think my pronunciation of scientific
words is not as well as it as it could
be it’s otherwise known as a Texas horny
toad now Texas horny toads are really
cool one thing that these guys do is
that they’re swallowed by a snake they
can actually inflate their bodies Lodge
themselves in the throat of the snake
until they get coughed up so they can
run and hide under a rock and live to be
caught by a snake on another day a less
well-known fact about these little guys
but equally interesting at least to me
is that they’re distantly related to
dragons and equally difficult to catch
now how do I know this I know this
because when I was 9 years old
I wanted nothing more in the whole world
than to catch a Texas horny toad put it
in a box under my bed otherwise known as
a horny toad habitat having been
carefully pre-prepared named it Frankie
and keep it forever at that point in my
life I’d spent approximately seven
thousand five hundred and forty-eight
hours running through the desert hunting
the Texas horny toad now that’s
approximately the same number of hours
seven thousand five hundred and
forty-eight that most kids will spend in
the classroom before the age of ten so
what was I doing with that much time on
my hand eight to ten hours every day to
sort of run through the desert
unsupervised I and my five younger
siblings were being unschooled by my
mother a teacher and also a social
anarchist with a penchant for the
unstructured we were being unschooled
now really quick what is unschooling
because everybody’s heard of crazy home
schoolers most of us have heard of
Montessori schools Waldorf schools
charter schools music schools and art
schools
unschooling is the idea that if you
create an environment in which people
can learn they will the role of the
educator in
schooled situation is simply to give
people space and as pat for anga an
author home school and unschooling
advocate an educator once stated
unschooling is parents giving kids as
much freedom to explore on their own as
those parents can comfortably bear
according to wikipedia unschooling is
the chruch is as we all know the source
of all information in the world although
there’s a gender bias there that we
might need to work on noonim
unschooling is the creation of an
environment where the people being
educated decide what to learn and how to
go about learning it that means within a
nun schooling space the goal is not to
sort of prescribe what happens at what
level but to be ready to offer resources
time and opportunity for kids or adults
because unschooling shouldn’t end when
you turn 18 who are ready to learn sort
of the next best step most of my
childhood was filled with museum visits
if we decided we were into dinosaurs all
of a sudden our house was full of books
on dinosaurs if everybody wanted to know
what happened to the last Romanov
princess then my poor mom had to sit
through a bunch of history on Russian
literature and the Revolution which is
something that she did very willingly
according to Ken Robinson his TED talk
schools kill creativity the answer for
education today is not to standardized
education but to personalize and
customize it to the needs of each child
and community there is no alternative
and there never was but now that we’ve
defined unschooling just a little bit
what happens to kids who grow up in
unschooling environments I wrote some
stats on my hands because I’m really
really bad at remembering stats but
first before the stats i’ve got some
anecdotes so I told you I have five
younger siblings which is a fairly large
family by sort of British standards
there’s six of us and I’d like to say
that we turned out more or less okay I’m
doing a PhD here at Cambridge I’ve got a
brother who’s a filmmaker and wedding
videographer another one who’s worked at
startups as a software engineer his
entire career my sisters or one of them
is still in university education
she’s just 21 another one is a
professional structural fire fighter and
another is a music teacher and
songwriter I like to think we’ve sort of
done okay for ourselves
but I also know that I’m in a room full
of people who potentially include
researchers educators yourselves
academics or people like me who are sort
of want to be academics kind of someday
maybe and anecdotes are not necessarily
good enough on their own so today if you
go to the United States about ten
percent of kids are being homeschooled
that’s about one point seven seven
million kids give or take of that less
than 1/2 of 1% are being unschooled when
I was unschooled in the late 1980s in
the early 1990s it was less than
one-half of one percent of kids who were
being homeschooled then were being
unschooled so my mother and educators
like her were very much striking out
into the dark they had ideas about what
education should be but they didn’t
necessarily know how it was going to
turn out they were taking a pretty big
risk and embracing a pretty big
challenge today Peter Gray who’s a
researcher at Boston University has been
able to go back and look at some
outcomes for some unschooled kids he
identified 75 people between the ages of
21 and 45 who were unschooled as kids
and who were living in the Boston
Greater Metro area today and he found
some really interesting things he
discovered that 83% of that cohort had
been able to have complete some level of
university education most of them had
started university education at the ages
of 15 or 16 as the resources available
to them at home had dwindled in
comparison to what they wanted to learn
and they needed to branch out to sort of
get into the fields that they were
really fascinated by 80% of those people
worked in creative fields there were
people who are looking for challenges
things that they could do that would
always have them sort of on the edge of
what was upcoming and what was next more
than 40% of them worked in STEM fields
at some point in their career and 50% of
them were entrepreneurs of some kind
having started a business or
not-for-profit at some point in their
professional lives and a hundred percent
of them said that they would seek out
creative and meaningful work over
ambition driven her salary driven work
because what fulfilled them was the
ability to create creative environments
and solve problems not just for
themselves but also for the people that
they worked with
so just a backpedal a little bit I know
I’m in a room full of people who were
educated by good teachers in good
schools doing the best that they could
to give people really good education
my mom is today a teacher working with
special-needs kids in Western Oregon
she’s taken her her penchant for
educating us and sort of continued her
career as her kids have gotten to a
point where we don’t necessarily need
somebody to tell us is it time to sort
of get up and look for something
interesting and I’m not saying that
education or schools are bad I’m just
saying that it’s an old system from an
old world and we’re facing new kinds of
challenges structured education the way
that we think of it today where you go
to a classroom and it’s compulsory to be
there five days a week more or less
eight hours a day
first started around 1788 in Prussia
schools had been around for about a
hundred years before that but within the
first century after compulsory education
becoming legalized almost all schools in
Europe and across the United States
education was compulsory at least
through the grade school level and this
was a really good idea people were
facing changes that they had never faced
before the Industrial Revolution had
made the world a different place in
people’s families were used to rural
farming populations were moving into
cities factories were transforming the
way that people lived the way that they
worked the way that they purchased
things the way that they thought about
the world and railroads had taken an
enormous world and made it tiny we
needed to take an illiterate population
make them literate we needed to give
people tools to grapple with problems
that they had never grappled with before
and structured education was how we did
that
and it worked really really well but
2088 is not 1789 and the challenges that
we’re facing today are really different
in nature than the challenges that we
used to face we have climate change
global warming massive inequality we’re
thinking about gender and identity in
ways that we’ve never thought about them
before and the Internet means that
everything moves incredibly quickly we
need to teach people how to be learning
every single day of their lives not just
a particular skill set that will carry
them through their lives and unschooling
or not schools or Sudbury model schools
which are set up like on schooling
except in sort of traditional school
environments
our ways to give people opportunities to
think and to learn that might be a
little bit better suited to a new world
than the tools that we’ve been using in
traditional educational models and it’s
also an opportunity to give teachers a
chance to engage with students on a more
one-on-one basis and to think about
those educational spaces in ways that
aren’t exhausting draining or that push
them out of the profession now if we
look at what on school or what
unschooling can do and what unschoolers
become we need people who can think
outside of the box who can continue to
learn their entire adult lives and who
will follow each new obsession to
wherever it takes them and I might have
grown up outside of a classroom chasing
horny toads through the desert spending
every single hour of every single day
thinking about one little tiny thing at
a time but I never hated learning and I
never hated the idea of school once I
started it because for me
as for many unschoolers the world is a
giant classroom and every day is an
opportunity to learn something new about
a place that is never static and I think
that’s the kind of gift that we need to
start giving the next generation thank you