Getting an Education, Living a Life – August 24, 2009
Recently, someone tried to talk me out of using the term “life learning”
and encouraged me to “support” use of the term “radical unschooling.”
And that, he said, is because most people only understand education in
terms of schooling, so “unschooling” is a good first step to get them to
think more broadly about ways to get an education. He quoted
author
James Marcus Bach who says he doesn’t oppose schooling, he opposes “schoolism:”
the belief that schooling is the only way, or the best way, to obtain
education.
While I certainly agree that school is not the only or
best way to obtain an education, that is not what I – nor, I
suspect, many who call themselves “radical unschoolers” – mean when we
discuss the lifestyle we are living with our families. Using a term like
unschooling seems to support the notion that one needs to get an
education, but just not at a school. And that once the education has
been acquired, life and that odd phrase “making a living” can
proceed. The dictionary meaning of the word education involves a process
of drawing out an individual’s latent potential, inferring that an
education is done to a learner by an educator.
When I use the term
“life learning,”
I’m referring to all
the types of needs-based learning that happen continuously throughout
one’s life – from birth (or even pre-birth) to death. Some of that
learning will be what we call “academic” in nature, some not. Some of
that learning will involve life skills such as walking and talking,
building a house, growing a garden, and caring for a loved one. Some of
it will involve those moments of insight that help us continue to fine
tune ourselves as compassionate, emotionally well balanced human beings.
Compartmentalizing and differentiating among various types of knowledge
and when and how they are learned is encouraged by those who commodify
education. Some bits of knowledge are deemed important enough to be
taught in schools (or obtained by other educative means) and measured
and tested; others aren’t. When we talk about getting an
education or becoming educated – in school or otherwise – we are
talking about a certain, externally ordained set of facts called academics – reading, writing, chemistry and history, as
opposed to another set that involves things like gardening, plumbing, bicycle repair or playing the harp. In
fact, the latter bits are scorned in academic circles, considered frills
at best and, at worst, a place to relegate kids who can’t or won’t do
(the more important) academics.
Unschooling – even the radical sort – is about obtaining
an education; life learning is about living a life and learning what one
needs along the way.
Posted:
2009/08/24 12:31PM
