A major topic the past few days on Facebook has been the latest episode of WifeSwap on ABC in which an radically unschooling family is featured. I have a few thoughts about this and I thought I'd write them here.
First of all, I have a friend that was on the show before and we have watched several episodes of it before, so I knew what was going to happen. I wasn't shocked and I knew it would be heavily edited for sensationalism. That is what the show is about, isn't it? Everyone I know is fully aware that what you see on these types of shows is as far from reality as humanly possible and if they put reality on tv no one would watch it. But why is that? Why are we not interested in seeing another way of life and learning from it? Why does "reality" not sell? Personally, I'd love to see more real reality instead of what the producers call reality. I'd like to see that Amish family and how they live day to day. I'd like to see how a family in the deep south and working parents deals with getting their kids to school. I'd like to see how a family in Korea does the laundry and entertains friends. That would be entertaining to me, but apparently not to the rest of the country.
This episode specifically was upsetting to me because one of the families is living a similar lifestyle to our family and I feel like it was wholly misrepresented. Don't get me wrong. I don't think that family misrepresented the unschooling ways. I think the producers deliberately misrepresented the unschooling lifestyle all together. And they did the same thing to the other family as well.
They showed the "mainstream" lifestyle family as well ordered and well behaved. And they showed the "alternative" lifestyle as wild and unruly. I can bet that anyone's family on any given day could be portrayed either way. They won't show how the alternative family decides what time to go to bed, or why they are allowed to play on the trampoline at 1am. And they don't show the grudging way the kids in the mainstream family do their assigned chores.
I'll go into one detail of an unschooling life that they mentioned and made a big deal about. Rules. "There are no rules.", they kept saying. Of course there are rules, but they are based on principles and discussed with equal input from all family members in a radically unschooling family. "We need to respect our housemates need for sleep, so we are quiet or in bed by 9pm because Dad needs to be up early to work." is a principle. "You go to bed at 9pm" is a rule. It's arbitrary and can be changed at any time. I'd say that is a problem. If you teach kids to only follow rules given from an authority and not the principles behind those rules, as adults they do the same thing and the authority can change those rules as they see fit. It doesn't work out well in a free society. That's how we lose our freedoms.
And what does this "radically unschooling" stuff mean anyway? Unschooling basically means that we let our children decide what they want to learn and when. That sounds crazy, I know. I still don't fully understand it, but I read a lot, I discuss ideas with others trying this lifestyle, and I learn new ideas and ways of doing things every day. It's a long and drawn out process that hinges on trusting that children have an innate desire to learn new things. We trust that they will be the best human they can be and we don't attempt to mold them into the person we want them to be. To us, the school system is insane. The idea that you can give a child all the information they will need to pass on to the next level is strange. You can't possibly know what information you will need ten years from now. But we can instill a love of lifelong learning in our kids by never making the learning process dull. The best way to make it dull is for the subject to have no interest for you. We wait until that interest arises and then give them the tools they will need to learn. It's extremely complex and can't be summed up in a 45 minutes tv show, mostly because it is different for every family, as it should be.
Radical unschooling is moving beyond education and into an entire lifestyle. It's treating children as full fledged members of the human race the minute they are born. It's making every attempt to live together in peace. It's not always peaceful. It's not always pleasant. But we feel we are learning right along with our kids and by the time they are adults, maybe they will have a better grasp on this whole cooperation thing than we do. I know many adults that were raised this way and they are awesome people. Again, it's not something you can spit out and explain. It's like trying to explain Christianity to someone who's never heard of it. It just sounds wacky when you try!
First of all, I have a friend that was on the show before and we have watched several episodes of it before, so I knew what was going to happen. I wasn't shocked and I knew it would be heavily edited for sensationalism. That is what the show is about, isn't it? Everyone I know is fully aware that what you see on these types of shows is as far from reality as humanly possible and if they put reality on tv no one would watch it. But why is that? Why are we not interested in seeing another way of life and learning from it? Why does "reality" not sell? Personally, I'd love to see more real reality instead of what the producers call reality. I'd like to see that Amish family and how they live day to day. I'd like to see how a family in the deep south and working parents deals with getting their kids to school. I'd like to see how a family in Korea does the laundry and entertains friends. That would be entertaining to me, but apparently not to the rest of the country.
This episode specifically was upsetting to me because one of the families is living a similar lifestyle to our family and I feel like it was wholly misrepresented. Don't get me wrong. I don't think that family misrepresented the unschooling ways. I think the producers deliberately misrepresented the unschooling lifestyle all together. And they did the same thing to the other family as well.
They showed the "mainstream" lifestyle family as well ordered and well behaved. And they showed the "alternative" lifestyle as wild and unruly. I can bet that anyone's family on any given day could be portrayed either way. They won't show how the alternative family decides what time to go to bed, or why they are allowed to play on the trampoline at 1am. And they don't show the grudging way the kids in the mainstream family do their assigned chores.
I'll go into one detail of an unschooling life that they mentioned and made a big deal about. Rules. "There are no rules.", they kept saying. Of course there are rules, but they are based on principles and discussed with equal input from all family members in a radically unschooling family. "We need to respect our housemates need for sleep, so we are quiet or in bed by 9pm because Dad needs to be up early to work." is a principle. "You go to bed at 9pm" is a rule. It's arbitrary and can be changed at any time. I'd say that is a problem. If you teach kids to only follow rules given from an authority and not the principles behind those rules, as adults they do the same thing and the authority can change those rules as they see fit. It doesn't work out well in a free society. That's how we lose our freedoms.
And what does this "radically unschooling" stuff mean anyway? Unschooling basically means that we let our children decide what they want to learn and when. That sounds crazy, I know. I still don't fully understand it, but I read a lot, I discuss ideas with others trying this lifestyle, and I learn new ideas and ways of doing things every day. It's a long and drawn out process that hinges on trusting that children have an innate desire to learn new things. We trust that they will be the best human they can be and we don't attempt to mold them into the person we want them to be. To us, the school system is insane. The idea that you can give a child all the information they will need to pass on to the next level is strange. You can't possibly know what information you will need ten years from now. But we can instill a love of lifelong learning in our kids by never making the learning process dull. The best way to make it dull is for the subject to have no interest for you. We wait until that interest arises and then give them the tools they will need to learn. It's extremely complex and can't be summed up in a 45 minutes tv show, mostly because it is different for every family, as it should be.
Radical unschooling is moving beyond education and into an entire lifestyle. It's treating children as full fledged members of the human race the minute they are born. It's making every attempt to live together in peace. It's not always peaceful. It's not always pleasant. But we feel we are learning right along with our kids and by the time they are adults, maybe they will have a better grasp on this whole cooperation thing than we do. I know many adults that were raised this way and they are awesome people. Again, it's not something you can spit out and explain. It's like trying to explain Christianity to someone who's never heard of it. It just sounds wacky when you try!
