Kerry McDonald Unschooled: the Power of Self-Directed Learning

[Speaker 3] (0:00 - 0:07) You are now listening to the Here for the Truth podcast, hosted by Joel Rafiti and Yerasimos. [Speaker 2] (0:11 - 1:22) All right, everybody, welcome to episode 77 of Here for the Truth podcast. We have an incredible guest as always for you today, Kerry MacDonald. Kerry is a senior education fellow at FWE and host of the weekly Liberate Ted podcast. She's also the author of Unschooled, Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom. Kerry's research interests include homeschooling and schooling alternatives, self-directed learning, education, entrepreneurship, parent empowerment, school choice, and family and child policy. Her articles have appeared at The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NPR, Education Next, Reason Magazine, and Entrepreneur. She has a master's degree in education from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in economics from Bowdoin College. Not sure if I pronounced that correctly. Kerry, Bowdoin. No worries. I'm from Australia, as you can tell. So might not have that one down, Pat. Thank you so much for being here. I've started reading your book. It's absolutely incredible. I've got two young daughters of my own who will never be educated by the government. So looking forward to this one. [Speaker 1] (1:23 - 1:26) Well, it's delightful to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. [Speaker 2] (1:27 - 1:36) No, it's an absolute pleasure. To kick this one off, I really just want to get a bit of backstory as to really how you became, I guess, interested in unschooling in general and how did your life lead you here to this point? [Speaker 1] (1:38 - 6:17) You know, it's an interesting question. I went to K-12 public schools in the suburbs of Boston, never thought much about alternative education models or schooling alternatives. Then I went to college and was an economics major as an undergraduate, which really opened my mind to a whole new way of thinking about public policy and the ways in which government influence in the market can either expand or contract people's individual choices. And nowhere is that more apparent than in education. You know, if you think about it, we have so many choices in all the other areas of our lives that are determined by the market and such limited options when it comes to education, which is primarily controlled by the government. So that was what led me into thinking a little bit more about education policy and different learning models. And in my senior year, I was taking an education seminar and had a chance to do an independent research project. And I had a classmate who had a family member that lived nearby who was homeschooling. And this was just intriguing to me. I, you know, again, never really knew about homeschooling, never met a homeschooler. This was the late 1990s. And so homeschooling had really just become legally recognized in all 50 U.S. states a few years prior by the mid-90s. So it was still very much on the margins. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education first began tracking or counting homeschoolers in the late 1990s and 1998, counting about 850,000 at that time. So it was still sort of this marginal emerging education model that hadn't hit the mainstream the way it certainly has in the 21st century and for sure over the past couple of years. But I remember shadowing this family for that semester that I was doing this independent study project and being completely captivated by the type of learning that I saw, just so different from anything that I had experienced. The child was just incredibly curious and articulate and at ease, you know, talking with adults and strangers and members of her community, you know, authentically immersed, authentically socialized in the community around her, the people, places and things. And it was in quite contrast to that same semester when I happened to be doing a student teaching practicum in a local public elementary school with the same age children as this homeschooler. And I think at that point was really the first time I saw up close the difference, the stark difference between learning in a conventional classroom that's government-run, government-controlled with sort of forced socialization and an age-segregated environment with the same group of students and the same static handful of teachers doing the same standardized curriculum. That again in contrast with just this interest-based learning, kind of following this child's interests and passions that I saw in the homeschooling world. So that was what ultimately led me to graduate school in education policy. I said, I want to learn all that I can about all kinds of different learning models, different schooling alternatives and different education choice prototypes. And so this was again, the turn of the millennium, school choice really hadn't become a thing in the States yet. Really charter schools were just coming on the scene, which are taxpayer funded, but privately run. And so if you were at all interested in school choice at the time at Harvard and to some extent still charter schools was sort of where you went and that was sort of your research focus. So that's what I did. And that got me more immersed in the school choice world. And then kind of fast forward a decade later, when I had my own children thinking about their education, I realized that their learning would contract if they were to go to a conventional school. They were really again, immersed in our community. We live in Boston, Massachusetts. And so we had all of these wonderful cultural and historic sites around us, museums, libraries, outdoor spaces, and so on. And I just felt like that would disappear if they were to go to school and, you know, spend their days again, in the kind of four walls of a traditional classroom doing a standardized curriculum. [Speaker 2] (6:19 - 6:27) Amazing. What really blew me away in your book was this definition of socialization, which I'd never heard before, which was the place on the government or group ownership or control. [Speaker 1] (6:29 - 7:48) Right, right. You know, so if you look at the dictionary definition of socialized, of course, this is the first question that homeschoolers get. And I do have to admit, honestly, when I walked into that family's home to shadow them for that semester, that was my first question. I think it's sort of the knee jerk question that we all say, well, we can't imagine that you could actually become a social human being without schooling, even though schooling is a relatively recent social construct. And certainly mandatory schooling, compulsory schooling is very recent, really dating back to the mid-19th century in the U.S. and around the world. So, but, you know, I was guilty of the same thing. And I think when we look at the actual definition of socialized, you know, it is to bring under government control. And what I think most people are asking when they're asking that question of homeschoolers is are you social? And certainly one of the secondary definitions of socialized is are you learning the kind of social customs of your culture, which again, you're better apt and better able to do when you are immersed in the people, places, and things of your culture, rather than spending the formative years of your childhood and adolescence in a very kind of artificial cultural environment. [Speaker 3] (7:49 - 8:03) I'm curious your thoughts as to why this shift, you said, the mid-1800s in the U.S. for compulsory schooling and moving towards this more homogenized version of education, why did it come about? Like, what are your thoughts on that? [Speaker 1] (8:04 - 13:43) Yeah, so I do trace the history of American compulsory education and schooling in the unschooled book. And it really dates back to the 17th century to, you know, shortly after the Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1620. A couple decades later in 1640, the colonists there passed the colony's first compulsory education law, which basically established a state interest in an educated citizenry. And then a few years later, about five years later, passed what they called the Old Deluder Satan Law, which kind of elaborated on that compulsory education law, requiring that cities and towns, these kind of emerging cities and towns, had to provide education resources to any family that wanted them. So depending on the size of the township, if they were a smaller township, the town had to hire a teacher. And if there was a larger town, they had to open and operate a grammar school. So the compulsion in those early compulsory education laws were on the municipality to provide educational resources to any families that wanted them. The compulsion was not on citizens to take advantage of those resources. And in fact, most, you know, wouldn't. They would be gravitating toward homeschooling, which was sort of the default at the time. The expectation was families were the ones who were ultimately in charge of ensuring that their children were highly educated. They often used various resources to make that happen, including what were known as dame schools, which were like little nursery schools in a neighbor's kitchen, tutors, apprenticeship programs, and an assortment of private and charity schools throughout the kind of colonial and revolutionary eras, and growing assortment of these public schools. But that again, were compulsory in terms of municipalities providing them not in terms of attendance and all changed in the mid 19th century in 1852. Again, Massachusetts, here I am leading the way in compulsion, but this time shifting the compulsion away from the city and town to the parents. And there was a lot going on in the US in the early to mid 19th century that I think added to the push for compulsory schooling. There was definitely a progressive sense that we needed to kind of shape children into a common mold. And there was this adulation of the Prussian model of schooling that the kind of architect of American schooling, Horace Mann, really gravitated to, which was compulsory attendance, compulsory classes, a standardized curriculum, state certified standardized teacher training, age segregated classrooms, a focus on order and obedience and compliance. And that was really enticing to the early education reformers in the US. And so that model of Prussian education was imported into Massachusetts. But there was also a lot of cultural change. There was dramatic increase in the number of immigrants coming to the US, in particular into Boston. The population of Boston doubled between 1820 and 1840. And a lot of the population growth was coming from Irish Catholic immigrants escaping the potato famine, which really challenged the dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural norms at the time, kind of Protestant Anglo-Saxon cultural norms. And so, in fact, just prior to the passage of the compulsory attendance law in Massachusetts, the state legislature talked about this problem of these Irish Catholic immigrants coming in. And they said, quote, those pouring in upon us in masses of thousands upon thousands are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect. And then they passed compulsory schooling, of course, to try to shape these unruly immigrants into what they felt like was the preferred American way. And these common schools, which were now forced upon parents, parents had to have their children attend, were purportedly secular, but had the King James version of the Bible, had Protestant teachers and texts, and were for all intents and purposes, you know, teaching this kind of dominant Protestant Anglo-Saxon educational model. And so a lot of these Irish Catholic families rebelled and said, well, we want nothing to do with this. And so they ended up creating their own parallel system of parochial schools throughout the 19th century in the US. And various reformers tried to eliminate private education in the US, which came to a head in the 1920s in a landmark Supreme Court case that found that the child is not the mere creature of the state, and that we can't have just standardized state education alone. But it's, you know, it was sort of an interesting battle throughout that time. And now, of course, we have certainly here in the US, a great push over the past few years toward parental empowerment and education and the locus of control shifting away from government controlled education and back to parents and families. [Speaker 2] (13:45 - 13:47) Wow. It's absolutely incredible. Yeah. [Speaker 3] (13:48 - 14:19) Definitely amazing. Because when I think about it, of how we're just conditioned to go along, we just, this is how it was done before us, this is how it was done this previous generation. And I just think about this idea of a parent, I'm not a parent, so I can speak hypothetically, of just like, I'm going to just give my child away for eight, nine hours a day, five days a week, for, you know, 12 years, whatever the case may be. And I don't really even know what they're really being taught and by who. And it just kind of, when you really think about it kind of seems insane. [Speaker 1] (14:19 - 14:23) Well, and not only that, you have to do it under a legal threat of force. [Speaker 2] (14:23 - 14:30) Yeah. It's wild. It's insane. Well, 15,000 hours, is that right? On average? [Speaker 1] (14:30 - 15:01) Yeah, roughly. Although it's getting, it's getting even more, you know, these compulsory schooling statutes, certainly here in the States are extending to ever earlier ages. There's a push, you know, for universal preschool and pre-K, which will, you know, some would suggest will inevitably lead to then compulsory schooling laws going to, you know, three and four-year-olds if those, if that trend continues. And then, you know, some states pushing compulsory schooling laws past 16 up to 17, 18. [Speaker 2] (15:02 - 15:22) It's absolutely insane to think that our minds are molded for such crucial formative years, for such an extended period of time by, I mean, ultimately teachers who are, I guess, following someone else's orders as well at the end of the day. Sorry, I just lost my train of thought for a second there. [Speaker 1] (15:23 - 16:19) Well, I'll interject there because I think it's a sort of a funny story too, there have been some states that have succeeded in pushing up the compulsory education or compulsory schooling ceiling to 18 from 16. And one state was Oregon had succeeded in doing that while at the same time pushing to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. So basically arguing that no, we have to compel students to stay in a compulsory schooling environment until they're 18 because, you know, then they're adults, but then also pushing to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 to get presumably more of the vote, these voters that they think would vote for their particular side. And it just kind of shows the hypocrisy that has nothing to do with, you know, youth empowerment and everything to do with politics. [Speaker 2] (16:20 - 16:21) Yeah, it's ridiculous. [Speaker 3] (16:22 - 16:46) Yeah, with the last few years and everything that's been going on, and obviously a lot of people, you know, wanting to take back control in terms of, you know, how their children are raised or how they're educated. Have you seen a lot of pushback, you know, from the state, like, oh, we can't have all these people creating their own little homeschooling pods and unschooling and like, what's kind of the climate right now around it? [Speaker 1] (16:46 - 21:05) You know, it's, I'm full of optimism, because one thing that the disruption brought about by the COVID response has done is really given parents a close up look at what was actually happening in their children's classrooms through district Zoom schooling, as well as begin to explore or create some other options. And so I think for so long, parents just sort of went with the path least resistant. So, you know, here's my child's school assigned by the zip code and all of our neighbors go here. And so let's just go along that path and not really think too much about it. But then when there was district Zoom schooling, followed by prolonged school closures, or various COVID policies implemented in schools like mask wearing and contact tracing and frequent testing and so on. A lot of parents just said, well, we're going to opt out of that and at least temporarily and find some other options. And so what you saw in the US in 2020, and in the in the 2020 academic year, the population of homeschooling doubled. And so there was more than 11% of the overall US K to 12 school age population being homeschooled. That was actually a tripling from pre pandemic levels back when the US Department of Education, you know, more recent data from the US Department of Education in 2016. And so there were more than 5 million students being homeschooled in that 2020 2021 academic year, again, according to the US Census Bureau. And in fact, this year, when when schools were reopened for full time in person learning, I think a lot of people thought, oh, well, all those people will just go back to school. This was just a one year blip. But in fact, the Associated Press ran an analysis of 18 states, finding that homeschooling rates remained above record levels, and only fell by about 17% from this all time high the previous year. So families were sticking with it and really, you know, found it fulfilling and enjoyable and rewarding. And the US Census Bureau discovered that the biggest driver for some of this growth in homeschooling were black homeschooling families, had a fivefold increase in the number of homeschoolers in that 2020 2021 academic year, and were overrepresented in the homeschooling community compared to the representation in the overall US K to 12 public school population. So just showing kind of an increasing diversity of homeschooling, you know, here in states, and certainly, you know, a real emphasis by parents to provide this kind of personalized learning, and then to stay with it, because they found it to be rewarding. And I'll just add one other thing, I think one of the reasons that they found it rewarding and doable was because a lot of them form these learning pods, or the what we call pandemic pods back in 2020, where they would just gather together with other groups of families to create a sort of co-op. And then a lot of those co-ops turned into full fledged micro schools. And sort of kind of a long winded approach to getting to answer your question. But as a result of that, there was a real push in a lot of US states to, to sort of allow these these learning pods or to recognize and legitimize these learning pods. And in fact, you saw two sweeping pieces of legislation over the past year in both Georgia and West Virginia, that loosened compulsory schooling statutes in the case of West Virginia, and that recognized learning pods, in the case of Georgia, and enabled sort of this deregulation of these innovative learning models that were typically kind of categorized as, you know, unlicensed childcare centers, for example, or other types of unrecognized programs. And now they're, they're recognized as legitimate models. And I think from that, we'll continue to see a lot more innovation going forward. So the momentum is with the parents, it's with innovation, it's with education entrepreneurs. And I think, at least at the moment, there's there's very little success in trying to rein that in. In fact, it's, it's really tilting toward parent empowerment, for sure. [Speaker 3] (21:06 - 21:35) Yeah, awesome. So I just want to say something real quick. I think it's incredible. And I live in, I live outside of Los Angeles and Topanga Canyon. And I have lots of friends, and they've been like forming their own pods and seeking out alternative ways, because they, you know, they weren't in support of some of the things that were happening the last few years. So I'm optimistic as well. And I think that's when great creativity and innovation happens is when kind of their backs or your back is pushed against the wall. And, and I think that's what we're seeing. And it's, I think it's pretty amazing. [Speaker 1] (21:37 - 21:43) Absolutely. Yeah, it's an exciting time to be in education and exciting time to be a parent or an educator or an entrepreneur. [Speaker 2] (21:44 - 21:56) For sure. I want to backtrack a bit. So what are the long term effects of this institutionalized schooling, these 15,000, quote, unquote, hours that we spend there? [Speaker 1] (21:58 - 24:33) Well, I guess the short answer is that it's getting worse as schooling takes up more and more of childhood and adolescence. You know, it used to be even back when I was in school that, you know, you went to school for your six hours a day, 180 days a year, but you had, you know, kind of wide open afternoons, you had halftime kindergarten, maybe you went to preschool a couple days a week, but it wasn't a big thing. And you had kind of wide open summers. And now every moment of most children's day and early childhood and on through adolescence is spent in these structured, supervised adult run activities, or school like programs, you know, whether it's during the day and kind of formal academics or after school with, you know, adult led sports programs or extracurricular activities or these other kinds of structured environment, you know, structured programs that are often academic. In fact, even in adolescence, you see in the US, teen labor force participation, particularly in after school jobs at an all time low. And most of the time, these teens are replacing what was kind of on the job experience and gaining a foothold into the adult world is now being replaced with academics or other kinds of school like structured activities. And the result, at least, you know, research coming out of Professor Peter Gray from Boston College, who wrote the forward to my own school book, you know, he's found that this decline in childhood play is leading to a lot of the youth mental health disorders that we've been seeing is that, you know, rising rates of childhood and adolescence, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and so on. And it's because of this kind of disappearance of play and unstructured, unsupervised time in childhood and adolescence. And so, you know, we see that worsening, certainly over the past couple of years of social disconnection, that's only gotten worse. And a lot of people say, oh, that's because, you know, schools were closed. But it was really about social disconnection. It was not that the schools were necessarily providing that kind of healthy environment, but the kids overall were disconnected from any kind of peer interaction and community support and involvement. And much of that for many kids, comes in the form of school, but it was really that kind of overall isolation that exacerbated, in many cases, what were already sort of simmering mental health problems among children and adolescents. [Speaker 3] (24:35 - 24:42) What role do you think an over-reliance on technology plays into that as well? [Speaker 1] (24:44 - 27:35) Yeah, so I'm sort of in the same camp as Peter Gray, again, a psychology professor at Boston College. And in terms of being skeptical about the research showing that, you know, social media, for example, is leading to increased, you know, youth anxiety and depression. And in fact, I recently had Peter Gray on my podcast, and he talked more deeply about this and said, you know, the research really isn't compelling. It's not, it doesn't back up that hypothesis that social media is what's leading to this kind of youth mental health crisis. And, you know, I would tend to agree with him, you know, I think that there's this tendency to sort of demonize technology, particularly new technologies and social media and kind of mobile, the mobile world is relatively new for us, right, just about a little over a decade. And so, you know, we have these sort of doomsday predictions about what this technology does. And one of my favorite quotes in my unschooled book, I have a whole chapter about technology. And one of my favorite quotes comes from a journalist who was writing about a new piece of technology that he said was going to make us nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to one another. And he was writing in the late 19th century and talking about the telephone. So there's always been this skepticism and cynicism about new technologies and how they're going to, you know, ruin us and they're going to cause all these problems. And in the end, net net, what do they do? They improve our lives. They improve our connection and our communication. That doesn't mean that they, you know, are perfect and not without their downsides, but overall technology enhances our lives and certainly enhances our learning. And this is I talk a lot about in the unschooled book is that, you know, it used to be that you had to go to school because that was where the books were. That was where the teachers were and the knowledge was. Now, of course, that's all around us, literally at our fingertips, thanks to these incredible new technologies. And so learning and knowledge have never been more accessible in history. And we can learn anything we want at any time from whomever we choose. And we can be more diligent in deciding who we want to learn from and what we want to learn and in the ways in which we learn than we ever were before. And so I think just given that kind of global educational environment that we have now and all of the resources that we have available to us, many of which are free or low cost, it just makes this kind of 19th century industrial model of schooling all the more outdated and obsolete. [Speaker 2] (27:36 - 28:40) Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know, and personally, I'm someone who I guess resisted school a lot while I was in the system and resisted education. In fact, I would even say school made me resent learning to some extent. And then but once you come out of that and finally realize you have the opportunity to learn the things that you're actually interested about, and I have these incredible tools at my disposal, such as social media, the internet to self direct my education, there's so much more joy in pursuing a path that's authentically yours. And that's authentically a result of who you are as an individual. And I love this quote that you had in your book as well by Henry David Thoreau. What does education often do makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook. And I just thought that was absolutely beautiful. And it's kind of sad to think about how much individual expression has been diminished because of these systems and how much creative potential we haven't seen because of what the schooling system has done in general. So let's get on to I guess the second part of this is what is unschooling? [Speaker 1] (28:41 - 30:58) Yeah, well, if I can just comment on your previous point, I think that you're you make a good point there that I don't want to lose. And that is that if we think about the learning needs of the 21st century, again, with all of this global connectivity and learning resources all around us, we have to think about kind of the economic and social realities of our time. And right now, you know, we're spending more and more of our time coexisting with and competing with robots and artificial intelligence. And so we have to think about what differentiates human intelligence from artificial intelligence. And it's, you know, these human differentiators that will enable humans, you know, to continue to flourish and make our world a better place. And yet, these are qualities such as creativity, curiosity, inventiveness, and entrepreneurial spirit, this desire for exploration and discovery. These are unique human qualities that are so often crushed through our conventional system of forced schooling that focuses instead on obedience and compliance and coloring in the lines. And, you know, really diminishes certainly a child's natural exuberance for learning and natural desire for exploration and discovery, again, in the name of conformity and order. And again, dating back to kind of this Prussian model, that's just so mismatched for the realities of, you know, our 21st century world. And so I think that it's time for us to embrace these new models of learning. And that's what I try to bring about in the unschooled book. So to get to your question, what is unschooling? It's really disentangling education from schooling, including what we would think of as school at home versions of homeschooling, or other kinds of conventional learning models that kind of rely on this sort of top-down established curriculum of this is the set, you know, content that you need to learn at this particular time in this particular way with this particular assessment method. And it's basically saying, you know, that again, we don't need to kind of continue to replicate that model in this new world. [Speaker 2] (30:59 - 31:25) Yeah. So it's almost like there's a distinct difference between what we would say homeschooling is and unschooling is. For example, we're not even bringing the education system or curriculums and subject outcome based learning into the home. So how does how is it facilitated? If you could give us a brief, I guess, overview, I mean, I guess it's more obviously naturally living within the families and communities, but I'd like to hear it from you. [Speaker 1] (31:26 - 35:26) So unschooling is really practiced in two forms, it can be a method of homeschooling where you're not replicating school at home, you're not focusing on a set curriculum. And kind of what we would think of as the expectations and kind of, you know, ways about going about education that would happen in any kind of conventional schooling environment, it's much more emergent learning focused on a child's interests, and then connecting them with available resources, both in-person community resources, as well as online resources and various teachers and mentors and peers around them. So that's one method is kind of a version of homeschooling. But the other method that I spent a lot of time in the book going through are these education entrepreneurs that have been building either self-directed learning centers, or what we term sort of unschooling schools, like the Sudbury model of education that's modeled after the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1968. And that over the past 50 plus years has spawned, you know, dozens of similar Sudbury models around the world. And the Sudbury Valley School was modeled really after the Summerhill School in England, dating back to 1920, which was created by A.S. Neal, who I think really kind of catapulted the modern homeschooling movement and the kind of modern self-directed school movement, unschooling school movement with his book, Summerhill, that he published in the 1960s. That really sort of prompted a lot of people who were thinking about a different way of learning and living to explore something different. And so really unschooling, whether it's as, again, a form of homeschooling that would be practiced in your home or throughout your community, or it's in one of these self-directed learning centers or unschooling schools where kids could be learning five days a week if they wanted to in one of these places, the key features are non-coercive self-directed learning. So there's no forced curriculum. There could be classes that are offered, but they're not required. That there is this belief that, you know, children are people and that they will learn and discover the world around them in much the same way that we adults do. You know, if we want to learn how to do something, especially now, we don't necessarily sign up for an adult education class and see if the teacher is who we want to learn from and they'll pay our money to do that. What do we do? We go on YouTube or, you know, we read or listen to a book or we find a podcast or we, you know, there's all these ways in which we discover knowledge or, you know, pursue our interests and passions. And it's just this recognition that, you know, our children learn in the much the same way and that we can provide that opportunity for them to do that. It's really about preserving that natural childhood curiosity and exuberance that all young children exude, but that's often diminished as they go through their years, of course, of schooling. And then if we're lucky, as adults, we may regain, right? I mean, I remember loving to read until reading in later in elementary school became this very unpleasant thing. You know, told exactly what to read and had to, you know, go kind of nitpicky through our, you know, sentences and lost sort of the love of reading. And thankfully I rediscovered my love of reading in early adulthood. But you can imagine that not happening for some people because their forced schooling experience could really crush all of that curiosity and drive for learning. And so I think it's just, unschooling is really just a way of making sure that we're not crushing those qualities and we're, you know, cultivating this love of learning and discovery. [Speaker 2] (35:27 - 35:42) Yeah. And I guess there would be like on the flip side of that, a belief on some level that, oh, if we just left them to learn by themselves, we're going to have like chaos and homelessness and, you know, unruly, undisciplined and stuff like that. What's your response to that? [Speaker 1] (35:43 - 39:24) Well, I think that, again, everyone's living in a community, right? And so there's adults around them, whether again, that's in your home and throughout your community as a method of homeschooling, or if it's in one of these learning centers or unschooling schools, there are community expectations. And so one of the key messages, and this was actually back to A.S. Neal and his book, Summer Hill, and what he imposed in his school, Summer Hill, that again, still exists today now over a century later, was this idea of freedom, not license. So it's freedom with responsibility, that my freedom can't negatively impact your freedom, that we have certain community responsibilities to one another, and that could differ depending on the environment and the home or the unschooling center or school, but that you're living and learning in the context of community. And so you're learning that, you know, not to be self-centered about your learning and that you're learning that you, you know, you have your end of the bargain to uphold and that you have to be respectful of others. And then I think this idea, oh, well, kids will never learn anything, is really a testament to, I think, our school mindset, right? Because, you know, kids are burning to learn. If you look at a young child, what are they doing all the time? Why, why, why? You know, they're always asking questions. They're driven to learn and discover. And we, again, turn that off through a system of force schooling that, you know, teaches kids obedience over originality and conformity over compliance. And, you know, you have to do things this way. You have to follow instructions in this way. And it's only gotten worse. I will say that certainly here in the United States, there has been a push to teach reading to ever younger ages of children. In fact, there was a survey done through professors at the University of Virginia and they found that in 1998, only 31% of teachers surveyed thought that children should be reading by the end of kindergarten. Just 12 years later, by 2010, that number was 80%. And it wasn't just the teacher's expectations that had changed. It was the curriculum directives. It was common core that was introduced in the United States. It was this push towards standardized learning and pushing reading and academic expectations for children down to ever younger ages when previously kindergarten was just for play and just for being social with other kids. And now all of a sudden five-year-olds are expected to read. And if they're not reading, oh, well now they're diagnosed with a reading delay or a reading disability or they're not sitting still to listen to the teacher and do this academic work. So they must have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and there's a drug for that. And so we'll put them on these hefty psychotropic drugs. And that's just increasingly what's been happening. And so I think that it's really time for parents and now is again that moment of parent empowerment to question this conveyor belt, to question where their children are learning, what they're learning, how they're learning, what people are telling them about their child, and realize that there are alternatives, whether that's again homeschooling or home unschooling or finding one of these unschooling schools or centers or building one if one doesn't exist, that can really preserve that natural childhood zest for learning. [Speaker 3] (39:24 - 40:59) It's pretty amazing because I'm trying to think about when I was younger and I was always a curious child and I was fortunate enough that I was able to go through schooling because I had the ability to memorize and regurgitate. It was something that got me through conventional schooling, whereas other people who maybe that's not their primary skill, they have a more difficult time. But I didn't really enjoy, I did it because I just did it. I was like, oh, I have this skill, this ability, I'm just going to do it and it's fine. But I didn't have the love for learning, even though I know it's such a huge part of who I am. And it wasn't really until I left college where I like backpacked Europe for a few months and brought like 15 books with me. And all I did, and it makes me think of how learning was done in the old days, it was travel, go to museums or go to see things, be with my thoughts, ask questions, read books, contemplate, introspection. And my love of learning really began when I left college. And since then, I've just been learning everything that I can and all the stuff that inspires me, that lights me up. And to think if I was in a model, now, again, I love my life and I have no regrets, but also at the same time, like at age four or five, six, to be nurtured in this manner, what kind of human beings, what kind of adults will we be creating? And I'm so excited to see that, to see like the next few generations of, like you said, 11% now, I guess, are being homeschooled or unschooled and to see what's going to happen in 10, 15 years. It's really cool. [Speaker 1] (41:00 - 41:44) Yeah. And you bring up a really good point because it's sort of the opportunity cost of coercion is high, right? Like we don't know what else we might've been doing if we weren't spending those 15,000 hours playing this game of school, like you said, memorizing and regurgitating, becoming well-schooled perhaps, but not well-educated. What else could we have been learning, doing, inventing, pursuing during those 15,000 hours? And yeah, how can we give that to our children so that they are not wasting their time and that they are really figuring out who they are, what their full potential is, what their gifts and talents are, and then given the freedom to pursue that. [Speaker 2] (41:46 - 42:22) Yeah. Exciting. It is. It is. It is really exciting, man. Like I've never been more excited about learning. Like it's only in the last couple of years I've really stepped into what entrepreneurship is. And it's such a beautiful thing. So it's free and liberating to recognize that you can create a vocation out of something that you're literally interested in and inspires you. And life doesn't have to be this segmented reality where you go and do one thing you hate for seven, eight hours a day, then come back and live another life. You can be integrated. So yeah, I think it's beautiful for sure. Obviously, schooling diminishes entrepreneurial potential as well. [Speaker 1] (42:23 - 43:08) It does. And there's empirical research to kind of back that up too. There was a study of grown unschoolers conducted by Peter Gray, who I mentioned, and his colleague Gina Riley from Hunter College. And they discovered that in their survey of grown unschoolers, that more than 50% of them were working as entrepreneurs, surprise, surprise, in fields that were connected to interests they developed in childhood or adolescence. Because, of course, they had that freedom to figure out what they were good at, what they were passionate about, and build that into a career. And similar survey findings come out of the Sudbury Valley School that I mentioned earlier about the high level of entrepreneurship coming from those alumni as well. [Speaker 3] (43:09 - 43:36) Yeah, it makes me think of that statement a lot of times where people go, oh, well, you're not going to be doing what you learned in college anyways. You'll be doing something else. Whereas if someone went through a different process, like what you were just saying, how these individuals, what they're doing from an entrepreneurial standpoint relates to these interests and things they were learning, it just seems more aligned and it makes more sense than someone who, let's say, went to school for accounting, but then is doing something completely opposite to that after they've graduated. [Speaker 1] (43:36 - 44:15) Yeah, or not happy with what they're doing, right? Because they've been on this conveyor belt of societal expectations since preschool that they have to kind of move forward, play this game of school, memorize and regurgitate whether or not they're learning anything, and then go to college because that's what everybody says that you have to do, and then go into this career that you may or may not like to pay off the loans from that college. And if we really stop and challenge that or question that pathway and recognize that there could be other ways of living and learning, other pathways to adulthood, it opens up a whole world of possibilities. [Speaker 3] (44:16 - 44:43) Yeah, and that's another thing, like the debt that students, that people go into to go to school, to go to college, like maybe they want to do something else after college, but because of the high debt, they're like, well, I'm going to go be a banker, I'm going to go do this, do that. And then they get kind of caught in that hamster wheel. And then 10, 15, 20 years go by, they have more responsibilities. Like, well, what do I do now? I'm not living my passion. I don't feel aligned. I'm not happy. Now what? Yeah, right. [Speaker 2] (44:44 - 45:05) Even if you look at this in conjunction with, you know, the whole study of self-esteem, for example, like Nathaniel Brandon's definition of self-esteem is the competence to deal with the basic challenges of life, right? So what level of self-esteem do you think people that are coming out of institutionalized education actually have to make different choices based on their own interests? They're not learning how to deal with the basic challenges of life. [Speaker 1] (45:07 - 46:09) Yeah, and in some ways, I mean, a lot of the time their self-esteem is crushed in school, right? I mean, they internalize often from an early age, either, you know, they're not smart because they're not learning to read at age five, for example, or they're not good at math because they're not getting good grades on a math test, when it could just be that they're not quite ready to learn multiplication in third grade, maybe it's fourth grade, but that curriculum doesn't allow for that kind of flexibility, or they learn, you know, I'm not athletic, or I'm not a musical, or any of these things, and then if they're lucky, you know, as we were just talking about in adulthood, they may overcome some of those messages and really discover who they are, and that had nothing to do with how they acted in school, but I think for so many people, they internalize these messages that are very often false and harmful, and they never do kind of reach their full potential and discover their passions. [Speaker 2] (46:11 - 46:27) Yeah, and it's like, we would trust our kids as newborns from like zero to three to learn everything they need to learn, you know what I mean, and let that process unfold naturally, and then all of a sudden, we think we need to hijack that entire process, but that's when they turn four or five and put them into some kind of institution, it's crazy. [Speaker 1] (46:29 - 46:42) Yeah, and again, an institution that's becoming increasingly rigid and has these expectations for childhood that are in no way reflective of natural childhood development. [Speaker 2] (46:44 - 46:52) Yeah, and I mean, there would have to be a correlation between, I guess, midlife crisis as well, right? [Speaker 1] (46:53 - 46:54) Yeah, perhaps, yeah. [Speaker 3] (46:55 - 47:07) That's what I was saying before about like, you just kind of go along, you do the thing that, oh, well, my parents did this, and this is what everyone else is doing, and let me just keep doing it until you get to that place, whatever the age is, and you're like, who am I? [Speaker 1] (47:07 - 47:34) And this is where I would, again, put a plug in, no pun intended for technology, because I think, again, technology exposes us in adulthood to all these other possibilities, other interests we may have, communities of people that we otherwise wouldn't connect with, and hopefully helps us to pursue our knowledge or, you know, pursue interests and learn various skills in ways that we might not have been able to even just a couple of decades ago. [Speaker 3] (47:34 - 48:13) I mean, this podcast and our business partnership was born because of technology. My wife and I were on a podcast and Joel saw it, it was another platform for education. And we connected and realized we were aligned and here we are. So yeah, I definitely love technology for its benefits. I guess for me, sometimes I think, when I think about my childhood and running around and playing outside and riding the bike and that whole thing versus like, well, now I'm on a device and I'm playing games or I'm doing this as opposed to really connecting and being tactile with another child, you know, when I'm young, I think that's where the balance, that's where it can be a little tricky, in my opinion. [Speaker 1] (48:14 - 49:30) Well, and a lot of that is cultural too. And this is based on, you know, research, I think of Lenore Skenazy and her book, Free Range Kids, and some of the work that she does at her organization called Let Grow, which is, you know, tracing the ways in which our culture has changed childhood, you know, when you're not allowed now to be a young child outside, unsupervised in your neighborhood, because that's unsafe. And you know, your family could have the police or authorities called on them, if that were to happen. And that's a huge sea change. You know, even from when I grew up, you know, in the 80s and 90s, where, you know, there was this expectation where you were outside playing, and no one was around, and we didn't have cell phones, and we were riding our bikes a mile away. And it was that was the culture, that was the expectation. And now that's changed. And so what do kids do? They play video games, because that's really the only cultural option open to them, their only source of play. And so, you know, if it's not, again, it's not the technology's fault. It's not the video games that are doing it. It's the ways in which our culture has changed to really alter childhood. [Speaker 2] (49:33 - 49:43) What's given rise to this fear around, you know, being outside and playing, and etc? I mean, I feel like we always carry so much fear, and everything's unsafe all of a sudden, you know, in your opinion, what's given rise to that shift? [Speaker 1] (49:44 - 50:30) Well, I don't know if it's my opinion. I'll, Lenore Skenazy is sort of the expert on this in her book, Free Range Kids, but she would say that a lot of it dates back to children's pictures on milk cartons, dating back to like the 70s and 80s, where you you had these, you know, a few high profile abductions, and then other kind of kids pictures on milk cartons that may or may not have been sort of these random abductions could have been, you know, family members and so on. But there's this image or this expectation. And of course, media runs with this, and it's all over the headlines, and then begins to make parents think that childhood is unsafe, and that they have to rein it in. And then it was this kind of cascading effect over the following decades. [Speaker 3] (50:30 - 50:52) Yeah, that's what that would have been my guess, too. I remember the milk carton thing, and just more fear, and then how the media plays a role in that as well. And, and there's just more of it, too. I mean, I can't help but say that there's more media than maybe there was back in the day. And so your mind is being hit, more often parents who have more opportunities to be hit with these messages to trigger more fear. [Speaker 1] (50:52 - 52:03) Yeah. And I and I think along along those same lines is maybe this disempowerment of family of parents, this, you know, belief that parents are not being a good influence on their children, and that others might know best, whether that's government schools or authorities, or nosy neighbors would call, you know, authorities on parents or the fear that that would happen. And so there was this, you know, I think there was a real shift and sort of parents being recognized as the ones ultimately responsible for raising their children. And they could do that in a whole different, you know, variety of ways. And you kind of keep, keep, you know, keep your mouth shut about what your neighbors doing or how they're choosing to raise their children to then know, you know, here is this expected way that you will raise your child. And if you don't, you know, you'll get in trouble in some ways. And I'm hopeful that again, the past couple of years of parent empowerment may be shifting that pendulum again, back to parents and parents being able to be more empowered and, and have a little bit more say, you know, and how their children are raised. [Speaker 2] (52:04 - 52:14) Yeah, the parent definitely has to trust themselves first to be able to go through this process. I mean, I dare say even unschooling is primarily for the, for the parent first on some level, in order to actually facilitate that within their home. [Speaker 1] (52:15 - 52:58) Again, if it's, if it's a version of homeschooling, but a lot of the times, this is happening in either a self-directed learning center that children might attend part-time or full-time or in, in a five-day-a-week unschooling school, like the Sudbury model, because I think the key with unschooling that differentiates it from homeschooling, for sure, if it's a method of homeschooling, is that it really is about the children and not about the parent. And that's actually why a lot of these learning centers and schools are so helpful for facilitating unschooling, because it does, especially as the kids get older, it does sort of allow the children to have their own lives and their own identities outside of the home. [Speaker 2] (52:58 - 53:08) Yeah. So these learning centers, they're, I'm guessing, an entire shift away from like Montessori and Waldorf and Steiner as well, right? That's still a systemized course. Yeah. [Speaker 1] (53:08 - 54:08) Those are all different educational philosophies. I touch on, on them in the book. And one of the things that I say a lot, you know, my main goal is to expand education options for families. And, and that's where I've been so excited over the past couple of years of education entrepreneurship with all of these new learning models or expanding, expanded models in, in, you know, time-tested approaches like Montessori. We've seen a whole scaling of classical education models, whether it's classical charter schools or hybrid schools that run on a classical educational philosophy and unschooling. And so, you know, I'll often say, I hope that I can persuade people to recognize the benefits of unschooling and self-directed education and, and pursue that path. But I'm really foremost concerned about this plethora of education options that families can choose from and figure out what's right for them and their children and, and, and go from there. [Speaker 2] (54:10 - 54:16) Awesome. All right. We know you're, you're limited for time here. So do you have a final message for our audience that you'd like to share? [Speaker 1] (54:17 - 54:54) You know, I just think it's been a remarkable couple of years of educational transformation. I don't think we're ever going to go back to the way things were before. And I think that's a good thing. I think parents are re-empowered. Parents and teachers are exiting conventional schools to either find or build schooling alternatives or other kinds of innovative education models like learning pods and microschools and hybrid schools and virtual learning options and all kinds of homeschool and unschooled collaboratives. And so it's a really exciting time again, to be a parent, an educator, and an entrepreneur. [Speaker 2] (54:55 - 55:16) Absolutely incredible. Yeah. I love your book about a quarter of the way through, but it reads, it reads beautifully. And I really appreciate the input that you've had in this subject. I highly recommend everyone to go out there and get it as well. Anyone that's on this path. Is there anything else you'd like to share? How can people find you? What do you have coming up? Stuff like that. [Speaker 1] (55:17 - 55:45) Yeah. So people can listen to my podcast, Liberated Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts or go to LiberatedPodcast.com. You can follow my writing at FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE.org slash Kerry, K-E-R-R-Y. There you'll see links to my articles and to my book, to my social media accounts. And you can find me on Twitter at Kerry underscore E-D-U. [Speaker 2] (55:46 - 55:52) Beautiful. Kerry, thanks heaps for your time guys. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Really appreciate it. Thanks. [Speaker 1] (55:52 - 55:53) Thanks so much.