Unschooling: making the world our classroom | Lainie Liberti & Miro Siegel | TEDxAmsterdamED

[Music] also a teenager so when Miro and I were asked to give this talk about education of course we said yes you see we've been practicing saying yes to everything and we do say yes to just about everything now you see it started in 2008 just before my mom and I left the States I was only 10 years old then but I remember it like it was yesterday my mom owned a small design agency and she worked a lot in fact I would tell her more often than she'd like to remember Mom you never spend any time with me you're always working I could tell that my words upset her but it was how I felt that year the California economy crashed and I could tell that my mom was worried about her business and I was with her in her office one night when she turned to me and said the most incredible thing Mell let let's get rid of everything let's go have an adventure let's live out of our backpacks let's head south and see where the road takes us and let's say yes to everything I looked at her and said emphatic yes and that was that that was the beginning of our paack to say yes to everything and it's become a lifestyle for us but saying yes to everything is not always the simplest path or the easiest way to grow up it comes with a lot of uncertainty and requires a lot of trust but my mom's a researcher so even though she's got that totally spontaneous side to her I know she always backs it up with a deep investigation so when my mom said yes to giving this Ted Talk she went to a frenzy researching and finally she said to me with Tean her eyes what could we possibly say about education in front of a group of Educators at a tedex education conference focused on education yes it's true after I told her to calm down and she finally did she turned to me and said we have to reframe the conversation we can't and won't talk about education we need to change the conversation from one about education to one about learning you see we have transformed ourselves into natural Learners and we do it through something we call World schooling so with every Adventure every place we go and every new experience we have the opportunity to learn something and for us learning has become very active it's interesting because before we left on our travels I had no doubt that one year of travel would be way more powerful than fifth grade I had no doubt my son would learn more than he could ever ever even think about in fifth grade in fact during that first year of travel it far exceeded my expectations we overcame so many things like fear how to trust ourselves and the world around us and how to negotiate everything in a foreign language actually what we were doing is we were discovering that we had new interests that were just blossoming through travel that first year we traveled through Mexico bise Costa Rica Nicaragua and Guatemala we both practice saying yes to everything oftentimes causing us to change plans and go in the opposite direction often we laugh about it but together we started to enjoy the freedom saying yes brought the uncertainty of never knowing and the adventures then just 8 months into our travels I turned my mom and I said let's continue doing this forever and she just smiled and looked at me and she knew exactly what I was up to and after all she was kind of obliged she just looked at me and said yes we talked like the night we talked in our office just before we left the states I was certainly excited about the prospect traveling the world living out of our backpacks having no permanent address nor the need to shower daily I love that I didn't need to put on clean clothes every morning or go to bed at a certain time I loved all the new things we were learning and all the adventures we were having but most of all I loved that I didn't have to go back to school so after saying yes to all of those things I realized that my job as a parent was to decide how I would educate my son so through my mad research and Google skills of course I discovered there was something called unschooling and it's a a way it's a philosophy of learning naturally uh from the world around you and living as if school doesn't exist yes we can do that unschooling encourages the learner to dive deep into their interests and we were already doing that so yes the role of the parent is to support and facilitate the learner yes and the parent and the child cocreate a partnership in life and in learning yes and the incredible part as I said is that we were already doing it and it was working in fact the first year I watched mroe absorb Spanish like a sponge where I could barely say the word graas without mispronouncing it I have never studied Spanish in seven years of living and traveling through Latin America I have never once opened a textbook or attended a formal language class but now I'm fluent near the beginning of our trip I would learn by playing football and connecting with the local kids But as time went on I began to learn naturally from all kinds of people around us from the people in the streets in restaurants on television I learned way more by listening to people than I ever could by reading from a book I studied their accents and speech and soon with the language and context to my experiences I was able to understand the people around us and they could understand me too in contrast my mom has had a rough time trying to learn Spanish and I guess making me the translator over the last seven years has also helped my language learning muan so one particular after afternoon during our first year of travel I began to take notice of all the natural learning that was happening just through travel I thought about one of our adventures where we Dove deep into a cave in bise we we went down one mile deep in this cave in bise through the uh Caverns it was amazing my mom can never remember or pronounce the name of the cave but it's called akun tun mnal which means the Cave of the the crystal sepulture so this is a place that National Geographic called the world's most secret cave and in fact our experiences were sacred too Miro and I swam very carefully and waited past the stalactites and stalagmites the scattering of pottery shards until we finally got to the main uh Arena the main area the thing that we came to see and it was a 2,000-year-old remains of a m sacrificial female her her bones completely um uh sparkled from the years of crystallization it was incredible and after that Adventure Miro and I went back to our hostel and we research we researched deeper into the mythology deeper into the history deeper into the archaeology not because we were told to do so but because we were so engaged in Lear learning in fact learning was so active for us now as I reflect I realized that never once had I challenged the idea of Education I always thought it was somebody else's responsibility to educate my son and in fact all I wanted for him was to become educated you know to me that's crazy I realize that through these travel experiences it was helping me change the conversation to one about education to one about learning now the only thing I want for my son is for him to grow into the passionate life learner he has become education looks like this for us developing critical thinking skills building a Global Perspective see this is important that's why it's written down becoming sensitive II to other World Views being inspired to take action and developing a deep love of learning so the content of what we're learning keeps changing but actually the learning Remains the Same and World schooling is the vehicle for us and it's working yeah although my mom never told me these were the things she wanted for me we live them they become a natural part of our daily lives and we've continued to practice saying yes as we travel and still do to this day in fact I would suspect that my mom and I have said yes far more times than the average human or resulting in so many deep learning experiences for example around 5 years ago we decided to get off the beaten path and travel to a small jungle Village in Colombia called San cypriano my mom had read about it and thought it'd be an interesting adventure and we had met a friend who' wanted to go and so we said yes sanano was very remote and the driver we hired to take us from Ki drove us to a small Road just outside of buen Ventura this is where we waited and met the driver of our next vehicle a motorcycle powered cart which was fitted to a set of active train tracks are you kidding me this was how we were getting there the driver told us that we'd be fine that trains rarely use the tracks anymore rarely was the key word here he told us but don't worry if we encounter a train the track should start to rumble and it should give us enough warning and if that happens we jump he showed us how to jump off the side of the the cart quickly and told us to hope and pray that we weren't on a bridge or over a river if that happened we loved our stay in s siano it was quaint and it was our home for the week we hired the son of the family we were staying with to be our guide as we ventured into the Nature Reserve each day we spent the mornings and afternoons hiking into the surrounding jungle visiting the waterfalls and tubing down rivers in the evenings we hung out with the local family that hosted us eating and sharing stories and laughing But as time went on we began to learn some things we didn't expect to learn there was a deep long-standing local conflict that was always Brewing just below the surface illegal gold miners were destroying the environment yet supplying work to a very impoverished Community for years those that opposed the mining and wanted to preserve the jungle were met only with violence and according to the family we were staying with the government completely stayed out of the issue we heard stories from both perspectives and soon realized that we were in the midst of a very complic ated cultural and environmental issue and that all we could do as Outsiders was to listen and empathize had I read of this issue in a book or a news article it would have always remained just somewhere out there but to me this experience is more real because it's someplace I've been some place I've experienced and some place I care about you know we have countless stories like this from the seven years of world schooling experiences deep epiphanies deep learning that took place in the biggest classroom available to us the world learning in context makes the lessons rich and the magic ingredient for us is connection but this journey hasn't been without its challenges um about four years ago mro turned 13 and he fell into a state of depression actually and we were invited to go back to the United States and speak about world schooling at an alternative education conference we received incredible feedback from our presentation and support for the learning but for us the single point of clarity was this was the first time Muro was actually able to connect with peers peers of teens that were unschooled that were self-directed Learners and we realized the point of clarity was that Community was important to him so what we did is we flew back to Peru we furiously started planning to make plans to bring a group of self-directed teenage Learners to Peru to learn the way that we had been learning through these immersive really deep powerful experiences and we started to facilitate our first temporary Learning Community for teens project World school was born the first year we hosted groups of teens in Peru we explored the ancient archaeological sites of Machu Picchu saak Oman and oant combo we cooked the flavors of the Andes learned how to play the zonia or the Peruvian pan flute participated in a traditional despacho ceremony with an andian elder and we even visited an indigenous family on their Farm in chinero to learn about weaving in addition to the explorations we do in the world the external world around us as a community we also explore the internal worlds too as a community we step outside of our comfort Zones look at our own relationships to learning uh challenge the ideas we once had about the world around us and challenge the fear that once dictated how we perceived that world all of this we do in community in fact over the last four years my mom and I have hosted immersive teen learning communities in different places around the world from Mexico's May Riviera to the Ecuadorian Coast to the Amazonian rainforest and of course Cusco and Machu Picchu Peru in the future we have our sites on bringing groups of teens and young adults to Argentina Chile Bolivia Guatemala Poland and Greece for Unique World schooling experiences we are working to change the conversation about education we are taking these experiences and encouraging a deep love of learning and we're looking at the world as the biggest classroom available to us and we invite you to do so also so thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 111,576

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Netherlands, Education, Education reform, Life, Schools, Travel

Id: bH-kQJ10WWo

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2016