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    How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials
    How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials
    How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials

    By Patrick Farenga

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    About this ebook

    Writing a report about doing school at home is easier in many ways than writing one about unschooling, since you will have many of the conventional products of schooling to share with school officials, such as tests, worksheets, and commonly used textbooks. Unschooling often doesn’t produce such products, so if your state requires you to submit a periodic evaluation you might need to explain your children’s growth and development in more depth to readers who do not understand unschooling. This book shows you how to do this successfully.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHoltGWS LLC
    Release dateSep 30, 2015
    ISBN9780985400231
    How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials
    Author

    Patrick Farenga

    Patrick Farenga is a writer and education activist who worked closely with the late author and teacher John Holt and continues his work today as the president of HoltGWS LLC. After Holt died, Pat published Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) from 1985 until it stopped in 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about learning without going to school, started by Holt in 1977. Unschooling is a word Holt preferred over homeschooling, since the learning Holt encouraged didn’t have to take place at home nor resemble school techniques and materials. The Farengas unschooled their daughters, now aged 27, 24, and 21. Pat speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world, as well as on commercial radio and television talk shows. His media appearances include The Today Show, Good Morning America, Voice of America, Geraldo, NPR’s Learning Matters, CNN’s Parenting Today, The Dr. Drew Pinsky Show, and Fox and Friends. Pat co-authored Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus), The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling, many articles about homeschooling and democratic education and essays about unschooling in a number of publications, such as Un Mundo Por Aprender (University of Colombia, Bogota, 2011), and the entries about homeschooling for the International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition (Elsevier, 2010) and the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (2012). His most recent work includes reprinting Holt’s Escape From Children: The Needs and Rights of Children (HoltGWS, 2013) and a forthcoming original title, The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Trusted, and Respected Children (HoltGWS, 2013).

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      Book preview

      How to Report Unschooling to School Offficials - Patrick Farenga

      How To Report Unschooling to School Officials

      How To Report Unschooling to School Officials

      Patrick Farenga

      Copyright 2015 by Patrick Farenga

      Excerpts from Teach Your Own and Growing Without Schooling are used with the author’s permission.

      Printed in the United States of America

      HoltGWS LLC, 13 Hume Avenue, Medford, MA 02155

      ISBN-10: 0-9854002-3-4 (eBook)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-9854002-3-1 (eBook)

      ISBN-10: 0-9854002-2-6 (Print)

      ISBN-13: 978-0-9854002-2-4 (Print)

      There’s an old story about two men on a train. One of them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said, Those sheep have been sheared. The other looked a moment longer, and then said, They seem to be—on this side. It is in such a cautious spirit that we should say whatever we have to say about the working of the mind.

      —John Holt, How Children Learn

      Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. —Albert Einstein

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Unschooling and the Schools

      Curricula

      Recordkeeping

      Evaluations

      Protect Unschooling from Intrusive Education Practices

      Educationese

      Online Examples of Unschooling Reports Accepted by Schools

      Appendix 1

      Appendix 2

      Appendix 3

      Introduction

      Writing a report about doing school at home is easier in many ways than writing one about unschooling, since you will have many of the conventional products of schooling to share with school officials, such as tests, worksheets, and commonly used textbooks. Unschooling often doesn’t produce such products, so if your state requires you to submit a periodic evaluation (and not all states require this, so check your local homeschooling laws or regulations) you might need to explain your children’s growth and development in more depth to readers who do not understand unschooling. This book will help you do this, but I don’t want you to get uptight about reporting to school officials, so I’ll outline the basic steps here so you can see it isn’t as complicated as you might think.

      1. Collect and review your journals, notes, documents, videos, photos, and other records of your children’s education efforts for the year. If none exist, create an after-the-fact curriculum, where you and your children look back over your year and recreate on paper what you did. Remember as unschoolers our philosophy is, as John Holt wrote, we are learning all the time—everything your child does counts as learning. For purposes of reporting to school, unschooling means learning without following any school’s curriculum. Unschoolers use real-life experiences to grow and learn, using school methods as needed, if at all.

      2. With your child, discuss what to report to the school that you think best represents their efforts for the year. You should have some evidence to back up your report if the school decides it needs to better understand what you are doing (written work, photos of projects and team efforts, recommendations from other adults your children study or work with, and so on).

      3. Write in plain English the things your child did during the year and put them into broad subject categories that mesh with your educational plans. I think it is a good idea to state that unschooling is your educational philosophy at the beginning of the report to contextualize your children’s learning. This helps if your child is below school’s grade level for their age—such as a child who learns to read at an older age than they do in school (typically 9 years old in most U.S. public schools)—this is due to unschooling and not educational neglect.

      You don’t need to dress up common events into school jargon unless you think it will help you communicate better with the school (educationese gets discussed at length later in this booklet). In fact, I recommend giving the school only what it needs to determine if sufficient educational progress has occurred and no more. Some people feel they need to prove their seriousness as educators by closely detailing their efforts in their reports, but this isn’t necessary. First, doing so can backfire and cause the school to pressure other parents to provide more details than the law asks because Mr. Jones has no problem telling us how much algebra he made his children do. Second, the schools do not usually read these reports closely; they want the paperwork primarily for their files and regulatory

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