this kid wasn't able to even get started with all the things he needed to learn in order to walk because his hamstrings weren't developing properly.
The thought struck me: how much more complex is learning to read? It is an enormous task, a bundle of skills and working synapses that need to happen before reading can take place. With complexity comes many opportunities for things to go wrong. This little light bulb moment of understanding made realize my kids did indeed need special help. Their type of difficulty, which was included under the umbrella term 'dyslexic' required vision therapy. It turned out their eyes didn't track well, they fatigued quickly so that they didn't work in unison. The eyes would take turn shutting down for a nanosecond so that when trying to read, it would be like if we kept winking each eye rapidly, first one and then immediately the other. while trying to follow a sentence. Try it! You can't read when your eyes are doing that! And also the eye muscles were too rigid, so they took a nanosecond too long to refocus. So if a child glances up at something in the room or his parent's face and then back down to the word on the page, he couldn't immediately focus again which caused hesitation and losing one's place. My kids' issues were mostly physical in terms of eye development and strength, though I do think my youngest son (and on the spectrum) had processing issues as well.
To be continued. . . .
The problem of authority and limitations in unschooling. As a Catholic I think I have a God-given authority over my children. My authority isn't there just to insure that my kids are safe (which I often thought unschoolers limited their parental authority to - keeping kids somewhat safe), though that is certainly part of it, but it is there so that I can nurture and raise children to be potentially the very best individuals they can be, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. In the truest sense, raising a child as a Catholic is holistic!
One problem I have with radical or secular unschoolers (and I should probably define those terms better at some point!) is that while they will often concede the need to keep children safe, other premises they work from don't seem to include the other elements of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health so much. And this is because they are coming from a different position in terms of authority and in terms of how they see what a child is!
This is one reason I rejected much of the 'self-regulation' premise of radical unschoolers, especially as promoted by Sandra Dodd. I actually experimented twice with my kids in letting them learn to self-regulate with TV consumption. But they simply got addicted! I think as parents we need to understand brain development and what a growing body needs. Children need tons of physical exercise and activity to develop their bones and muscles and even balance brain chemicals. Too much screen (TV, videogames) is addicting and unhealthy. It just is. And kids are often too young to resist something so addictive. Adults struggle with this too. And it isn't because things are only addictive if we deny them to the children. That somehow the child will rebel and whatever is denied becomes irresistible forbidden fruit. That can happen, but not necessarily at all. We can also develop habits that are healthy by providing our children with balanced healthy engaging daily rhythms.
One size does not fit all.
Whenever anyone homeschools their children, let alone unschools them, they do so within the context of their homelife. There is a certain landscape already set up which the child is born into. If you are a military family, your landscape will be different from someone living an urban lifestyle or someone in the suburbs or someone living on a farm out in the country. The parents' jobs, temperaments, the number of children, the financial opportunities, whether extended family is nearby or not, etc., all these factors play into what sort of landscape the homeschool is set in. And religion also plays a major part. If a family is Catholic then living out that faith, going to Mass on Sundays, preparing for sacraments, living the liturgical year, daily prayers, all will be part of what the child's upbringing. In this way, there are natural factors that place both limitations and opportunities in the child's life. If your child lives in the suburbs for instance, they will probably have a backyard to play in, to garden in, a place to build catapults or forts. In you live in the city, the child may not have those opportunities but perhaps having to go to the park for outdoor time means it is easier to socialize. Or perhaps being able to visit museums or other interesting sites in the city, is something the child in the suburb won't have as much of, what with having to deal with driving into the city and finding parking, etc.
The other thing that ought to provide natural guidelines and limitations on childhood is the parents' understanding of child development. In a first world country like our own, as we begin our journey of parenting we have recourse to many 'experts' who can clue us in to what is going on developmentally with our children as they grow. There's a lot of confusing stuff out there, so I would say avoid the extremes and go for what looks like the most objectively true and least ideological. Also maybe stick with Catholic sources, if like me, you are Catholic. But if we know generally what makes for healthy development, we probably wouldn't be forcing kids to read at age 3 or worried that our 7 year old fidgets too much as we push him through a mountain of workbooks! The pressure is on in our society to raise 'successful' children and that always seems to mean sooner and faster rather than respecting the natural unfolding development of the child.
As I was stumbling through homeschooling in the early years, I kept trying to engage in the secular unschooling sphere, but I never could fit in. And I actually came to reject secular unschooling for two reasons: they assumed everyone's landscape was the same, (in other words, one size fits all) and 2) they often disregarded sound scientific developmental principles (even as they were acknowledging some of these principles that the school system seemed bent on ignoring).
I realized that the problem I had with certain maxims of radical unschooling stemmed from different world views. As a Catholic I think that we are created in God's image but also that we are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God. Radical unschooling comes from a concept of children descended from the writings of Rousseau. That is, children are born pure but are corrupted by society. Rousseau espoused the idea of the noble savage. But Catholics are closer to Charlotte Mason's understanding that children are born with capacity for both good and evil (or perhaps CM's Anglicanism borrowed this viewpoint from Catholicism!). To me, Rousseau's vision is an idealized ideological one, whereas Mason reflects a more realistic understanding of humanity.
Here are the three secular or radical unschooling notions that I encountered and that I came to reject.
The first one I encountered was this: ADD and learning disabilities are made up by the school system to control kids. I came to disagree with this. We do live in a fallen world and that means that perfection doesn't happen this side of heaven. People can be born with disabilities, physical, mental, emotional.
The second is the maxim that children will naturally learn to self-regulate. While I do think some kids at certain times, for certain things can self-regulate, I also think there is such a thing as temptation to sin, bad habits, addiction, etc I also think children are immature and don't see the bigger picture and need to develop self-control and prudence.
The third is the idea of treating your child as a guest. This, to me, is so foreign an idea. No, I believe in family. I think this idea of guest was put forth by people who had been damaged by authoritarian parenting. But I came to terms with my God-given authority to guide and nurture my children. This gave me the right to say no and to create routines that I saw as beneficial to the family. Not in a cruel, controlling, arbitrary way, but in the way that God gives up rules so that we can better love Him and each other.
I remember Sandra Dodd herself scolding me harshly because I called my kids dyslexic. I had kids I had been reading to since in utero! I taught via phonics because that is how I learned to read myself. I thought my kids would read early as I did. I actually learned to read by playing school with my older sister. We had beginning readers lying around the house and she parroted her teachers to me. She wrote letters up on the chalkboard in our playroom and made me repeat the sounds. I turned 5 in April, 1965. That summer we loved playing school and at some point reading clicked for me, By the time September rolled around and I started Kindergarten I was already reading simple chapter books. I thought my kids would learn to read like that. But they didn't. My son at 5 still couldn't name colors accurately or recognize the letters of the alphabet well either. And he was so hyper, we couldn't go out. To take him shopping or to a restaurant was hell! Everything overstimulated him and made him either super impulsive or highly irritable. I didn't understand what was going on. He was eventually diagnosed as ADHD. How could an unschooled 5 year old be ADHD if school was the cause for this?
I do think that ADHD gets over-diagnosed. And I recognize the fact that schools today are not developmentally appropriate in their demands on children. The forcing of academic skills and expectations on children before they are ready, like early reading being a must instead of something that happens on age spectrum from 3 to 9 or 10, is one such example. Taking away recess or diminishing physical activity so that kids can't get their wiggles out, is another example. I think all that contributes to this over-diagnosis. But that doesn't mean that the condition doesn't exist. I think there are other factors that influence this. Not that I'm an expert, but I personally think something is going on especially in the U.S. or western world where something is disrupting proper development (maybe hormones in our food and water?) and this is causing the rise in autism and ADHD which might very well be part of the autism spectrum.
Anyway, back to the dyslexic issue. My kids weren't learning to read. My oldest attended the nearby public school for Kindergarten and 1st grade. She wasn't learning to read. I remember the pressure to get my kids reading was enormous. I felt this from the school system, from all parenting resources, from other parents who bragged about how well their kids were reading, and from my own preconceptions.
I was caught between the seductive ideology of the unschoolers and my own anxiety and expectations. What really helped me was just after being scolded by Dodd (and feeling cut to the quick because at the time I was so vulnerable), I got a call from my sister. She had had a baby recently and the baby wasn't doing the normal baby thing of trying to stand in her lap. She noticed he never tried to put weight on his legs. This worried her so she took him to the doctor. The doctor said that his hamstrings weren't developing properly and that he needed physical therapy to to learn to stretch them out and bear weight on his legs. So she took him for therapy for a number of weeks or months (I can't remember) and lo and behold he began to put weight on his legs. This young man grew up to play football in high school and just completed his basic combat training in the military! So he turned out fine. But the big thing that hit me was that he wasn't developing naturally. And walking was a big example unschoolers gave for leaving kids alone and letting them learn in their own good time. Except this kid wasn't able to even get started with all the things he needed to learn in order to walk because his hamstrings weren't developing properly.
The thought struck me: how much more complex is learning to read? It is an enormous task, a bundle of skills and working synapses that need to happen before reading can take place. With complexity comes many opportunities for things to go wrong. This little light bulb moment of understanding made realize my kids did indeed need special help. Their type of difficulty, which was included under the umbrella term 'dyslexic' required vision therapy. It turned out their eyes didn't track well, they fatigued quickly so that they didn't work in unison. The eyes would take turn shutting down for a nanosecond so that when trying to read, it would be like if we kept winking each eye rapidly, first one and then immediately the other. while trying to follow a sentence. Try it! You can't read when your eyes are doing that! And also the eye muscles were too rigid, so they took a nanosecond too long to refocus. So if a child glances up at something in the room or his parent's face and then back down to the word on the page, he couldn't immediately focus again which caused hesitation and losing one's place. My kids' issues were mostly physical in terms of eye development and strength, though I do think my youngest son (and on the spectrum) had processing issues as well.
To be continued. . . .
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