Often when people hear a mention of non\u2011school education, a picture of it will straight away pop into their mind.<\/p>\n
For example,<\/p>\n
- \n
- children doing a workbook sat at a table in their house, or<\/li>\n
- young people doing random stuff and never taking any exams, or<\/li>\n
- a poor lonely child who has no friends, because obviously school is the only place you can make friends ;-)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I realised that sometimes, the imagined picture of non\u2011school education is a kind of “opposite of school”. But home ed isn’t necessarily “the opposite of school”! Different families all customise how they do it, to suit themselves.<\/p>\n
It got me thinking about the many aspects of learning which can vary, and how some of the variables tend to get lumped together even though they didn’t necessarily have to.<\/p>\n
![\"Aspects](\"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/AspectsOfLearningTitle.png\")
<\/p>\nPossible variables<\/h2>\n
These factors are all different variables:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Where<\/strong> you’re learning: in a school, on a course, at an event or rehearsal or meetup, out in woodland, on a train, in your home.<\/li>\n
- What<\/strong> you’re learning.<\/li>\n
- How<\/strong> you’re learning, in practical terms: e.g. listening versus reading versus watching versus trying things out.<\/li>\n
- To what extent your learning is intrinsically motivated<\/strong> (the reward is enjoyment or satisfaction, directly from doing the thing or mastering the new skills) versus extrinsically motivated<\/strong> (the reward is status, approval, a formal qualification, etc).<\/li>\n
- To what extent someone else<\/strong> is helping, teaching or coaching you as you go along.<\/li>\n
- To what extent the learning is pre-structured<\/strong> (e.g. following through a textbook, taking a class), versus to what extent you’re following your own curiosity and potentially changing direction as you go along.<\/li>\n
- To what extent you’re learning alongside others<\/strong>, or in a team<\/strong>, versus by yourself and at your own pace.<\/li>\n
- If it’s intentional learning (as distinct from things like “playing with Lego and thereby implicitly learning maths”): to what extent you’ve “taken ownership<\/strong>” of your own learning. By that, I mean something like: understanding your own processes, and knowing what helps you, and planning to do those things to meet your own goals.<\/li>\n
- Whether the learning is outwardly visible\/measurable<\/strong> to someone else, e.g. because you wrote something down or made something or talked about it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
And I’m not saying I’ve definitely listed all the possible variables there, either :-)<\/p>\n
The chunks, links and traditions of school<\/h2>\n
School links several of these variables together in a particular way: partly because of tradition, and partly because of the practical challenges inherent to managing the learning of multiple people in a class. For example, school education tends to be quite pre\u2011structured<\/strong>, and the teachers want your learning to be visible in some way (often written)<\/strong> so that they can assess it.<\/p>\n
In a sense, school presents a “package<\/strong>” of some of these variables – take it or leave it.<\/p>\n
However, some<\/em> of these factors still remain highly variable<\/strong> within school. For example, you can be in school fully having taken ownership<\/strong> of your learning – or you can be in school passively doing what you’re told<\/strong>, regardless of whether it helps you to learn anything or not.<\/p>\n
Options, not necessarily opposites<\/h2>\n
On the other hand, learning outside<\/em> of school doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve gone to the “opposite direction”<\/strong> on every variable which school packages together.<\/p>\n
Being outside of school does help to make wider options available<\/em>. A classic example is that home ed typically offers more scope to learn by doing<\/strong>: cooking, making art or music or practical things, going places, plenty of time for sports. (A lot of “home education” is not actually at home. In that respect, it’s a misleading name.)<\/p>\n
Or if a young person likes watching videos<\/strong>, these days they can learn enormous amounts (including a lot of what would be in a typical school curriculum) at their own pace, by finding videos about it.<\/p>\n
But at the same time, the people outside of school do also have access<\/strong> to most or all of the traditional “schooly” ways of learning<\/strong>. For example, young people might still do a course<\/strong> or use a workbook<\/strong> or find a teacher<\/strong>, if resources allow.<\/p>\n
(Nowadays, there are quite a lot of educators who put together packages and classes for non-school children: for example, there might be a small group all doing a science GCSE together.)<\/p>\n
Choices from within<\/h2>\n
For a lot of non\u2011school families, one of the most valuable advantages of being out of school is the chance for the young person to move towards autonomous learning<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
The more you go in that direction, the more it’s a cultural shift which extends beyond what’s usually thought of as “education”.<\/p>\n
Most home ed families go some way in that direction and not all the way: often, the parent does have a plan for what they’ll tell the child to learn, at least part<\/em> of the time.<\/p>\n
But even far far down the autonomous end of the spectrum, it isn’t that autonomous learners never take courses or use workbooks<\/em> or whatever. It’s that an autonomous learner will only continue with that path while it still seems to them<\/em> a good thing to be doing<\/strong>. The agenda doesn’t come from outside.<\/p>\n
In fact, autonomous learners can perfectly well choose to go to school: some do. (And it’s worth noting that young people who go into school by their own choice<\/em> tend to have a very different relationship with being in school, compared with the ones who were either coerced to be there, or simply never offered the choice.)<\/p>\n
Depending on the attitudes of the parents, and how much the parents have questioned schooly assumptions, a young person outside of school might also have the freedom not to pre\u2011plan<\/strong> what they’re going to learn next. And they may have lots of time and space to do learning which isn’t necessarily visible<\/strong> at the time to anyone else – though someone who knows them well probably has some sense of it.<\/p>\n
Bonus note on the risk of bad laws<\/h2>\n
Not pre\u2011planning<\/strong>, and not necessarily making oneself measurable<\/strong>, are two of the jewels of non\u2011school education which government regulations are in danger of crushing. The government “wants” home ed to be continually measurable and repeatedly measured: in the name of making sure children are getting “a good education”, but also because they simply don’t understand why the freedom to learn freely is valuable<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thinking about how school education compares with non\u2011school education (a.k.a. “home\u00a0ed”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,19,43,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autonomous-learning","category-education","category-law","category-non-school-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2403"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2836,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403\/revisions\/2836"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- What<\/strong> you’re learning.<\/li>\n
- Where<\/strong> you’re learning: in a school, on a course, at an event or rehearsal or meetup, out in woodland, on a train, in your home.<\/li>\n