I thought it was appropriate to follow up yesterday’s discussion launched by my thoughts about trying to sort out a few of the societal issues around homeschooling, and whether it is an appropriate educational path for some kids.

Confessing again my position up front, I gravitate to the educational path of “unschooling”, where the learner sets their own curriculum and works at their own pace, generally outside of a formal educational setting. But I have come to the conclusion that “unschooling” is not for everyone. The truth as I see it, and this seems to be something that a lot of people have trouble grasping, is that no one educational path, even the conventional instructional academic school, is for everyone.

From my experience as a kid growing up and more recently as a parent, there is no substitute for an internally motivated learner. A person who has decided for themselves that they really want to learn something is going to absorb and retain so much more than a person who is required to study something or is otherwise externally motivated by a grade or a test score. The well-known former teacher and unschooling advocate, John Holt, said that when it comes to externally motivated students, the good ones are distinguished by the fact that they forget the material after the test, rather than before.

That said, there can be plenty of internally motivated learners in a conventional instructional school environment. I think it is the kind of student that most teachers long to have, a student who is there because they have a real gut interest in the curriculum and not just playing the game to get the grade and move on to the next hurdle.

But if that same classroom environment contains kids who don’t want to be there, it can easily turn the learning environment into something quite different, an effort focused on conveying the minimum required material to the most possible (even unmotivated) students, a far different dynamic.

So what I think an education system should be all about is designing or at least facilitating a range of educational “paths” that leverage internally motivated learning wherever possible. That system should include conventional instructional schools for kids who really want that instruction to achieve their learning goals. It should also feature truly alternative schools that are more holistic and/or more learner-driven and thus less instructional in their pedagogy. Finally learning outside of a school environment, at home or in some real-world work or community organization environment should be encouraged and facilitated. This way, with profoundly different educational paths, there is more chance that the natural learning motivation of the person, a kid for example, is encouraged and leveraged, rather than possibly quashed by being forced into an educational environment where external motivations need to be resorted to.

And I would like to see the approach to instructional schools change as well. Rather than forcing a kid to sit through the social science class they are not interested in at this moment (though they might be next year) so they can take the advanced algebra that they are aching to learn, run high school and even middle school more like community college, and allow the student to pick and choose when they are going to participate in an instructional class.

I believe we are wasting so many of our human resources, forcing talented teachers to teach unmotivated students and forcing motivated students to be in educational environments that are not right for them or taking classes they are not currently motivated to take (rather than learning what they are burning to learn). I would venture that a full fifty percent of our teacher talent and nascent student talent is wasted or never developed in our education system that features external carrots and sticks as the main motivator rather than leveraging internal motivation.

My own daughter Emma was in instructional school environments through middle school, and had bought into the whole external motivation thing, seeming to focus on doing what she needed to do to get a good grade, as if school were a video game where the main goal was “leveling up” and getting accolades from the adult school staff for doing so. After a year of high school that seemed totally focused on teaching to the test and helping students “level up” at all costs, Emma finally decided she had had enough.

What really did her in was that Emma had specifically researched and picked this public school program, which was billed as a “Digital Arts” magnet, because she wanted to immerse herself in that subject and discipline. But it turned out to be more like a “bait and switch”, and she ended up having no opportunity to actually be involved in the production of digital art in any of her classes, having only one survey art class where they at least had one unit where they talked about this subject that was consuming her passion at the moment.

The icing on the disappointing cake was being required to take a geometry class that turned into a hellish year-long slog to keep from failing. The class was full of kids who were failing the subject and hated being there. The poor teacher was doing damage control rather than inspiring internally motivated math geeks to pursue their interest. Emma might even have gotten into that if the class could have been set in the context of computer modeling, but the teacher confided with me at an open house that there was so much required material to cover with his unmotivated students that there was no time to try and make this body of knowledge relevant.

Emma managed to pass that geometry class with a very painfully earned C-, but she ended the year totally unmotivated to go back in the fall. So her mom and I, having done our research about alternatives to conventional school, offered her the option of homeschooling, and she decided to pursue this very different educational path.

Her mom and I decided to let Emma “unschool” and essentially design her own curriculum based on her internal motivation. What she has pursued, finally looking to her own compass and charting her own course, is basically the arts plus learning the restaurant business. She is writing fiction and continues to study painting, piano and guitar. She continues to pursue learning French, but always in non-classroom environments, including eight weeks at a French language immersion school in Montreal. She makes good money waiting table and managing at a small woman-owned bakery restaurant business. It is her pay-the-bills backup to pursuing her interest in the arts.

But what is most important is the change in her approach to her life. She is no longer jumping through hoops that other people have set for her. She is waking up each morning with the expectation that she has to chart her own course and she is happy to do so. She asks for help and advice when she thinks she needs it but is not being constantly supervised and evaluated. She has turning into a highly functional, poised and well-spoken young adult.