Learning Through Unschooling | Callie Vandewiele | TEDxCambridgeUniversity

Texas horny toads are one of eight varieties of horned lizards that make their homes in the southwestern deserts of the United States and these guys can do something really cool when they're threatened they can inflate their bodies and lodge themselves in the throats of snakes thereby getting spit up and living to feel threatened another day and something equally cool about these little guys is that they are related to dragons now how do I know this I know this because when I was nine years old I was utterly obsessed with Texas horny toads I wanted nothing more than to catch one of these guys name it Frederick and keep it in a specially prepared shoe box otherwise known as a horny toad habitat under my bed forever now by that point in my life I'd spent approximately seven thousand five hundred and forty-eight hours hunting the elusive Texas horny toad or approximately the same number of hours that 7,500 and 48 hours that most kids living in the United States or Western Europe would have spent by the age of 10 sitting in a classroom becoming educated so why was I allowed to spend most of my childhood traipsing through the deserts looking for a lizard rather than getting an education it's because me and my five younger siblings were being unschooled so what do i what do I mean by unschooling education as you guys probably know is an incredibly hot topic right now everybody from activists to artists to academics even business leaders and educators are exploring what it means to learn stuff how do we go about doing it why do we do it what makes it effective to borrow a term from a university professor of mine back in undergrad education is one of those topics that makes up the zeitgeist in our breakfast cereal every single morning we've heard of Montessori schools art schools wilderness schools charter schools crazy home schoolers but where does unschooling fit into that whole conversation now I'm going to pull my definition from Wikipedia because Wikipedia is the source of all known knowledge in the universe as far as I can tell according to Wikipedia unschooling is the creation of an environment where the people being educated decide what to learn and how to go about learning it it's basically letting kids do what kids do best letting them learn and giving them the resources to go about learning in every way that they can this means that an unschooling education is an education that is absolutely personalized to every child that received that education now Ken Robinson whose TED talk schools kill creativity may have been the most watched TED talk of all time once stated that the answer is not to standardized education and you cheat it's sad but to personalize and customize those education to each child and that is the only solution and it always has been now unschooling allows us to customize education to each individual because whether that is an individual child at the end at that individual is a child a teenager or an adult their education is being driven by what they want to do and what they're interested in I learned biology because I wanted to know more about the desert I learned ecology because I was obsessed with horny toads it wasn't a traditional education nobody ever sat me down and said this is what an ecosystem looks like and if you fail this test next week you're bad I simply learned it because I wanted to that's a very scary environment for parents and educators to put themselves in and unschooling doesn't have to happen at home there are a lot of schools popping up across the United States and even in places like Delhi in India in Europe in Spain that are called not schools or open schools which are environments structured around a traditional educational setting a school where people go in the morning and spend all day learning and then come home in the afternoon except instead of going into classrooms they're basically buildings full of resources and educators so the students who show up at school can decide where they want to spend their day what kind of resources do they need access to do they want to work as a group do they want to work alone this provides people with the opportunity to give themselves their own education and it's not that unschooling isn't a lot of work for the educator because the educator always has to be on their toes they're working in tandem with the pupil to provide whatever it is that the pupil needs for whatever stage they're at Pat Varenka who's an unschooling advocate and an author who writes a lot about unschooling and open pation once stated that unschooling is the process of letting children learn in the world as much as their parents can bear so basically as much as you can stand somebody exploring the world around them and learning that way let them do it now that we've kind of talked a little bit about what unschooling is what happens to people who grow up in this unstructured environment when they grow up when they become adults now I like to think that it turned that it turns out pretty well because I've got a case study of me and my five younger siblings I like us as a group despite the neighbors referring to us repeatedly as little hooligans we've done okay I'm a PhD candidate here at the University of Cambridge I've got a brother who's a software design engineer one who's a filmmaker a sister who's a firefighter another who's in college and another who's an elementary school teacher our hobbies range from stand-up comedy to mountain climbing to marathon running to training horses we do okay but I get it this is this is a university and I love statistics as much as the next person trust me now this is kind of the first time we've been able to look at unschoolers from a statistical perspective today in the United States roughly three percent of people who are going through the education system in the u.s. are home-schooled of that about 10% or unschooled now back in the late 1980s in the early 1990s when my parents were unschooling us this was virtually unheard of open schools or not schools didn't exist so people exploring education in an unstructured or unschooling way we're doing it sort of hoping that the ideas that they had and the thought that they put into those ideas would pan out so my generation people coming up on thirty in the next couple of years or the first generation we can look at to see what actually happens to a population that is unschooled now Peter Gray who's a research professor at Boston College has done a study covering seventy-five people who were unschooled at least three years of their educational experience and what he found was absolutely astounding of these people 83% of them went on to pursue university education or higher eighty percent of those who were unschooled for their entire education work in the creative fields forty percent of people work in STEM fields or teach stem education and over 50 percent of people who are unschooled started their own not-for-profit or their own biz this at some point in their adult lives a hundred percent of these people stated to grade that they sought out creative and meaningful work / work that provided high financial remuneration none of the people in his study ended up working in the banking or finance industry just saying and most of them stated that one of the things that they found incredibly important about their work life was being able to contribute and give back to the communities that they lived these were people who are applying the same philosophy behind their education one of exploration to their adult lives they wanted to make the world a better place and make it a place where they wanted to live now I know I'm standing in a room full of people who are doing amazing things who probably all received very traditional education you went to good schools you had good teachers and in many cases it was that education that helped you get where you are today and I'm not saying that schools are bad or flawed I'm just saying that schools are an old tool traditional schools the way that we see them today that we're trying to apply in a new world and it was in 1788 in Prussia and I know there's some Americans out here so that's part of Germany today that we first saw its kind of what we would call modern at modern education like instituted as a mandatory part of life and within a century had become so successful and so popular that across Europe and the United States we had mandatory state provided education for most students now this was the heart of the Industrial Revolution everything in the world was changing the way people lived the way that they thought the way that they worked the way that they were creative and the way that they interacted with other people everything was changing overnight as industry absolutely revolutionized not just the way that people mechanized things or the way that people manufactured things but the way that they lived the rail system had opened up the world for travel communication was changing at a drastic rate and we needed an education system as a society that would prepare a generation of people to engage with the world in a whole new way to grapple problems that people had never grappled with before and to do it in an effective way and a quick way and the modern education system provided just that it turned an illiterate population into a literate population it gave people skill sets to allow them to work in a world that was different than the world of their parents and their grandparents and that would be different than the world that their children and their grandchildren lived in but that was 200 years ago and the skills provided by an education system designed in the 1780s isn't going to provide a generation living in the 2080s the skills and the tools that they need to survive and that they need to thrive the education system that we have today teaches people how to maintain and how to function but not necessarily how to change the world we let people graduate and give them an opportunity to relearn how to learn and engage in life when we we can give them the skills that they need to do that by the time they're 14 15 and 16 years old we have an in unschooling and open education examples of people whose education from a very young age prepare them to think creatively and since we're facing problems that nobody in the world has ever faced before a huge population mechanization and computers are changing the way that we deal with information and climate change is not only changing the way that we function in our lives but the way that the entire planet actually exists and it might be time to start thinking about giving the next generations an education that prepares them to think in creative ways to be unorthodox about the way they approach the world to look outside of the box to produce solutions for problems that we have never faced before because it's just possible that the best education is that we can provide the next generation are not those education that are given to us as we sit in rosing classrooms but those education that we seek out explore and find ourselves even if that exploration means spending hours and hours and hours chasing horny toads through the desert you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 77,185

Rating: 4.9281664 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Education, Achievement, Childhood, Children, Curiosity, Early education, Education reform, Learning, Life Development, Parenting, Personal education, Progress, Self improvement, Teaching, Youth

Id: FIm7dmEJKfM

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2015