Unschooling: When Is An Outdoor Education Not An Education?

When I was a senior in high school, I took an aptitude test that indicated the occupation for which I was best suited was... forest ranger. I laughed and laughed. Forest ranger! What a ridiculous idea! Well, as you have probably gathered, time has proven that idea to be far less ridiculous than I thought. For better or worse, our educational infrastructure is designed to target very specific skills and promote very mainstream career options, often to the detriment of creativity and unorthodox choices. I see this in my day job as an economic developer for a rural community; manufacturing careers have been devalued to the point where we need special programs to explain to middle school students that there are good career opportunities in advanced manufacturing. I'm not saying that had my high school's curriculum been a but different, I would have embraced rather than scoffed at a job with the forest service. I'm not sure that, ultimately, I would have lived happily ever after with my little woodland friends, but the lack of any sort of "outdoor" component in that curriculum certainly contributed to my negative attitudes about that path.

That's why Ben Hewitt's article, We Don't Need No Education, in the September issue of Outside magazine struck a chord with me. In it, Hewitt details the growing "unschooler" movement, and why he decided to eschew traditional educational pathways for his two boys, Rye (12) and Fin (9) and essentially let them educate themselves on the farm and in the woods near their Vermont home.

I will be the first to admit that I am somewhat on the fence about home schooling. While I believe it is a parent's right to educate their children in any reasonable way they see fit, I do wonder about the unintended consequences. While a good part of my middle and high school experience was less than wonderful, I did develop some social (survival) skills and do have a few good memories. And the more negative aspects unquestionably hardened me and taught me how to deal with a broader society that can be difficult.

Hewitt positions his "unschooling" methods as an even more fundamental form of education than traditional home schooling. And lest you think he is some sort of backwoods anti-government survivalist type, he and his wife are both well-educated and well-grounded and appear to lean to the left politically. His distaste for school can be traced back to his own time in an educational system which he has likened to incarceration. More to the point, he feels the system failed him by stifling his creativity and preventing him from pursuing activities in which he had an interest and aptitude while promoting more mainstream pursuits which were, for him, a dead end. While he acknowledges that children will not spontaneously learn things such as reading and math, he believes that structured learning component should take up no more than a couple of hours per week.

I am with Hewitt to a point, and that point comes about halfway through the article when he suggests that this approach would work equally well on the streets of a big city as it does in rural New England. I'm sorry, but the things an enterprising 10-year-old explorer comes across in the woods is SIGNIFICANTLY different than those they would discover on the streets, and while there are unquestionably things in both places which could potentially be dangerous, I prefer to take my chances with nature.

I definitely think there is some merit to Hewitt's overall reasoning, but from a practical standpoint, I think there are circumstances in which his version of anti-education could be effective and appropriate, and circumstances in which it clearly is not.

Read the article and let me know what you think.