Book Review: Unschooling Rules
Unschooling Rules is a book organized around what the author deems as the Seven Cs (Curricula, Content, Coaching, Customization, Community, Credit, and [Day]Care) of Education. It has 55 mini-chapters that detail his research for the best practices that should be adopted by homeschoolers and unschoolers.
The book is a straight-to-the-point short read. I keep one in my library as a reference book. I would highly recommend reading it to understand the reasoning behind many of these ideas. For those of who firmly believe that the traditional education system must change, many of these ideas make a lot of sense. For others, many of these may seem radical.
Below are the 55 chapter titles. While not always, the chapter titles typically summarize what to expect from the chapter (though I highly recommend reading the book, especially if you want to learn more about any of these in particular).
Curricula
Learn to be; Learn to do; Learn to know
Focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic
Learn something because you need it or because you love it
Twenty-five critical skills are seldom taught, tested, or graded in high school
Don’t worry about preparing students for jobs from an Agatha Christie novel
Avoid the academic false dichotomy of “The Cultural Literacy Track” or “The Vocational Track”
Content
Throughout life, everyone unschools most of the time
What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom
Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful
Animals are better than books about animals
Use microcosms as much as possible in learning programs
Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests
Include meaningful work
Create and use periods of reflection
Embrace all technologies
Listen while doing
One computer + one spreadsheet software program = math curricula
Have a well-stocked library
Read what normal people read
Is it better to be “A Great Reader” than “Addicted to Computer Games”?
Formally learn only what is reinforced during the next 14 days (you will forget everything else anyway)
Build more, consume less
Coaching
Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership
Expose more, teach less
Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor
The ideal class size isn’t thirty, or even fifteen, but more like five
One traditional school day includes less than 3 hours of formal instruction and practice, which you can cover in 2
Homework helps school systems, not students
Every day, adults are role models of learning (whether or not they want to be)
Avoid the Stockholm syndrome
Schools are designed to create both winners and losers
Customization
In education, customization is important like air is important
There is no one answer to how to educate a child. There may not be any answers
Be what schools pretend to be, not what schools are
Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are
Feed passions and embrace excellence
Children learn unevenly, even backwards
Five subjects a day? Really?
Maturing solves a lot of problems
Community
Socialize your children. Just don’t use schools to do it
Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea
Minimize “the drop-off”
Increase exposure to non-authority figure adults
Credit
Tests don’t work. Get over it. Move on.
The future is portfolios, not transcripts
Keep a focused journal
Use technology as assessment
College: the hardest no-win decision your family may ever make
[Day] Care
Outdoors beats indoors
Walk a lot
Under-schedule to take advantage of the richness of life
Parents care more than any institution about their children
Children should be raised by people who love them
Conclusion
The only sustainable answer to the global education challenge is a diversity of approaches