High school students are about to get a taste of what it means to reinvent a school on the fly. Educators are creating on-line curricula with no time to experiment, and teachers, normally energized by the interplay between readings and roomfuls of students, are staring into their laptops trying to guage the tenor of their “classroom”. At most schools this sudden on-line semester will offer less rigor and a bland replication of what happens in a classroom. Expect a messy implementation. And it seems probable that schools are going to be liberal about grading given the chaos that is almost guaranteed. Most students will see a nice GPA bump after this spring if they do what’s minimally expected.
For students who love the challenge of their high school classes, or who aim to attend colleges that accept a small percentage of their applicants, worry is already setting in. This is especially so for juniors who are afraid that the most-important-year-of-all for college admission will be a total write-off. Many of us are already fielding calls from students concerned about what this means for their college applications. Even amidst a pandemic the smaller worries of life endure.
We’ve been trained to think of schooling as a series of increasingly more challenging lessons involving textual analysis, scientific experimentation, and historical/social literacy interspersed with training in the arts and second languages. This is largely the basis of all non-technical schooling from 2nd grade on and will remain the foundation of any emergency on-line learning our children experience.
But there is an opportunity revealing itself as high schoolers drift into the surreal and solitary world of social distancing and on-line learning: the chance for conventional high school students to engage with the unschooling movement. For a brief moment–the pandemic semester–there’s a chance to break free from the formal definition of schooling and do something truly different. And colleges will love it.
“Unschooling” is a radical idea that animates a small but devoted subset of homeschool parents: let students decide what they want to learn and how they’re going to learn it. By deemphasizing teachers and promoting personal iniative It places curiosity at the top of the pedagogical hierarchy and rejects the “mass-production” model of public schools–or even structurured homeschooling–as a soul-crushing failure. Not many colleges take it seriously, and its critics say unschoolers enter adulthood with few skills sets apart from the ability to deftly advocate unschooling’s Eden-like purity.
But for a semester when students are essentially under medical house arrest, unschooling could give credibility to what conventional high schools are not structured to provide: teacherless learning.
What could that mean? Pick a spot in the woods and do your own habitat study. Write and record a series of original music. Organize a neighborhood effort to convert flower gardens into pollinator-friendly environments. Write a novel. Learn how to build furniture. Take kayak trips down your local rivers. Create an on-line platform to reach out to your fellow students who were socially isolated even before the pandemic. Make a documentary with your Iphone. Or do all of these.
A year from now when we have emerged from this pandemic, colleges are going to be asking the question “So what did you do in the time you weren’t in school?” Students who have taken the initiative to offer something more than good grades in on-line courses will be noticed. By embracing the best of the unschooling movement students will add something powerful and original to their high school portfolio, and they’ll also do something critical for their own self care in a time of boredom and fear.
Even without teachers and a syllabi, high school students have a rare, though brief opportunity to reimagine themselves as learners and to get out of their heads long enough to engage, in a new way, the land and community of which they are a part.
One side benefit is they won’t have to fret over their college essay. It will have written itself.