Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories and on sunday but tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding comes from these Television Companies and more including comcast. Comcast is partnering with 1000 humidity centers to create wifi enabled list so students can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. Comcast along with these Television Companies supports cspan2 as a public service. We want to show you the cover of this new book on school its called,raising curious welleducated children outside the conventional classroom. And its written by kerry mcdonald. Ms. Mcdonald, before we get into the substance of the book tell us a little bit about yourself. Great to be with you peter i am a Senior Education fellow at the foundation for economic education. Celebrating our 75th Year Anniversary this year as the countrys oldest freemarket think tank, im also an adjunct scholar at the cato institute, a freelance life for and as you mentioned the author of unschooled which came out in 2019 in the spring of 2019but actually had quite a bit of renewed interest. Over the past year plus eagiving the School Shutdowns and the upsurge in interest in homeschooling and alternatives to schools particularly with again will shutdowns and delayed reopening plans. On a practical level have you been a teacher in a classroom or do you have children you are schoolage . So i am a homeschooling mom myself. I have four children whove never been schooled range in age from 7 to 14 so the book does type in some of that but from personal experience and reflection but i traveled the country in writing the book to visit other homeschooling families as well as selfdirected learning centers and other schooling alternatives that are really catered to families looking for Something Different, something more customized for their childrens education. Outside of the Traditional School environment. My background, my undergraduate degree is in economics and i went to graduate school in education policy at harvard and that was where i became interested in Education Choice and freedom alternatives to school and education entrepreneurship. Really entrepreneurs coming up with new learning models that dedicated 12 level and new ways to meet the demands the parentshad for Something Different for their kids. Carey, you say your childrenhave been homeschooled but have they been unschooled . Is there a difference westand mark. So the difference is that homeschooling and on schooling are of course both alternatives to school outside of a conventional classroom but with unschooling its selfdirected education. Including school and home methods from homeschooling some sort of the stereotypical version of homeschooling where you might have a parent sitting around the Kitchen Table with textbooks and sort of replicating school at home. I challenge that a little bit in this book and suggest that you dont need to replicate school at home even in homeschooling models but you can encourage Childrens National natural curiosity and creativity and as a parent really connect those interests and passions that your kids naturally have two available community resources. If People Places andthings around us. So how do you get to the basics of teaching math and reading literacy to children if an unschooled environment. So i make the point very clearly in the book that if every parents responsibly to make sure that their children are highly educated and i would argue that is true whether your children are in school or are not inschool. That parents need to make sure their kids are learning and being educated. And i think that on schooling because there is so much more Family Involvement in education because parents are tuned in to their childrens strengths and weaknesses and areas of interest is easier to again connect those resources and build upon the knowledge that children have ge their natural curiosity to discover. So i do go through the book talking about how to approach reading and math. Through that approach and its good to mention that theyre not anticurriculum or sort of the accoutrements of traditional learning, its just that the idea is that its selfdirected, its student directed as opposed to topdown. Youll find many unschooled children will gravitate to a subject, many end up taking many College Classes in the High School Years. In fact the survey done on a grown homeschooler by doctor peter gray who is a psychology professor at Boston College and an unschooling advocate, he and his colleague gina riley discovered most grown unschoolers did spend time during their High School Years taking community College Classes, often s getting an Associates Degree at the same age that there appears would be getting a High School Diploma and then the evil to enroll in a fouryear University Grant during those credits and saving quite a bit of money so its also optical approach for filling out with skyrocketing tuition rates at universities. It seems that the homeschool and the unschooled movements have grown exponentially in the last 20 years is that saying something about Public Education . Homeschooling has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades. Youre right. The first year the us to permanent education began acting on schoolers was 1998 e at the time they counted 850,000. That number soared to about 2 million, just under 2 million in 2016 and then over the past year of the School Shutdown since the pandemic began in march 2020 we seen a tripling of the homeschooling rates from that prepandemic level so that the Us Census Bureau released a report in february finding that now more than 11 percent of the overall k12 school age population is being homeschooled which isover 5 million students. Its this tremendous growth and one of the things the Us Census Bureau found in particular was that growth was being driven in large part by black homeschooling families. There was a fivefold increase me from march 2020 through the school year that just ended. Black homeschooling families now have over representation, 16 percent of the overall homeschool population identifies as black compared to 15 percent in the general k12 Public Schoolpopulation. Is that something a message about Public School . I think for this year for sure parents were really frustrated about delayed school reopening. Zoom district schooling was mnot meeting the needs of many students. And the parents felt like they could do things better r particularly once they got a glimpse at what their kids were learning or not learning in the classroom through remote schooling last spring so part of it is that. The overall growth over the past couple of decades has been really more of a desire to provide a more personalized customized education. In fact the Us Department of Education Data from 2012 and 2016 shows the number one reason parents are choosing to homeschool is a concern aboutthe environment of other schools including bullying , negative pressure, that sort of thing. And the number of two reason number two motivator was a desire for academicexcellence. I think that is somewhat of a reflection on the conventional School System but really a sense of parenting reempowered to o help guide their childrens education in learning and give them a more robust education that they cant get anywhere. Carey macdonald, in unschooled you use the term coercive schooling. Coercive schooling is this idea that we are compelling students to be in schools through compulsory schooling laws. As well as through these coercive measures, topdown measures that you will learn this subject at this time in this way with very little customization and in fact y really double down on the standardization of learning over the past couple of decades beginning with the passage of the no child left behind act in 2001 which i get into the unschooled book and thats accelerated over the pastcouple of decades. The New York Times came out with an indepth article on homeschooling a few years ago and they found him of the biggest rows in todays homeschooling families is happening in urban secular families are turned off this growing analyzation of schooling and common core curriculum framework and so on. Things like testing, push for academic standards at ever younger ages, expecting kindergartners tobe reading and all of that turned off a lot of parents. This idea of injecting education with more freedom and consent over coercion and conformity. Whats the role of technology in furthering homeschooled children . Now there are just so many online resources for homeschoolers and conventionally schoolchildren. We certainlyseen the reliance on technology over the past year. I think that its been certainly be the district level and Public Schools that have tried to implement Remote Learning in many cases there are incredible private learning Online Learning programs that homeschoolers continually rely on that i think other families are able to discover over the past year im thinking of something like, academy, the Nonprofit Organization that is the leader in online relearning videos, theyre known for their club. A lot of homeschoolers have been using them for years and more families discoverthem this year. Theres this liberation really of high quality Online Learning resources that make homeschooling and these other schooling alternatives more accessible to more families. You touched on this a little bit earlier but you talk about naturallearning, can you expand on ethat a little bit . The idea is that Young Children are naturally curious, exuberance, creative theyre always asking why. And really eager to explore and discover their world. And as i mentioned peter gray who was the forward to my book as he has so eloquently put these natural drives to learning and discovery dont automatically turn themselves off when a child turns 506. We turn them off with our e coercive schooling to the idea with unschooling and separating education from schooling, thinking about schooling is one method of education but certainly not the only one and arguably not the best one where for the realities of the 21st century the idea is to not shut off those natural drives for learning, discovery, creativity and curiosity and instead allow those tries to flourish. We think about the kind of needs the 21st century where we are increasingly competing and coexisting with robots and machines. What is it that distinguishes human intelligence from Artificial Intelligence and its things like creativity, curiosity, originality, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit and so often those are the qualities that get diminished coercive system of schooling. We sort of trade originality for obedience in schools. We trade creativity for conformity in schools and that really shuts off those natural human drives for discovery and learning. That are so critical nowmore than ever. Whats the downside to fund schooling. There is a true upside. I think this is a moment families are tdiscovering conventional schooling is not meeting their needs. Certainly havent met the needs of many families over the past year and now more orthan ever families are looking for alternatives to support forschool choice as sword over the past year. Parents have been put back in the driver side, the and reempower to take the reins of their childrens education and see other options. And there are so many education entrepreneurs, Online Learning programs. Unity resources that are there to get in and support these families looking for a different way to learn. Kerry mcdonald is the author usof this book unschooled, raising curious childrenoutside the classroom. Thank you for joining us on book tv. Great to be with you, thanks. Weekends are an intellectual piece, every saturday american is three tv documents americas stories and on sunday book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding comes from these Television Companies and more including charter to medications. Empowering opportunity in communities big and small charter is connecting us. Charter along with th
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.