School's Out Forever

THE SOURCE: “Unschooling” by Astra Taylor, in n+1, Winter 2012.

Imagine being a kid and having no school bus to wait for, no quizzes to fret over, no curriculum to slog through. Imagine that the only thing guiding your education is your own curiosity, with the occasional assist from Mom and Dad. That was the experience of Astra Taylor, a writer and documentary filmmaker who was raised in the radical pedagogical tradition known as unschooling.

The unschooling movement got its start amid the idealism of the 1960s and ’70s. Iconoclasts such as Paul Goodman and John Holt argued that children should be trusted to create their own educational goals. At the heart of the unschooling ethos, Holt wrote, was the idea that “the human animal is a learning animal.”

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