Living Joyfully

Helping parents cultivate a thriving unschooling lifestyle in their family.

  • Start Here
  • Deschooling
  • Unschooling
  • Parenting
  • About
  • Contact
  • Podcast
    • Q&A Episodes
    • Ten Questions Episodes
    • Interviews I’ve done …
    • TUC Talks
  • Books
    • Book Clubs
  • Network
  • Summit
  • Questions?
  • Articles
    • Spanish Translations
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Philosophy / Unschooling and Critical Thinking

Unschooling and Critical Thinking

April 25, 2017 By Pam Laricchia 2 Comments

unschooling and critical thinking blog postNOTE: This is excerpted from my introduction to the podcast episode, Unschooling and Technology, but I think it stands nicely in its own as well. 🙂

~~~

Readers may have noticed over the many years I’ve been writing and talking about unschooling that I’m not big on sharing studies. There are a few reasons for that.

One reason is that data can be sliced and diced and presented in many different ways to support whatever we want to say. This one is near and dear to my heart because, at one point in my former career, I was a data analyst and I dug deep into data to try to answer questions—I even ran a data warehousing project for a while. I know how thin the thread can be that ties data and conclusions together. Case in point, there are many studies that support both sides of the technology issue: ones that say tech use should be limited and others that say there aren’t any negative effects; studies that say violence in entertainment increases aggression and other that say there is no effect.

That said, it can be interesting to read studies—to think about the group being studied, how it was conducted, what they concluded and why. Not as “the answer” but as more information to incorporate into our worldview. For example, it’s very rare that a study is done on a group of unschooling children. And we know that unschooling children—children free to make real choices every day—often behave differently compared to their conventionally schooled and parented peers, so to take the results of conventional studies at face value is already suspect.

It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, from Carol Black:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.”

The children in these studies are conventionally parented and schooled children. There IS a logic to what they see in those studies. Yet it’s a logic that often does not apply to unschooled children’s lives. Experienced unschooling parents are sharing what life with children looks like in the open ocean. Not the tank.

Another reason is that sharing studies implicitly endorses our cultural tendency to value quantitative data—numbers and statistics—over qualitative data—thoughts and motivations. That studies with numbers to “prove” their conclusions hold more value than those based on personal experiences. I bought into that bias for many years, consoling myself with the understanding that unschooling parents very rightly avoid measuring and testing their children. And then I came across something Brené Brown, a qualitative researcher, shared in her book, Rising Strong. It’s a quote from an editorial written by Ann Hartman, in Social Work:

“This editor takes the position that there are many truths and there are many ways of knowing. Each discovery contributes to our knowledge, and each way of knowing deepens our understanding and adds another dimension to our view of the world. … For example, large-scale studies of trends in marriage today furnish helpful information about a rapidly changing social institution. But getting inside one marriage, as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, richly displays the complexities of one marriage, leading us to new insights about the pain, the joys, the expectations, the disappointments, the intimacy, and the ultimate aloneness in relationships. Both the scientific and the artistic methods provide us with ways of knowing.”

Brown went on to explain that, “today I proudly call myself a researcher-storyteller because I believe the most useful knowledge about human behaviour is based on people’s lived experiences.” That was an aha moment for me. Our stories ARE valuable—sharing our experiences adds meaningfully to the collection of knowledge around human behaviour—specifically children’s behaviour. And that’s important. So now I’m even less inclined to share the quantitative studies that pass through my days.

And yet another reason is that I don’t want to perpetuate our reliance on “experts”—I think it prolongs our inability to think for ourselves. So many of us have learned through our own conventional school experience that what we think is irrelevant—it’s what the experts think that matters. So our first step when an issue arises is to look around for an expert to tell us “the answer.” But, as we’ve realized looking back at our school careers, being given an answer—even if it’s the “right” one—does not necessarily lead to understanding. It’s the different between content and context.

That brings to mind another one of my favourite quotes. It’s from Maria Popova, the creator of brainpickings.org. She wrote:

“We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two. We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true — more and more information without the proper context and interpretation only muddles our understanding of the world rather than enriching it.”

This so concisely distinguishes between schooling and unschooling. At school, learning is all about remembering those pieces of information so you can put them on the test, end of story. In contrast, unschooling parents value the context and connections that surround a piece of information, and cultivate a learning environment for their children where the why and the how are just as important as the what. Again, tank and ocean.

As parents embracing unschooling, it’s so important to develop the ability to think critically for ourselves—to analyze the context, not just the content. To ask ourselves, “Is this true for us?” Just as we examined the beliefs handed to us around learning and academics and chose unschooling as our family’s learning lifestyle, it’s important to take that same critical journey through the conventional messages we’re being given surrounding technology. Around ANY issue over which we find ourselves conflicted.

“Is this true for us?” And then, trust yourself—even if what you see unfolding in your unschooling lives flies in the face of what conventional “experts” are saying. Or chances are you’ll be thrown for a loop every time a new article or study purports to support the conventional messages. Or, as it’s been referred to in unschooling circles, “periodic unschooling panic disorder.”

That’s why I personally shy away from the term “expert” and use the term “experienced” instead. I enjoy sharing my family’s unschooling experience with anyone who is curious to learn more. I’m happy to share my unschooling perspective on things. Yet at the same time, I want to encourage you to think for yourself. Don’t take my experience at face value and try to shoe-horn it into your lives. Your context—your family—is different than mine, so while the principles stay the same, what it looks like day-to-day may be different. But what I hope is that you use the experiences and information shared by me and many others on the podcast to widen your lens and help you see new possibilities.

And to help with that, consider the concept of beginner’s mind. Zenkei Blanche Hartman describes it as a mind “that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgements and prejudices. Beginner’s mind is just present to explore and observe and see ‘things as-it-is.’” She thinks of it as “the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement.”

We only need to look at our unschooling kids as a wonderful example of beginner’s mind in action. 🙂

Filed Under: Philosophy, Unschooling Tagged With: deschooling, learning, life

Comments

  1. Susan says

    May 2, 2017 at 8:04 am

    Excellent, Pam! And very needed. Thanks.

    Reply
    • Pam Laricchia says

      May 4, 2017 at 2:35 pm

      Thanks, Susan! 🙂

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The Living Joyfully Network community

The Living Joyfully Network

The Living Joyfully Network is an online community for parents worldwide to explore unschooling with other like-minded parents who are also choosing to embrace lifelong learning and develop strong and connected relationships with their children. We invite you to join our candid and wide-ranging conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling!

Learn more about the Network here!

free intro to unschooling ebook

Click the book cover to get the book from your favourite online retailer, or click the link below to join my mailing list and download the book directly!

What is Unschooling? A book about living and learning without school.

Exploring Unschooling Podcast

click to listen to the archive of all Exploring Unschooling podcast episodes

Choosing to live and learn without school isn’t as intimidating as you might imagine!

The podcast archive is now home to more than 300 episodes, filled with unschooling goodness.

support the podcast on Patreon

Have you read my books?

Free-to-Learn-Cover Free-to-Live-Cover Life-Through-the-Lens-of-Unschooling-Cover Living-Joyfully-with-Unschooling-Box-Set-Cover The Unschooling Journey Libre d'Apprendre cover Libre para Aprender cover Szabadon Tanulni cover

Journey with us to a new way of seeing your child

icon-logo

Join Anne Ohman, Anna Brown, and I in our online Summit where we share the experiences, insights, and tools that we found most helpful on our unschooling journeys. We will walk with you from where you are now, to where you want to be.

Looking for something?

I've been exploring unschooling for many years now and there's a lot of content here! I've been working to tag things to help you more easily find information about the questions you're curious about right now. I'll continue to work on this.

Click a topic to explore:

college

dads

deschooling

food

grown unschoolers

learning

life

math

reading

relationships

relatives

technology

teens

work

Welcome to Living Joyfully

Pam ... an online resource for parents who are curious about unschooling. If you're passionate about exploring the world with your children, this site is for you. I'm Pam Laricchia, the author and owner of this site. Thanks for inviting me along on your unschooling journey!

The Living Joyfully Network

The Living Joyfully Network is an online community for parents worldwide to explore unschooling with other like-minded parents who are also choosing to embrace lifelong learning and develop strong and connected relationships with their children.

Learn more and join us here!

SEARCH LIVING JOYFULLY

Living Joyfully participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the iTunes Affiliate Program. This allows me to earn a small commission, at no cost to you. I appreciate your support!

Read my Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Copyright © 2023 · Living Joyfully Enterprises

By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies. I use cookies to provide you with a great experience and to help my website run effectively. OK READ MORE
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT