Editor’s note: I had the pleasure of making Laurette Lynn’s friendship on Facebook where she introduced me to the concept of Home Education. I liked that term and asked her if I could share more about her views here on The Innovative Educator. Thank you Laurette for sharing another view about learning which she also calls unplugged education. Get ready to be inspired :-)
For most of us, when we hear the word education, it automatically creates a mental image of school and books and papers and we instantly associate the term with school. Similarly, when we hear the word school, we think of teachers, desks, chalkboards and a building filled with students, sounds of bells, images of backpacks and busses and the cringing thought of homework and tests. Take it a step further with the term 'homeschool' and a vast majority of the population automatically associates that term with 'strange, weird, bizarre, outcasts, unsocialized, cooped up" etc... Some of us know better and hence associate the term homeschool with books and papers and grades etc - but minus the chalk boards and busses and building, and of course minus the 'homework'. For many home educators, this would be an accurate image for what homeschooling is for them - school at home. However, for a growing number of families, the word school does not at all describe what they have discovered or the lifelong learning they are enjoying. What's more, these are the families who have come to the conclusion that the word education is not synonymous with the word schooling. As a matter of fact they are two very different ideas.
As a home educating Mom in one such family, as well as an outspoken advocate for home education, I use a new term that I feel helps to better describe our style. What we do is not school. We learn independent of a system or a building. We learn outside the lines of time schedules or any intellectual or emotional restrictions. It's education for sure, but it is an unplugged state of being; unplugged from the system with which we are used to associating the terms education and schooling. It is Unplugged Education©.
This is more than academics. It is not home school because it is not school at home. It doesn't always happen inside the home (although it can) and it is not "schooling". It is learning more...more than math.
Unplugged Education is a philosophical concept. It means unplugging from the mainstream ideas and compulsory concepts that drive the cultural modern world and thinking outside the proverbial box.
What is the system?
Unplugging forces us to see the schooling system for what it is - a system! A system indeed, that manufactures products and those products are our children. It is a deliberate and artificial procedure wherein pre selected and categorized information is downloaded into fresh young minds. The spoon-fed information is superficial, narrow, lacks variety and does not consider individuality. Furthermore it is selected by an elusive board with vested corporate interest. (This is why we see corporate advertising weaved into textbooks and throughout the school programs).
The system treats a multitude of children as a single entity and perpetuates a very artificial, group-think ideology; which suffocates individuality and strangles creative expression. It casts out anyone whose style of learning differs from the pre-selected standardized methods and literally ignores potentially great creative intellectual genius - because they are those who could not conform. It is a system that demands conformity and denies originality. An alarmingly high percentage of all public schooled children in North America graduate from this system without being able to read. This massive number of children are categorized as 'learning disabled' and diagnosed with any variety of conditions such as ADD, ADHD or a dozen other creative terms invented to label children who are truly just very naturally unable to conform to unnatural procedures.
It is the very nature of the system to compartmentalize in this way, separating the easy conformists (smart kids) from the otherwise (disabled kids). The conformists are the good students and the non-conformers are the disabled or even worse, the "bad" kids.
This systematic murdering of individual creative expression and strangulation of natural human genius has damaged our modern society. The system is not working. It is failing. It is failing our children; it is failing our society, our nation and our world.
"I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior." - John Taylor Gatto
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