(2009-04-29) Pollard Unschooling

In reaction to PsPirro's new book on UnSchooling, Dave Pollard relates his High School Independent Study experience. * I'd become friends with some members of the "clique" I had aspired to join, and discovered that, together, we could easily cover the Curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all. We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others' work). As the year progressed, the "keeners", to my amazement, found they were struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular structured classroom program. Now our independent study group was a remarkable group of non-conformists, whose marks - on tests we didn't attend classes for or study for - were so high that some wondered aloud if we were somehow cheating. My grades had climbed into the low 90% range, and this included English where such marks were rare - especially for someone whose grades had soared almost 30 points in a few months of "independent" study. The fact is that my peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do - inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved... And the independent study program, despite its extraordinary success, was not repeated in subsequent years. Part of the justification for the pilot program had been to free up teachers' time to spend with students who needed more individual attention; yet the dubious reason we were given for its cancellation was that "it was unfair to deprive the average students of the presence and example of the more outstanding students".*

Fred Wilson picks it up and has lots of comments as usual.