This post attempts to describe the nym, unschooled and what he represents.
Unschooling is a concept spanning the broad and ungainly field that we conventionally refer to as 'education,' which is divisive as it is antithetical to the conventional notions of schooling. It is not quite homeschooling; instead, unschooling is the process of allowing one to pursue their education according to a fluid and self-determined syllabus.
The schooling system where we send out children today is very fiat--in its undercurrent if not explicitly. It cranks out mostly uncritical citizens who are increasingly coddled by their teachers. The expectation is increasingly that the program ought to conform to the parents/learners desires. The list of things about which someone might dare tell them (heaven forbid it should be an administrator or other school authority) to 'suck-it-up-buttercup,' or 'cry me a river and get over it' is diminishing by the hour.
My thesis, and the first reason I chose my nym unschooled, is that the condition I described above is a perfect inversion of the way it ought to be. School is where you go to conform to a tradition involving culture, academia, music, sciences and the arts, not to demand these be changed, but to reaffirm day-in-and-day-out your willingness to let them change you.
School has to stay relevant by being resistant and the same goes for educators. I am not suggesting they be luddites, but instead that they be dogged in their preservation of conventional wisdom. Very simply put, students do not mark their own exams.
Instead, what tends to happen is the youth decide to rebel against the Man (i.e. the authority in institution), by protest or complaint on some political point, and the latter concede. Over time, this flexibility starts to corode at the values that the institution was founded on. This, I believe, is done increasingly so that they can continue to push a political agenda with the hopes of appeasing their donors or securing public sector funding, but in both cases the outcome is the same: the sterilization of culture for political gain, greed, and continued cultural and monetary debasement.
This is an unfortunate, carnivalesque, state for our institutions, as it reverses the roles one should expect. Instead of students looking to conform to the tradition and with it adopt the hard-fought values, of the institutions, boardmembers constantly look to the students asking, what can be done to satisfy their demands, or how can we better appease them.
I am not here to say that our schools ought to hang back with the brutes. There are certainly cases where we have gotten it quite wrong, and this does call for a tempered amount of revisionism. Plato wrote dialogically to express the ideas of Socrates, showing us that more can be achieved when ideas are engaged with by inquiring minds. What distinguishes our modern era from what is shown by the works of Plato is that, Socrates was willing to die for what he believed is true, and I'm quite sure you will not find a single administrator or board chair willing to do the same.
So why unschooled? Well, I think the conditions I've attempted to describe above are temporary. Crony politicking will market to whatever is trending, and what is trending inherently passes, leaving nothing behind but the cold truth. Schools, in their current forms, are a bastion of some of the worst ideas and so this blog is my journey to unschool myself. That, I'm some sense, is the project. I'm not actually sure how we get there but on this blog I attempt to explore some possibilities.