Unschooling advocate Blake Boles is dedicated to helping teens learn on their own. He’s worked at Grace Llywellyn’s famed Not-Back-to-School camp, cycled through the Argentinian countryside with a group of unschoolers, and planned unconventional adventures for young people who choose to learn on their own.
Blake’s first book, College Without High School will be on shelves this October. I was treated to a sneak-peek and am impressed with the insight Blake shares with teens who want to skip high school, pursue their own interests, and still make it to college.
I asked Blake a few questions about how he became involved with the unschooling movement, where his educational philosophy has taken him, and how the theories behind unschooling shape his own life as a learner. You won’t want to miss his answers.
Photo: Blake Boles (top, center) with Unschool Adventures group in Argentina.
How did you first become interested in helping unschooling teens learn on their own?
In Spring 2003, when I was an astrophysics major at UC Berkeley, a friend handed me a John Taylor Gatto book and ignited my passion for unschooling and free schooling. I ended up changing my major to study those fields exclusively, but for years after graduating I wasn’t quite sure how to apply this passion outside the academic realm of reading and research. I knew that I liked working with teens from my time as an instructor at a wilderness summer camp, but the question of where to find these magical “self-directed teens” eluded me. A short-term internship at a Sudbury-model school (where youngsters dominated the scene) had left me unsatisfied. So, I wrote Grace Llewellyn an e-mail, remembering vaguely from my first reading of her Teenage Liberation Handbook that she ran a teen-only summer camp, and I asked her if I could become a staff member. She wrote back with an enthusiastic “yes”.
Not Back to School Camp totally altered and informed my perception of homeschooling and unschooling. Previously, I think I held many of the common doubts about homeschooled teens: Are they really just social recluses? Do they have personalities? Can they actually read and write well? NBTSC blew those all away by showing me that unschooled homeschooled teens are really more like savvy high school graduates taking an extended gap year. (Literally, their social, emotional, and intellectual literacy levels were often on par with most high school graduates.) These teens were taking on challenges and projects at age 15, 16, or 17 that blew me away. And socially they were “normal,” “well-adjusted” kids with shares of healthy weirdness and idiosyncrasy. The first summer that I worked at NBTSC I spent one session there, and I returned the next year to work all three sessions. Since then, I haven’t looked back in my desire to work with unschooling (or more generally, “self-directed”) teens.
Why are teens leaving school? What can they learn or accomplish on their own that can’t be done from a classroom?
Teens choose to leave school for a variety of reason: intellectual, social, religious, and safety. My work involves teens who choose the intellectual and social reasons. Intellectually, a student may be held back by a slow teacher or curriculum, his academic interests may not be addressed by the school, or his learning style (especially kinesthetic) may be ignored. Socially, a teen may be frustrated by superficial and vicious social groupings, a dearth of worthwhile friends, or the unfulfilled desire to interact with the whole world–not just the little bubble of people her same age who happened to be born in the same area.
For most of the teens who I work with, it’s some combination of these factors that drive them from school. Unschooling lets them undertake big learning projects and take ownership of the results. It’s a more adult way of learning, and it’s a lot more fun to boot!
Leaving school is scary. What do you say to parents who worry that their teens will become socially awkward, deficient in necessary skills, or unable to make it to college?
My initial response to these questions is: Yes, it could happen. If you pull your child from school, keep them at home all day, and insulate them from the world-at-large, then it’s perfectly possible to raise a socially stunted and untalented teen with no college preparatory assets. Homeschooling can be botched just as any form of education can be botched.
Homeschooling done well, in my opinion, means actively getting the student out of the house (which is why I prefer the terms “unschooling” or “self-directed learning”), exposing them to a wide swath of real-life activities (especially the world of business via internships, job shadows, and employment), traveling, and joining in group activities large and small. The more that these are chosen by the student, the better.
When homeschooling is done this way, social “adjustment” is a given; students learn skills because real life demands it of them (instead of a teacher’s decree); and college preparation is only a few steps away (by taking a few community college courses and a standardized test, for example). And for teens with a basic measure of independence, none of this absolutely requires one parent at home.
My advice to parents who still worry about these common issues is to read, read, read, and then find local homeschooling groups who can give sage advice on specific issues. John Holt & Pat Farenga’s Teach Your Own and Grace Llewellyn’s Teenage Liberation Handbook are excellent places to start. [click to continue…]
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