 Schools out indefinitely as parents across America attempt to juggle their work schedules with taking care of their children full-time it's putting enormous stress on families. Kerry McDonald an education researcher and author of unschooled raising curious well-educated children outside the conventional classroom says that it's also an opportunity to rethink how we teach our children. McDonald who also homeschools her own four kids recommends that parents experiment with radical unschooling which proposes that kids learn better when they direct their own education. I chatted with her about strategies for struggling parents and why she thinks that this crisis could finally move society from the industrial to the imagination. Kerry thank you very much for chatting with me today. Oh thanks for inviting me Zach great to be with you. First I know there are a lot of parents out there who are under a lot of stress the kids are there they might be working from home and having to juggle that with parenting responsibilities they might be on leave or out of work so I just want to be clear from the top that these are not exactly the ideal conditions for giving homeschooling its first shot but sometimes necessities of the mother of invention. Well this is a really trying time for all of us we're all experiencing something that we've never experienced before it's incredibly stressful you point out you know we parents and kids working and learning alongside together alongside each other in interruptions that might come with that the you know stress of lots of screen time for children and the effects that that might have on family life and just the overall uncertainty and fear that brings us to this point and also the fact that parents might have lost jobs or not sure if they have jobs to go back to when this all ends so it's an incredibly difficult time for everyone and you're absolutely right that this is nothing like authentic homeschooling you know traditional homeschoolers and unschoolers would tell you that this is just as difficult for us as it is for everyone else because we are so separated from our communities I mean the one thing that you find a lot of the kind of modern homeschoolers experiencing is being immersed in the people places and things of our communities it's not the stereotype of sitting around a kitchen table all day isolated from the other outer world it's really this authentic socialization in our communities and of course all of us are cut off from that experience right now so I hope that people are not turned off by homeschooling by this experience that again is nothing like what they would encounter in a genuine homeschooling experience but I do think it can give some glimpses into what learning without schooling might look like a lot of closed down schools have been sending homework home and day you know sometimes daily emails out to parents trying to keep students on track as much as possible I have very young kids who are in preschool and even they're getting stuff sent like every day but what's your advice in terms of trying to you know keep up with the curriculum during this time according to the economist about a billion students around the world are out of school due to COVID-19 so this is something that we're all contending with of life without school at the moment and different schools and different school districts are managing this process differently so in some cases young people have a specific curriculum that they must follow that the school has sent home that maybe they're logging on virtually from you know eight to three every day and it's very much like a typical school day except at home I think we're also seeing though in many cases any work that's being sent home is being considered or for enrichment purposes only the Wall Street Journal had an article about this recently saying that in some major districts education officials can't guarantee that all students have equitable access to technology or connectivity and as a result of that they can't mandate any of this work so you know we're seeing schools and districts deal with this different extent that parents have some flexibility the extent that any work that is being sent home is optional or won't count toward grades or testing or advancement I think it's a great opportunity for families to disconnect from schooling and see what it might be like to learn without that sort of standardized curriculum and that expectation that we see from a standard classroom what has the shift been like for you someone who already homeschools but obviously you're you're much more constricted at this point right so I'm located in Massachusetts and in Boston Cambridge area and so we spend most of our time outside of our homes taking classes in the community going to the library going to museums gathering with friends going to the park and playgrounds all sorts of things that of course we're not able to do and so our lives have changed in very much the same way that everyone's lives have changed now again being isolated at home disconnected from from friends disconnected from our daily routines so but what I can say that I do think that homeschooling and the process of living and learning alongside children is something that families can begin to get a glimpse of now in a way that they may not otherwise have had that opportunity to really get to know their kids a little bit more what are some of their interests what are some of their curiosities and again and to the extent that families are able to move away from a standardized curriculum or maybe just spend a couple of hours a day on whatever the school has sent home leaving all kinds of unstructured time with their children this may be a wonderful opportunity for children's natural creativity and curiosity to reemerge right I mean young children are incredibly enthusiastic about learning right they're always asking questions you said you have young children they are just full of energy and excitement for discovery and then what happens so often is they enter a standard schooling situation and they learn conformity and obedience and compliance to a curriculum and so those natural drives for learning can sometimes be turned off and this is this incredible moment to potentially turn those drives for learning back on and to see for example a reluctant reader all of a sudden be really interested in reading because you're giving that child the freedom to read whatever he or she is interested in or maybe you're reading together as a family in ways that you hadn't had a chance to before when all of us were on the go and we had so many activities in our own lives so this could be a really great opportunity for families to get gathered and gather and connect in ways that they otherwise wouldn't the worry that I often hear is well they're just going to sit around and play video games or look at their phone all day is that how do you get around that or do you just like let them do that or are they eventually going to get bored and do something else what's your advice with regards to screen time and just being a couch potato well I think there's two responses to that there's the immediate response of what we're all experiencing currently where technology is frankly a lifeline for parents and children alike and so I think you know it's understandable that parents have concerns around technology under typical circumstances I think you know often just like sugar sometimes parents might see the negative impact of too much screen time on their children but I do think that because we're in such extraordinary circumstances right now we should loosen some of those limits just because it's again a way of connecting with the outside world and not worry so much about it I think that'll also take some of the stress off of parents who may be wearing oh my goodness my my child is watching so much tv or is always on on the tech on technology while I'm trying to do calls or I'm trying to get my work done and because this is such a stressful situation for parents and children children are just as stressed and they're seeing the stress that parents have loosening a little bit on those technology limits and not feeling so bad about technology at least in these early weeks of this I think is really going to take the pressure off of families and be a relief the upside of the technology that I've noticed is just being able to you know the the social isolation is obviously a big problem for everyone and being able to face time with parents and even you know friends and our preschool has been doing zoom and meetups where they do show and tell which has been fun for them I mean what are some of the ways that you've seen or recommend technology actually be leveraged you know for positive at this moment everything that you've said I think we're seeing these ways of virtual connection through zoom and google hangouts older kids are playing Minecraft video games through a multiplayer world where you know they're interacting with their friends or they have face time with their friends while they're playing the video game there's another game called prodigy math which is free and it's a wonderful math software it's often used in the schools as well and that's another multiplayer kind of video game world so there are these ways that kids can connect I've seen also you know google docs some of the the materials being sent home from schools are being put onto google docs worksheets and assignments but you'll find too that the kids when they're able to collaborate with their friends and their classmates might start using google docs to develop a story together or a script together so there are these wonderful ways to leverage technology right now and make up for that lost physical connection that we're all feeling I think the other reason why we should loosen some of the limits that we might have typically had on technology at this point is because there are so many resources free resources now available to us organizations that typically would charge for their services many of them are offering these free this free content it's just really incredible you have 2,500 museums around the world with virtual tours you have symphony orchestras that are streaming their performances and then you know other learning tools like Khan Academy of course has always been free online videos for kids they have more resources for families even companies like varsity tutors which is an online tutoring platform that you would typically pay for are offering their services for free so there's this is just a unique opportunity to be exposed to content and experiences that we may otherwise not have had a chance to a lot of parents might be just worried that if especially if we're talking about high school kids that they're going to start just falling behind in whatever subjects they're they're currently studying how concerning is that for you and is there any way to you know combat that if we're going to be losing possibly several months of time I think there's a lot of talk about what's being lost what is what learning isn't occurring and I would like to flip that a little say what learning will occur I mean this experience is a defining moment for all of us but particularly for our children's childhood and their lifetime this will be something that they will look back on and that will really shape their future and their perspectives so there is an incredible amount of learning for them over the next several weeks or months and I think that we should acknowledge just how much they will learn and that these new perspectives they will gain and the one story that I have found fascinating that's come out of this pandemic is the story of Isaac Newton who in 1665 was a young college student in England and all the colleges shut down due to the bubonic plague that hit London and all of the college students had to go back to their homes just like is happening now of course uh what we're experiencing and Isaac Newton was one of those college students went back to his childhood home and it would be called his year of wonders when he was away from professors and curriculum and his typical assignments is when he invented calculus and discovered gravity and came up with his theory of optics because he had this freedom to explore and to learn and to discover and I think that could be a model for us as difficult as this is this could be an incredibly productive period for both parents and children it could really unleash some creativity if we allow young people to separate from a schooling mindset so yeah this the schooling mindset is really what you go after in your book that you're trying to separate the idea of learning from formal schooling and that brings us to the topic of what's become known as unschooling and it's an it's an educational philosophy that began to pick up steam in the 80s as a spouse by an educator named John Holt. School is a place where children learn to be stupid and the process that makes them stupid at least stupid in school is other people trying to control their learning. That's John Holt who's the intellectual godfather of the modern homeschooling movement. In a sense he's the moral leader of a movement in this country on the part of a significant number of American families to take their kids out of school and teach them at home. There's a common perception that homeschoolers are social conservatives who want to shield their children from the modern world. It's good for the child to get out of the home get away from mom and dad and and talk to other people because when they become adults they've got that problem. But Holt had a different view of the dangers of schooling. In his 10 books Holt argued that children were capable of self-directed learning possessing a natural curiosity that's quashed by modern schools. They treat them like empty receptacles into which they are going to pour whatever learning they think they ought to have. One such example is the Houston Sudbury School. Based on the Sudbury Valley school model pioneered in Massachusetts in 1968 students here who range in age from six to 17 play and learn with each other attend optional lessons in various subjects and each have an equal vote on how the school is run and money allocated. So what are the insights from the unschooling philosophy that you think are most applicable to our current situation? He defined unschooling as taking children out of school. It has since evolved I think to be more associated with this idea of self-directed education. So if we think of typical homeschooling some homeschooling families might replicate school at home and so all that's really changing in terms of education is the location. And unschoolers or those who sort of focus more on the self-directed education philosophy would say that schooling is one method of education regardless of if it takes place in a school or some other location. But there's other ways to be educated and in allowing people to set their own path to focus on their own interests and passions so much learning will occur. And of course as I say in my book and I repeat frequently it's a parent's responsibility to ensure that their children are highly literate and numerate that they're well educated. And I think that that's true whether your children are in school or out of school. But I think there are ways that we can facilitate those that strong education and these curious individuals by allowing for a non-coercive learning environment that stimulates their interests and passions and reveals their gifts. The person who wrote the introduction to your book Peter Gray is a psychologist who studied this kind of self-directed learning when he observed the original Sudbury school. And that the Sudbury school which we referenced one in the previous clip it basically allows kids not only to make their own curriculum but kind of democratically come up with the rules of the school itself. Could you give us some highlights of whatever research is actually out there about self-directed learning and what kind of results we see whether whether or not it actually works just for parents who are worried about you know kind of unleashing their kids and really no learning of any sort happening. I think it's important to note that even under the umbrella term of unschooling there is a wide assortment of approaches and different ways that families tackle self-directed education. So and I and I highlight the Houston Sudbury school in my unschooled book as well as a variety of other self-directed learning centers, unschooling families, unschooling alumni and you see this diversity of practice and approaches. I think the the underlying focus though is on this sense of having learning be not non-coercive. So really focusing on freedom over force and encouraging individual gifts to emerge within our children. So some of the research and you're right to point out Peter Gray who's just such a wonderful advocate for self-directed education and unschooling has done some fantastic research in this area. One of the surveys that he and the colleague did on grown unschoolers found that grown unschoolers had no trouble getting into college should they choose. Many of them took community college classes during their teenage years and did fine and took the SATs and did fine and then were able to enter college, did fine, were able to adapt effectively to college and career. But I thought one of the most interesting findings from this particular survey of grown unschoolers was that more than half of individuals surveyed jobs that were entrepreneurial and tied to interests that emerged during childhood or adolescence. So the sense of encouraging personal agency creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit can really be cultivated through unschooling. The pandemic right now it's causing a lot of people to question things about the world I think and their assumptions. Some people have the sense that a lot of things are going to be permanently changed after this much in the same way 9-11 shifted the paradigm in many areas of our lives. Is that a sense you have when it comes to how we view education in America? Will this permanently shake things up in some fundamental way or is this really kind of a blip? Look many families are going to be delighted to get back to their typical routines of work and school. I think all of us will be very glad when this is over and we can return to a sense of normalcy. But I would be very surprised if we don't see an optic in families choosing homeschooling or virtual learning or some other kind of alternative to school. I'm already seeing this. A neighbor of mine for instance just said when I asked at a six foot distance how's it going and she said oh my child is just flourishing. She's writing stories. She's reading books. She's devouring math. And I said you know gee maybe you'll continue this out. She said we're really going to consider this. I think that's going to be the case for some families especially families that have been intrigued by the idea of homeschooling or an alternative to school. This is their moment to give it a shot. And they may find again their kids are calmer. They're happier. They're more curious. They're doing interesting things. They're learning amazing things without schooling which will be I think revealing for the parents and they'll want to continue that. And I so I really think we're on the brink of a real education reset in the same way that Hurricane Katrina caused a huge education shift in New Orleans after the hurricane in 2005. And Terry Moe from Stanford University wrote a book recently called The Politics of Institutional Reform where he spotlighted how Hurricane Katrina led to a nearly all charter school district in New Orleans that really couldn't have happened had it not been for that level of a natural disaster to break up some bureaucracies and cause some real institutional shifts. Speaking of charter schools I wonder like whether or not homeschooling per se takes off like is this the self-directed learning approach is there any hope of getting that incorporated a bit more into school like traditional schools or charter schools or I believe John Holt uh himself believed that was not a possibility which is why he advocated homeschooling but where do you follow on that do you think it's just kind of impossible to reform the schools in this way and homeschooling is the only path forward if you want a more self-directed approach or are there ways to implement some of this in the broader system well as I was writing my book I was very hopeful for an experiment just outside of Boston near me in Somerville, Massachusetts what was to be a fully self-directed high school district school but not a charter school and it was really aiming to incorporate these unschooling principles the founder was influenced by John Holt and Ivana Ilich definitely believed in this idea of allowing emergent learning to occur and not having it be a top-down process it was it was this dream school if we were to imagine anything that was to happen in a public school looking like unschooling this was it in fact they won a 10 million dollar grant from the xq super schools innovative school fund because the idea was so exciting and promising and everything was set up they had superintendent support they had teachers union support the community was really excited about it and as my book went to print they were set to open this past fall of of 2019 and in March so just like a month or two before my book came out last year the school committee unanimously decided not to approve the opening of the school and it was just a shock and npr wrote a big piece about it the Boston Globe because it was really set up in so many ways to be this one experiment to see if self-directed learning could happen in school with everything going for it and then to have it to have it paused in that way or halted really was just heartbreaking and the main reason was the sense that because not everyone could participate in the school then no one could yeah that's uh that doesn't bode well uh the i mean the the biggest because the biggest hurdle i see like for homeschooling honestly is that when you have two working parents it seems difficult if not impossible and like dual income households seem to have been holding steady for a couple decades now around 60 percent um it almost seems like homes like for homeschooling or unschooling to really take off people would need to adopt a whole different mindset which you do discuss a little bit in your book um is there anything that leads you to believe that a new mindset is emerging or forthcoming i think families are finding that they can adopt homeschooling and unschooling and continue to be two working parents or single parents for example even just again this experiment with digital learning families will realize that they don't have to be the ones sitting down and teaching their children that there are these incredible resources available that can educate their children like Khan Academy can can manage a child's math education or my older daughter takes Korean classes and it's a Korean tutor who she's working with i don't know Korean so as a parent we're just connecting our children to available resources i think another trend that we're seeing is the hybrid homeschooling models um where a young person might go to a learning center or a micro school for a couple of days a week or even potentially full-time but are registered as homeschoolers so so homeschooling really becomes the legal lever to put parents back in charge of their child's education and allow for this freedom and flexibility that wouldn't be possible with typical public or private schools so there's much more flexibility there again around hybrid homeschooling networks of low-cost in-home micro schools like the Prenda Micro School Network coming out of Arizona in some cases for that one there it's tied to virtual charter schools and education savings accounts these other kinds of school choice mechanisms that can allow for some more education innovation experimentation so i think we're going to see much more of that i think after families have a taste of a different kind of education they're going to demand more education choice they're going to want more options and hopefully will also encourage more education entrepreneurship to build these new models it's interesting because uh yeah you're kind of changing the way that i've thought about homeschooling a little bit in terms of you imagine the parents more as the teacher and what you're sketching out here the parent is kind of just shepherding the child towards different areas of interest or education options which makes sense because not everyone is a good teacher you're kind of questioning the fundamentals of the current education system and i feel like to really understand why those need questioning it helps to understand why it is the way in the first place and again your your book does delve into this and you zero in on Horace Mann and the Prussian model it's kind of the the starting point what was going on back in the early 19th century that laid the foundation for what we have today well i think it's it's even further back than that so if we go back to the 1640s not long after the pilgrims landed in what was then Massachusetts Bay colony they established the colony's first compulsory education law that said that the state had an interest in educated citizenry but the compulsion was on towns city and cities and towns of certain sizes would have to hire a teacher and or open and operate a grammar school so it was the town that was required by the state to provide education resources for those families that wanted them but it was not the parents who were required to send their children there and in fact homeschooling was of course the default the expectation was that parents would be the ones educating their children but they weren't always the ones doing that education even then there were game schools which were like these little nursery schools in your neighbor's kitchen to teach young kids the three hours and let their mom you know get things done around the house there were apprenticeship programs there were tutors that would come and offer guidance so an array of different education approaches and of course public and private schools were also available this all changes in 1852 when Horace Mann and his colleagues become the architects of of compulsory schooling and so for the first time parents are compelled to send their children to school under a legal threat of force and that was a huge sea change from what education was previously and you're absolutely right that it was these education reformers in the mid-19th century who were fascinated by the Prussian model of education that focused on obedience and compliance and orderliness and and coercion really to to build a solid group of factory workers that would help you know build the the industrial revolution really and that was exciting to a lot of these reformers this was also a time of mass immigration particularly in massachusetts a lot of irish catholic immigrants pouring into the streets of boston in particular which threatens the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethos of the time and so common schools these compulsory schools that were created were really designed to Americanize these immigrants and to to teach them what it was like to live an appropriate life in in the united states so they were purportedly secular but they had the king james bible they had Protestant teachers and they really had a specific worldview that a lot of families including Catholics rejected and actually went off and created their own network of Catholic schools to get away from that that sort of system systemized methods of education yeah and i mean an interesting fact i picked up from your book was that man actually homeschooled his own kids so the kind of rigid it was like rigid compulsory schooling for me but not for the uh i feel like we still see that dynamic at play sometimes in the education debate we do i think that that hypocrisy of well this is for other people's children but not for my children or you know i will continue to exercise choice for my kids but we have to make sure that everyone else is forced into a government system of mass schooling that is the is the piece that i think is is we really need to call out that's the most frustrating and the really the most pernicious so if the motivation or i guess the effect of the horseman prussian approach was to kind of prepare workers for this industrial base that then would fuel the industrial revolution we're now in a different era but this this model still persists to some degree you call it in your book you say that a lot of people talk about the information age which is called the imagination age what does that mean to you why you think we're in the imagination age what does that mean for schooling and what does that mean you know for the future right so i didn't coin the term the imagination age i go through uh some of its evolution in the book it's often called the innovation era but it's basically um you know the next stage after the industrial revolution right and even in some ways past the information age where human creativity and imagination are what really are going to separate us from robots and yet we have a system of compulsory mass schooling from the 19th century that is very um efficient at creating what are essentially robotic humans you go through these this orderly process and you tick all the boxes and then you come out all shiny and learned at the end and i think what we're seeing is that through that process often uh those essential human qualities of creativity and curiosity and inventiveness and an entrepreneurial spirit can be crushed or at least dulled and yet those are the human qualities that are so critical as we as we coexist with robots you know what separates humans from robots it is these essential human qualities around human imagination that will um create the the next great inventions and hopefully enable us to prevent or better deal with some of these global crises like we're currently experiencing and i mean as this global crisis kind of belatedly kicks off the 21st century here what do you see as a realistic path towards improving the way american kids get educated moving forward once the dust settles from the pandemic yes i think again and families will see a different way of learning they will um hopefully among all of the stress and tension that they're experiencing at home will find those moments where they can connect with their children in ways they weren't able to before and see how much they really are able to learn when they're given the freedom to do that and again because we have these incredible digital resources for free right now to take advantage of i think parents will also see that it's really the technology that will make self-directed education or other education models more possible because of of the ways that technology provides us with all of these different resources and approaches so it's not just families feeling the pressure that they have to educate their children it's really seeing that that technology can can facilitate that and in some ways it's also looking at how we as adults learn whether it's now through this pandemic i mentioned isaac newton i'm devouring the biographies about isaac newton now and and watching you know documentaries about him but i think it's also recognizing again the way adults learn what how do we become interested in things and then what do we do to satisfy that curiosity and increasingly it's using digital technology to do that and i think it's just acknowledging that young people learn the same way they have those they have their own interests and their own passions and they'll be able to leverage technology as well and once we emerge from our social distancing back into our communities then we're connected with all those real resources as well that make learning that much more rewarding and impactful