S3E9 | The Efficiency of Unschooling

Cecilie Conrad: 00:00
Okay, so here we are again, and now I'm just going to say good morning because it's my morning. Good morning, Sandra Dodd. Good morning. I am happy to see you here. And Sue, welcome.

Sue Elvis: 00:13
Hi, Ex Cecilia. Hi, Sandra. I'm happy to be back for another conversation. I'm looking forward to this one because it was Sandra's suggestion and it's a topic I would never have thought of suggesting. So I am really looking forward to hearing in which direction Sandra is going to lead us.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:34
It's going to be a very nice conversation on the ladies fixing the world. We are going to talk about efficiency. And I agree with Sue. Who would think that unschooling is efficient? Of course, it would be Sandra Dott.

Sandra Dodd: 00:50
Oh, yay, thank you.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:52
I'll just send the speaking torch or whatever you call it stick to you and you open the conversation, please.

Sandra Dodd: 00:59
Alrighty. I wanted to be a teacher since I was little, and I was a teacher for a while, and Sue's husband is a teacher now. And so I want to first talk about the efficiency of classroom education. There's

Sandra Dodd: 01:10
not much. Teachers need to figure out how they can efficiently present the information they need to present and how to test the kids so that they can prove to the district that they've done their job. All of that sort of thing has to be done. So it's a very different kind of efficiency. So the efficient way to teach a classroom of 25 or 30 kids is assume that 10 of the kids already know. Ten of them would like to know. Ten of them don't care and they're not listening. Or they might listen but they won't get it. That seems cold-hearted, but what can you do? You can't address each one of them individually. So you present your information and then time passes and a new year comes, or a new semester, or a new session. And so you ask the kids, did they cover this last time? And the kids say, No, this is traditional. This is traditional conversation. Have they covered verbs? No. Because they want to have an easy lesson. They want you to start over. And so you kind of have to do that. So one uh third grade does this information in that way, aiming at the middle to kids who are pretending they didn't know before or who didn't know and still don't know. And then fourth grade comes and they start back about a third of the way and they cover that, aiming at the middle, and school ends, and fifth grade, you know, sixth grade comes. It's just that way. With unschooling, that doesn't need to happen. When one child learns something, that's it. Ta-da! He knows it. You don't have to repeat it year after year after year in a different way or a little more difficult way. So that whole thing is gone. You don't need to test at all. So that whole thing is gone. All of the time spent moving from one class to another, that's gone. All of the time spent being delivered to school, in certain clothes, being brought back. So, anyway, when parents are considering unschooling, sometimes they're afraid that they won't be able to be efficient or that they won't, that they'll totally forget something for years, that their kids will be learning along, and then they go, Oh, I forgot history, or oh, I forgot science. It won't happen. And it's hard to persuade young moms or fearful moms or moms whose kids have already become resistant to learning, they

Sandra Dodd: 03:30
feel like they're shutting down. Um it I know that's scary, especially when kids have lost their curiosity, they've become super embarrassed about enthusiasm or joy. So the thing is, even if the first thing that an unschooling family does is to do nothing for a month or six months, to do what it seems like to the parents nothing, but just let those kids play. Let them sleep, let them eat extra meals, have extra snacks, sit in the backyard for hours, digging the dirt, play with the dog. If it doesn't look like anything that the parents in their nervousness feel they have to do, need to do, or will be required to do. It's a good way for the kids to recover, assuming those kids were in school and and have had begun shutting down and avoiding what they call subject matter. Um that's a way for them to have a sort of a fire break between the horror or scariness or boredom or whatever their emotion was around school and a new possibility. So the thing that parents often learn from that is while the parents are reading up about unschooling, being nervous, asking their friends, you know, reading about other families, whatever they're doing, listening to podcasts like this, if their kids are just hanging out, vegging out, playing, playing, playing, playing, at some point the parents will get enough ideas from their own research about unschooling and their own listening, reading to look at the kids and see them learning, even without there being any interaction about it, any instruction about it, anything like the kids coming and saying, Aren't we gonna do anything? They won't. Like, I don't, I've never heard a kid do that. Aren't we gonna have lessons? Why aren't you teaching me? I don't think that's a likelihood. And so when the when the parents are getting ready to relax and the kids are relaxed, at some point they start to see learning from conversations or from seeing the kids doing something that they never did before, figuring out on their own, or from the parents, from the kids coming and asking the parents to help them do something. Do we have any tools for this? Do we, you know, can I try to do that thing that you're doing? Um, oh, you're putting up a mailbox, can I help? Whatever it might be. And so I think the efficiency comes from the individual reality of each child learning and putting his own ideas together in his own natural way.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:09
I was thinking when you talked about kids who are coming out of school and they have the resistance to schooling, and maybe they're in the backyard, maybe they're watching Netflix, maybe

Cecilie Conrad: 06:20
they're gaming. It doesn't look like anything that we, the parents, can understand as learning. Um, how the parents need to wait. The parents need to learn and chill and just wait and let the child decompress for a while. When I counsel parents who take their children out of school and start unschooling, it's a very different journey from unschooling from the beginning because you've got a child with all kinds of conditioning to the ideas of school. And usually when they are taken out, it's because it didn't work in some one way or the other. But I was thinking about how trying to teach these children something, something that looks like school, some of the academics. It's like trying to cook a meal for quite a big group of people, but even just a sandwich in a kitchen you haven't cleaned. I'm right now living with a lot of people at the organic farm in Denmark where we often hang out, and and uh the owner here is a professional chef. He has a very nice kitchen, and we cook a lot of elaborate, nice meals for large groups, and obviously you need to clean the kitchen. And the rhythm here is always no one starts cooking without cleaning the kitchen all the way to very clean, because that's how things work here. And then you can efficiently, like this, cook up a meal for 20 people, it takes you maybe an hour. Uh, whereas if I was trying to do that, and every time I need to use a pen, I need to look for it first and then clean it, and and uh, and then I put things on uh you know, you can't work in that chaos. And I think the kids who get out of school, if if they're not allowed, so what I was my general idea is six months. They need six months, maybe a year, of doing whatever they want. And the parents can very well de-school themselves in that year. Just take a year, let the child do whatever he or she wants, more or less. Um, that's the cleaning up, that's the decompression, that's making space, that's just putting all the pieces back together. Don't leave the child alone that year. You need to work on the relationship, you need to make space for the emotions, you need to have a lot of, as you said, Sandra, extra snacks, moments in the garden staring at the horizon. It needs to be okay. It's all okay. You're loved anyway, you're loved either way, whatever. It's all good, and we have time. And the child needs to get out of the idea of having to do a lesson of everything every day because otherwise I'm failing in life. All of these things. And after one year, it's like the kitchen here at the farm. It's nice and clean, everything's back in order, now we can go to work. And I'm not talking about efficient curriculum-based work, but just now the brain can start even functioning. I think that part is really, really important. And it's important on a large scale when the children have been under a lot of pressure, working in the school system and somehow failing, basically. Most kids who get out and start unschooling have the story of fail, one way or the other. They didn't manage to function in that system and now they're out. And the whole world is looking at them as some sort of failure, not being in school. Maybe it's better in the US. Now, maybe I'm trying actually saying this from my perspective now. Here in Scandinavia, it's such a rare endeavor to unschool and homeschool that not being in school is

Cecilie Conrad: 10:15
still looked upon as some sort of fail. To my knowledge, I'm not sure I'm right because I'm not following all these things maticulately, but to my knowledge, the only really big report made from our government that includes uh the field of homeschoolers, which is actually quite growing after COVID, um, it's under, it's inside of a report on children who fail to go to school. We have a word, I don't think I can translate it, but children who avoid, maybe it's avoidance, school avoidance, inside a report on school avoidance, they cover the homeschoolers. So it's still looked upon as some sort of fail that you have a homeschooling movement.

Sandra Dodd: 11:06
In a way. I mean, yeah, maybe they're they're looking at it as a fail, but if they're reporting on people who are resistant to school or avoiding school, that's got to reflect on them. True. And so eventually, even if the district that or the department of education, whatever it might be, creates this list and these statistics of who's not in school and maybe why or whatever they're saying about it, where you know, they might be trying to prove that they're not learning. But good luck with that, because it's anyway, um, other people who look at that from the outside or from the edge or from the edges of the inside, the people who are also thinking maybe the schools should change a little bit, that will end up being a document for the failure of the schools. Why is it that all these people bailed and didn't come back? Why is it that they're able to do what you were doing very efficiently while the kids are also goofing around playing video games, going to the museums, going to the zoo, hanging out with their friends. So there's they're might be creating, accidentally creating their own evidence.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:09
I totally agree. Now I was talking about it from the point of view of the children. I've talked to a lot of children in the tween age when they've what? When they've been to school for for some years, they've been conditioned for maybe three, four, five years in the school system, and then something happens in the family, they decide decide to homeschool and they move on to unschooling, begin with unschooling. These children very often have the idea that they're failing, and they need to get out of that failure feel. They're not failing, it's a different choice. It's it's not a choice we made because you failed, it's a choice we discovered because there were problems in choice A. So we looked at other options and now we have choice B. We're doing B because it's better. But a lot of these children are used to this mainstream mindset that if you cannot thrive in school, it's some sort of failure. And that makes it really hard for them in the beginning, and that's why I think they need a lot of time to get out of that mindset in order for that kitchen table to be wiped down, the shni to be sharp, the cutting board to be clean, and you know, everything ready. I I've seen a lot, I've done a lot of work with these kids to just make them help them have a different perspective on their own situation.

Sandra Dodd: 13:33
But I think So do you are you saying that you think that the child feels like he failed to stay in school, to succeed in school? Or are the people around him treating him like a failure?

Cecilie Conrad: 13:43
I think both. So the child very often tells me that they feel they failed, and and you know, they're homeschooling because um, yeah, they it didn't work out with school. I I couldn't really manage, I've I I couldn't understand understand or thrive, or I couldn't take the pressure, whatever. It was it goes reflects back on the individual child. Something was wrong with me, and now I'm in this situation and I'm risking my future. Everyone else is in school and they're learning all these things, and I'm not, and I might not succeed in life. It's it's actually quite devastating how much this idea that you need to be in school and you need to succeed in school in order to have a good life is installed in a 10-year-old child. Takes quite a while to uninstall it.

Sandra Dodd: 14:38
I haven't seen that in the US, I don't think. I may be misunderstanding, but I think a lot of the attitude of if a family decides to homeschool, I think a lot of people around go, well, that's cool. That that'll be good for those kids. And I think the schools go, ah, we didn't keep them interested. And sometimes schools really like to get those kids back for their own, they feel like they won. They feel like they lose when the kids go, but the kids don't, I don't think the kids feel like they're losing, if assuming that they were in on the decision and all. And I think a lot of families say, let's try something different, let's try something more fun. And then if it doesn't work, you can go back to school if you want to. And that way the child is empowered.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:19
Let's cover another little cultural difference, then, because you said about the inefficiency that you know you move from fifth grade to sixth, and then the sixth grade teacher's asking you, Did we cover verbs

Cecilie Conrad: 15:30
or whatever? And the kids say no, and then you go one-third back and all of that. In our traditional school system, and this was more the case when I was a child than it is today, when the schools were smaller. Uh, they if this is funny, they made a lot of changes to the school system to make it more efficient here by breaking it in Scandinavia. So when we were in school, my husband and I, you started when you were six years old, you stayed for 10 years. So we had grade zero or grade kindergarten, it was called. So that was a transition from kindergarten to school, you had this more playful year, and then you had first grade through ninth. Uh, that was mandatory schooling. Um, so that was 10 years of schooling. In most cases, from grade one to grade nine, you have the same main teachers. Your teacher doesn't change, especially the one that will teach you Danish. That person will usually also have a little of the smaller things like religion and stuff. So you have a lot of hours with the same teacher. They will try to keep the same math and history teacher as well. So the so the majority of the time you have the same teacher throughout, not the first year of the kindergarten years is different, but the first through ninth. So for nine years. That's very efficient. The teacher knows everyone. You get very close to your teacher. It's like someone you have a real relationship with your teacher after nine years. They saw you grow up, and it can be very emotional, actually. It's broken down quite a lot now, in the name of efficiency, but that was beautiful, actually.

Sandra Dodd: 17:13
It's beautiful for those who like that teacher.

Cecilie Conrad: 17:15
Exactly. But the idea is good. The idea is better than changing the teacher every year, I think.

Sandra Dodd: 17:28
Yeah, true. And so, and so they see another system that isn't working as well as they think it should, and they tweak it and they change it. And one thing that happens here is they go through phases of we need to just teach facts, rote learning. They need to just memorize these things, they need to know these things. And then it you come to that to the phase where you see the limitations of that, then they go, No, we need to teach these kids to think and to reason and to figure things out on their own. We shouldn't just have them memorize it, we should explain how and why it works. And that goes for a few years and they see how that doesn't work, you know, that fails in a way, and then they go back the other way. It's it went back and forth like three times when I was in school, and I still see it do that. That's not efficient. Yeah, and so they see that that people need both. You know, they need some sometimes you just need to, you know, sing a song that has math facts or the alphabet or something. And sometimes you need to understand what multiplication is, not just memorize the answers. So unschooling doesn't need any of that because the kids are asking questions, asking natural questions and learning uh in their own way. And they're building their own um model of the universe is is a is an analogy that we've used in the discussions over the years. So each each person's model of the universe is different. And at school, they give you a little kit and say, if you learn all these things, that's your model of the universe. So the kids outside of school will have a different one and probably a bigger one, and they might have some holes the other day. Holly was asking us about some part of American history, the Lewis and Clark expedition, when Thomas Jefferson sent a couple of guys across to across the northern area, like the from the Great Lakes over to the Pacific. And so they went exploring so that they could see what was up there, what was out there. And Holly didn't, we were doing a trivia game that we do that's historical sometimes, you know, history facts. And Holly said, How did you learn about that? And Keith and I looked at each other and went, because they didn't teach it hard in school. It's not a thing that all kids learn, but it's interesting. And so kids who are interested in history and geography pick it up. And across that part of the country, they only started in St. Louis, so they started in the middle of the country, which was the settled area at the time. And they um there are lots of places, highways, parks, national parks, streets named after them. And so it it's that sort of thing, like who is this guy? You know, there's a street named after him who is he? And I don't I don't know how we learned it, but now Holly knows because we just told her enough stories in 10 or 15 minutes. You know, she's in her 30s. It's not I don't know if it's an unschooling story, but it's the story of a grown unschooler who felt like she missed something. There was some big piece of history that she missed out on, but lots of kids in school miss out on it too. Because the teacher isn't that interested in it or they don't live near that part of the country.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:14
I've been to school for 23 years, if you include high school university. Nonstop. I didn't take Gab years. I would still say that, and I did study, I mean, I studied the history of ideas and the history of of uh psychology, basically, history of philosophy, history of science at university level. I would still say my the majority of my concepts, my understanding of the history of the world comes from things I learned outside of the school system.

Sandra Dodd: 20:46
So, in a way, the hit school history will give you a scaffolding if you're paying attention, if you care a little bit, and then to that scaffolding, you add facts and experiences over your life. You might be talking about some place that's just very vague, and then you go there and you have enough to start connecting all the dots. Yeah. Sue, in Australia, do you think that if a child is taken out of school to homeschool, that there's a stigma or that that the child or the family is treated like that they failed, or something's wrong with that child?

Sue Elvis: 21:16
No, I don't think so. I think homeschooling is held in quite high regard. Uh, and certainly it has the number of people homeschooling has increased tremendously over the years since we started out. Uh I remember that my first daughter, she had a registration, homeschool registration number, a ridiculous, ridiculously low one. It was, I don't know, somewhere maybe below 100. And now we've got thousands of people that are homeschooling. I think it's just become another way of life here. Nobody well, when we were my kids were younger, it wasn't so well known, and people used to question us and say. Uh it wasn't so much the academics, the learning, but how are they going to get on in society if they're not with their peers, that you're making them different, they're never going to get on with people, that type of thing. But no, uh, a lot of people homeschool these days, and it's been a growing um tri trend, I think. We've never come across anything um that uh indicates that people look down upon homeschoolers. But I there was um what I sometimes think is that when the the registration for our state is quite rigid, and I think that sometimes people drop out of school and do homeschooling because their kids are failing at school. And then I think it's rather ironic that homeschoolers have to prove that they're doing a good job when the school's failed, that all they have to turn around and say is, well, we're homeschooling because my children didn't learn to read or whatever it was. We can't do any worse than the school system did. And how schools don't really have to prove it, they don't have to prove themselves, but homeschoolers do. Uh, if schools fail, schools fail, you go find another school if you're not happy. But homeschooling, you've got to jump through a lot of hoop hoops, or is that the the term to actually homeschool? So you're two different standards as far as the education department goes, but as far as the general public goes, and as far as also I think universities and other institutions, they're looking very favorably upon homeschoolers. It's not that uh you uh and I think actually they're recognizing that homeschoolers, you know, they may have something more than somebody coming out of school. And I think that's very encouraging that we don't have to prove ourselves so much that yeah, homeschoolers are getting a good name for themselves. Oh, that's great.

Cecilie Conrad: 24:09
Might change here as well. I don't know. Um might have actually already have changed a bit. I don't live here any longer, so I don't, I'm not I'm not in all of the loops anymore. I've just noticed with the children. But anyway, we just think sorry, go on.

Sue Elvis: 24:28
Can I just qualify that? Uh we live in New South Wales, Australia is a big country, different rules and different states, and we also live in a small area, we don't live in the city. So um my opinions are based on where we live and my what I the feedback I get is having a husband as a school teacher. Not everybody might have that experience, but that was our experience.

Cecilie Conrad: 24:55
The efficiency theme. Is it if we're talking about efficiency, are we do we risk that a listener will

Cecilie Conrad: 25:10
start making tick boxes again? I feel it to me it's obvious, but maybe not when I was new and maybe not in the beginning, but it's obvious if you're teaching one child, or that one child is teaching him or herself something that they want to learn, something that they came up with they wanted to learn, and then they're learning it. It goes like this. You don't have to spend a lot of time doing it because you don't have to push through that barrier of not wanting to, not paying attention, all these things.

Sandra Dodd: 25:47
It'll be even faster if you stop using the word teaching and start talking about learning. I'm so picky. But as long as the parents are looking at who's teaching themselves or who's teaching what, you're missing it. You're you're you're putting a little wall of teach teach in between you and the learning that's that could be happening. That is happening. So, anyway, for people who are new here, don't think you have to teach, don't think your kids have to be teaching themselves. So the checklist, if those parents are worried and they want an efficiency checklist for unschooling, let's do this. Do the kids have choices? Are they happy? Did they sleep a lot? Are you available to answer their questions and available to leave them alone some of the day if they want to be doing something on their own or doing nothing? What looks like nothing to you could be the greatest thoughts they'll have for a month. They could just be remembering and imagining and making connections and coming up with great questions to ask you. So don't judge them on looking like they're not paying attention or looking like they're not learning. That's another big difference between school and home, is because in school, kids are expected to sit without fidgeting, don't do anything unless you're taking wonderful notes. Otherwise, gaze at the teacher admiringly and pretend you really care. That's not very efficient. It's kind of silly, it's kind of goofy. I will one time I had a class of 14, 15-year-olds, ninth graders, and the principal was I was scheduled to be uh observed. Uh, the principal would come once or twice a year and write a little report, a little review of how you're teaching and that sort of thing. And I had a pretty loud classroom, and uh we were at a at a part of the building that it didn't matter much, but I said, Okay, I'm you know, Mr. Martinez is gonna be here, do me a favor. I was gonna be the assistant principal that year. I said, Do me a favor, don't act like monkeys, okay? Just chill a little bit. So he comes in, he's sitting in the back, everything's fine. I had a fine lesson. The kids are bright, they're great. They're just go silent. After a while, a a kid raises his hand and I said, Yes, because they didn't usually raise their hand, they just talked to me. And he said, May I please sharpen my pencil? Really straight face. And I said, And all the kids are trying not to laugh because it was like such a little play, such a little sarcastic little demonstration of how they never were. And so that would so they they just kept that up for the whole hour. They just were very formal, raised their hands, like they were using voices like they were acting like students. It was funny. And the principal could tell probably because there was some giggling going on, but that's okay. So there are things that kids do in school that don't have to do with learning, that just have to do with school, that have to do with the formality and the structure and the logistics and efficiency, I guess, of having a lot of kids in one place with one or two adults. And those things can all be thrown by. So most of what's involved in school, and well, most of what teachers need to know, is not about learning either. It's about management of a group, how to keep that many kids quiet and happy, and how to figure out how to break up a fight, and how to figure out how to report grades. You know, there's all this sort of clerical and peacekeeping aspect that parents at home don't need to know much of. It's a different, maybe there's a different sort of clerical aspect and some some different tricks for keeping the peace among siblings. But that's efficient too, if you only need to keep the peace among the kids you know really personally and really well, and you have more than one room. You don't all have to stay in one corner of the kitchen for an hour at a time together. You don't have that restriction.

Sue Elvis: 29:38
Yeah, talking about school and uh efficiency, seeing what my husband has to what they're doing at their school. They have a day for making Easter bonnets and a day for dressing up as a book character, and a day for Harmony Day, and a a day for wearing your pajamas to school, a day for this, a day for that. And sometimes he says, you know, we're not actually doing any learning, we're just doing all the extra bits that we wouldn't do it. We might sit in our pajamas at home, but you wouldn't spend all that time preparing for a uh a theme day. And they have a lot of theme days at school. And then when he's doing report writing, that takes weeks. And I think, um, when do you get a chance to he's allowed to teach because he's a school teacher. Um, he'd he'd get uh into

Sue Elvis: 30:35
trouble if he just said, Oh, the kids are all just gonna learn by themselves today. Uh, he's a teacher, so he's expected to teach. But when's it where is there time to teach when he is so busy trying to evaluate and uh write the reports in the way that they're meant to be written? I really shouldn't criticize the school system, but but I see I do see him doing it, and I always thought that as our kids were growing up, we had the better deal at home. Uh he he works really hard to achieve what he achieves, but our learning at home was, as you said would say, efficient. But you know, that word efficient, I was thinking about this before we started talking over the last couple of days. And I have never in all the years that I've been writing and speaking and actually uh unschooling myself used the word efficiency and uns the words efficiency and unschooling in the same sentence. Well, when you said, shall we talk about efficiency, Sandra? It was like a new idea. I thought, how do those two things go together? Are we saying our parents evaluating all the different ways of education and saying, well, unschooling is the most efficient way, so I'm going to choose that. But then I was doing some research and doing some thinking, and I was thinking, efficiency is just a byproduct of it, you can't help but be efficient. And uh although I've never explored the word efficiency before, it is efficient. And that that was so interesting. Uh sort of like a new angle into unschooling after all this time. And I'm sitting here thinking about efficiency. But of course it is. It's just that we have expressed the ideas of efficiency, well, I have, in different ways. For example, I once wrote a blog post about, I think it's called the problem with ticking off boxes. And people like to tick boxes off and it looks efficient. And I remember when my eldest daughter was, I don't know, about six, seven, and I got her this workbook for grammar, and she just loved filling in all the pages and then turning to the next one, filling it in, and it looked efficient because we were ticking it all off. And then one day I said to her, I went back a few pages and I said, Well, what about can you tell me about this concept? Or I didn't use those words, but and she had no idea because what she was doing was filling in things, moving to the next page, and she had no real understanding of what she was doing. It was all about finishing the page and moving on. And I wonder if a lot of parents are the same way. Let's tick it all off. It looks good, it will be really good at homeschool registration time, but is that an efficient way to learn? Because that's not a it's a shallow way of learning. There was something on your website, Sandra, that I was reading earlier today. Uh, it was in the section about research and unschooling, which I think is really funny, research and unschooling, because I've uh I was invite I've been invited to a couple of um world um what they called, um, homeschool summits. And there were a lot of people with a lot with degrees, uh educational degrees, and I was just a mother. And we got the I got the idea that people listen to people who have a qualification rather and want to hear the research rather than somebody who has experienced uh unschooling in action within a family. But there was something about um, I'm just trying to see if I could find what I was reading this morning, which um sort of I really liked. It was, I don't know if you remember, it was about Alan, Alan Thomas, who is the education researcher in Australia. I don't know when when this was put on your site, uh, has done some really interesting research into what he calls um in my glasses there. Oh, informal learning using homeschoolers. He didn't use the word unschoolers as his research group. It is quite efficient because new knowledge and understanding are only assimilated when they extend existing knowledge. The converse equally contributes to the efficiency of informal learning. When new material is unlikely to dovetail into and extend knowledge or understanding, it is discarded. This utterly contradicts conventional school learning, in which students are expected to persevere when they do not comprehend, often acquiring no more than a superficial level of understanding,

Sue Elvis: 35:55
what has been called surface learning. Perhaps informal learning is better suited to the innumerable connections and networks in the cerebral cortex. Whatever the case, it works and without all the effort associated with formal learning.

Sandra Dodd: 36:14
Right. Connections what you just saw or read or heard to what you already knew.

Sue Elvis: 36:23
But I think what is interesting is that that was a researcher, and so maybe I've had a lot of parents who want to know the research. But what do the experts say? What does the research say? So I think that's really interesting.

Sandra Dodd: 36:42
I think the first time I really started noticing that efficiency aspect was when I interviewed a mom named Julie Daniel from London. She's she runs a business that she created herself that's an efficiency advice for either businesses, small businesses, or individuals will hire her and her husband. It's her company, but her husband, she met her husband and he came to work for her. And they I don't I think he was working there before they were married, I'm not sure. But anyway, um, they're efficiency experts, that's what they do for a living. And so when they started unschooling, she saw it right away. Because that's the way she saw the world. And I know for people who consider themselves efficient or not efficient in their regular lives, this might make some people nervous. The people who are efficient, like say we're my husband is really good, like I've said many times, could have been a truck driver or a cab driver, he would be the greatest because he knows where everything is. He just has maps of the world in his head. And so if we have four or five things to do in one day, especially when we had little kids, and they we have to drop a kid off, pick two kids up, you know, all that sort of thing, go to this store, that store, the post office before it closes at three. I we would just tell him where all we needed to go, even if he wasn't going to be with us. And he would say, Okay, do this first, do this, don't drive on candelaria because there's no left turn light at that intersection. And he so he his advice for what order to do things in involved more than just the order that they are on a map. It involved time and and that, what the traffic signals, how the flow of traffic is, or he would say, Don't forget it's state fair time, so don't go on Lomas. And I could do that painstakingly, but not ever as quickly or as efficiently as he could. So that was an efficiency that he has because of his own interests, and some people don't have that. Some people cook very efficiently. They pass through the kitchen and they pick up the ingredients they're gonna need for that. I go, I go get my pans and then I look at my recipe, and then I get one thing, and then I walk across the room and get one thing. So I know it's not like my husband driving across town. Um, and whatever, whoever's listening to this, whatever you're efficient at, that may be just a natural part of your personality. So don't worry about it because we're not saying you need to learn to be efficient at unschooling. We're saying as learning goes, unschooling doesn't waste a lot of time and energy on unimportant things that won't be picked up that are going to be surface learning. There, there's no such thing as surface learning in unschooling. People either were interested in something or they weren't. They either connected it to what they knew and got some understanding of it or they didn't, or they just kind of see it so they are aware that it exists, or they hear a word, so they're aware that there's that word, and later on they're going to come back across it again and fill in more that at that point. Because people aren't, it's not a vocabulary lesson. You don't have to research the history of every word you come across. And I know when I used to read books, I would read a word, and I I didn't, if I didn't feel like looking it up or there wasn't anybody nearby to ask, I'd just skip it by, and that's fine. And after I've skipped by the word three or four times, I started to see what it meant because it would be used similarly each time, because that's how words are. And so if a kid's at home, though, there is somebody to ask. And now that with the internet, it's easy to look words up. And if you're reading a book on a Kindle or something, you just touch the word and it'll give you a definition if you want. So that's a kind of efficiency with newer equipment, too, and uh and of not disrupting a whole classroom if you stop to ask. If you walk, stand up from where you are and walk away with your book or with whatever you're reading and ask somebody something. You didn't disrupt anything. You're being you're doing what we hope you'll do, which is learning or having a conversation or picking up information, finding information. Kids do that with video games all the time. They will be asking somebody in another state or another country because they have them on some sort of, you know, however they're communicating online. Or they look something up, they go to YouTube or Google and they ask that question, you know, in this game, how do I get this item? And that's real research. It's something they needed to do. They knew which what their what their resources were, and they use a resource. That resource might be a kid they're playing with or a neighbor or a parent. And once they have done it, and then they do it a couple of times, they have it. They don't have to sit in a classroom where somebody says, This is the name of this game. It was built in 1998 by this corporation in Japan. You know, none of this wanna wanna wan droning on. It's not like that. The kid may not care who made it or when. They may just want that item. They may want to know is this game older than this? Who's what

Sandra Dodd: 41:40
part of this of this game platform was lifted to make this other game? It depends what the kid's interested in. And while they're doing that, they're learning history and geography and engineering and math and logic and storytelling and all kinds of stuff. Maybe art and music. There are things on my website about the art and music and video games that that people who don't mess with or hang around gamers might never think is an aspect of the games. But there's some really beautiful and complex music involved.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:14
I think one of the big deals uh when we're talking unschooling and efficiency is to uninstall in the parental mind the idea of what exactly is it they're supposed to learn. So if we come from a viewpoint of, you know, we have this idea of the curriculum, maybe we don't really know exactly what it is, but we have this idea there's some things, and they all have to learn these things, and how do we efficiently make sure that they cover it all? Um, I think that idea is really problematic if we take the idea, excuse me, of the curriculum out of the equation, so it's not something specific they have to learn and just look at the learning that is happening, letting go of the idea of some core elements. That's a term very often used at its core elements. Who came up with the idea that those elements were more important than other elements? I don't know. Um, but anyway, the curriculum has this idea of core elements, and and and that somehow travels to the mind of the parents, and the parents think the kids have to learn specific things, let's say some math skills and some some some of the tools like uh what's that called grammar and and uh maybe big sections of world history, somehow, you know, there has to be some sort of skeleton or or or idea of the big lines. Let's say that's what we think the kids have. To learn, then you look for the efficiency in learning these specific things, and that might not be what you're seeing. But if you look for learning, just it becomes clearest day that the things they learn, they learn learn extremely efficiently. They pick up stuff and it stays in there. Uh, they pick it up as a byproduct of things they're doing. Very rarely, smaller children, unschooled smaller children sit down with the goal of learning something. Right. They don't sit down to learn, they sit down to play, they sit down to explore, they sit down to have a conversation, they sit down, or they might not even sit down.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:45
Oh my God.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:46
But they will still be learning.

Sandra Dodd: 44:49
One of the efficiencies is that the parents don't have to do all that teaching that they imagined they were going to be doing. When parents first looked at homeschooling, if they decide to unschool, they probably still think that they need to live in that checkbox. You know, the the core the core areas or the core principles or what however the school where they live has named these things. Um they probably think that they need to spend 36 hours a year on each of those topics, you know, and then they and they count those minutes or something. That's not the kind of efficiency I'm talking about. I'm talking about while your kid is building a Lego ship or something, they they'll be learning about math and and colors and materials. And they might be not even thinking about ships at all, they might be thinking about what animals were brought from you know the Pacific when Darwin was doing his explorations. It doesn't matter. You know, whatever that boat sparks in them is going to be efficient learning that the parents can't manage, shouldn't stop, should not try to stop at all, and and let that go. And if the parents follow these trails that their kids are doing, if the parents says, Why what made you think of that? Or, you know, what do you want to say, do you want to save these blocks separate from the directions? Are we going to put them in the pile or what? Well, all these things that involve the child learning, thinking, processing, if the parents can follow those trails and start to learn how natural learning looks, instead of looking at it through school-colored glasses, through the a sort of a plastic overlay of a curriculum, if they just put those things away and out of their minds, they'll see how learning individually is efficient. And so what Julie was talking about in that interview, uh, it's all on my website. And it and if you just go to centerdot.com and look up efficiency, you'll see you'll find the interview from Julie probably right at the top. And it's it's not long, that part of it isn't long, but uh she's I had asked her something since you since you work in the field of efficiency, how do you feel about unschooling? And she said both she and her husband were really excited, really surprised and happy at how easy and smoothly learning happens. If you can provide things to play with, places to go, you know, if you can create that environment and not mess it up, how efficient learning is. I'm putting words in her mouth. I'm because I just knew that she had already gotten past that point. So I'm not saying what she said. I'm but they were impressed with the efficiency. And so that way she described what they had seen impressed me. They have degrees, maybe not in in management, you know, or maybe not in efficiency, but still that's the thing. Um there's efficiency in all kinds of fields. And we're not in a field, in a known and accepted field. It's so weird. It's so weird that even people who have done it for years get told by their friends, don't say teaching. Why are you still saying teaching? It's one more little uh stumbling block, one more little hurdle that you don't need to jump over anymore. Just you know, undo it. Don't just let it stay with the curriculum and the other teacher teaching things which are not very efficient. Teaching isn't very efficient. In fact, a teacher can teach, can claim to teach, can lecture, can speak, and uh if she's really nearsighted, she might not know that it's a whole bunch of mannequins and not a bunch of people. Because really, if no one's learning, are you teaching? And that's a philosophical point that de schoolers, new unschoolers should consider too, is can you really teach something if no one's learning? It's the learner bringing that information into them, into themselves, that makes you a teacher, not noise that you made, not handouts that you made, not tests that you made. That's not teaching. As far as the schools are concerned, it is show up each day in this room, talk about that topic, make sure they do some homework and take some tests. That's what you get paid for. That doesn't mean anybody's learning. Whereas if you back off, take all of that teaching and curriculum lists of things um that they have to learn away and let them discover things in natural, easy. What was the term? Do you remember, Sue, that the guy called it? The Australian expert that I had quoted? He called it not natural learning, but something like that.

Sue Elvis: 49:24
Informal learning.

Sandra Dodd: 49:25
Informal learning. Right, thank you. So if the parents can move away from all that other lingo and expectation and framework to a new framework, which is a little more leafy than that ironclad, iron steel stuff that the schools have prepared. Uh, and then the United States, in a way, it's worse because we have the idea, thanks to Henry Ford and the Winchester Rifle Company, schools are based on assembly line philosophy. That if you if you can make a car or a rifle or a house, now houses, computers, telephones, with all the same parts, so that if one part breaks, you can just pull that part out of the box and stick it in there, that they say is efficient. It's efficient for for a factory, especially a 19th century or 1910s factory. So the schools are pretty much based on that model. Is if we start all the first graders in the whole United States with this set of expectations and requirements, then if they move to another state, which is totally legal here, you can move any kind of Thursday at noon, get put, stick your whole family in a truck and go, you know, to Alaska or wherever, New York, you know, thousands of miles away, and then just put them in school. So the hope and the ideal was that when they get to that school, they just pick right up where they were. Not by the day, but by the year, you know, by the general expectation. Doesn't always work, but that but it's based on that idea that because it's legal to move around and because each state is required to provide these schools,

Sandra Dodd: 51:10
that the kids should be able to sort of come and go from different public schools and still be able to keep up and graduate and all of that. Then we've done like with unschooling, you can't expect that all the eight-year-olds know the same things. All the kids who are interested in trains know a ton about trains. So the kids don't maybe not know what a train is. And whatever topic or subject or interest or focus it is, the kids who are interested in it will learn a lot about that and peripherally, everything that is connected to easy, naturally, for fun, like playing a video game. If they live their lives like they play video games, that's very efficient.

Sue Elvis: 51:51
I was just going to say that similar sort of idea that we've talked about previously, about parents who unschool or even just homeschool with one eye on school, thinking that they've got to keep up with the schools just in case their kids go back into school and how you can't unschool that way. Uh, it just doesn't work. But the other thing I was thinking about also was I really love discovering ideas in general society, or they discover them, not realizing that already these ideas are the foundation of unschooling. It's uh well, maybe we discovered them first, I don't know. But you suddenly see a trend in general society that reflects our thinking. And I always love that. And the one I'm thinking about is the obsession with productivity. Uh, you go on YouTube or you go to the bookstore, and there's hundreds of books about productivity. And I remember reading one, or I looked at the uh heading of a YouTube video, and it was about saving a minute or two when you're typing by how you're going to type more efficiently so you save this much time, and all these uh it's shaved a minute off here and a minute off there. Um, organize your notes a bit better so you can save these minutes, and let's get rid of this distraction, whatever. And I don't know, it was um not sure exactly when I read this book. Maybe within the last year, I read Cal Newport's book called Slow Productivity, which I thought was refreshing because he opens up uh his book with a chapter about a story about a man who I can't remember all the details because I'm I'm no no good at that, but I do remember this image of this man lying on his back on a picnic bench uh for days, maybe even weeks, I don't know, months maybe. He was working on a problem. And instead of heading into his desk and sitting there and really doing what we what most people would call work. Oh, look, he's working really hard. This person was lying on his back and it looked like he was doing nothing. And then he had this brilliant idea or made the connections, and he went eventually and did something absolutely um fantastic, something that nobody else had thought of. I don't know, I can't remember. But I remember thinking that didn't look efficient. It didn't look like he was um an example of of um good productivity, but he was. And this is how our children are, aren't they? That they're sitting there in the sandpit thinking about something else, they're lying on their beds thinking. Um, not all every day, every hour of unschooling looks busy. There are a lot of times when kids and parents are just sitting and thinking, and it doesn't look efficient, but in the long run, it's very efficient. Uh I didn't know, I really enjoyed that story. Uh Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. And the other thing that I found, which I haven't read all of, I I I can't help but download all these books from the ideas. I think I want to know more. Um, a book called Writing to Learn by William Zinsa, I think the name is. Uh, and he was saying uh, how do we get, how do we encourage people to write? And then he uh connected the idea of writing and a passion. So if you are really interested in maths, maybe you can write about maths, or if you're really interested in science, write about science. And they were taking these ideas and applying them in educational institutes, and that's just writing and one other subject, but to me it seemed more efficient and also more enjoyable, and the learning would be real learning. And I just wonder how many other ideas like this will filter their way through into the general um population, general educational uh systems. I haven't got much hope for schools. I think there all the times I've been looking at schools, there hasn't been, as you were saying earlier, Sandra, they try this for a while and then they try that for a while when that doesn't work. Uh, it would take a lot for there to be a revolutionary idea, unless, of course, it was in a private school or one of these, um, one of those schools, uh, they're different schools. Um some of them are parent schools. Alternative schools, yeah. Uh I'm trying, I can't remember the name of the one I was thinking of. But they I'm not sure. But there are various schools who were where they're trying new ideas, but I'm just sort of thinking about the general school population. It's not likely to happen. But yeah, I just I like discovering, I guess, unschooling ideas in the general um society. I think, wow, look, I we know that, we know that. Of course, that's who cares about saving two minutes on your typing, yeah, lie on your back on a picnic bench for a few weeks and uh allow all those connections to to to percolate and then get up and efficiently do the attackle that problem that you've been thinking about.

Sandra Dodd: 57:58
So I like that one anyway. To go with that guy on the bench, they have long said that Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree. And an apple fell on him, and he started thinking about gravity. And Einstein was riding a train, he was a commuter, he's on that train a lot, sitting just thinking, and he came up with the theory of relativity. And it's pretty easy to do, I think. Trains are passing by things. So he's out of his peripheral vision, things are changing, shape and and location relative to where he is, and he just thought about it. A lot of what Einstein did was what he called thought experiments. He would get an idea and he would just keep the idea in his head and think about it and think about it and think about it, and run all kinds of sort of simulations, uh, you know, to see if he thought what he had discovered or proposed was true, just by sort of running simulations in his head over a long time.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:54
If we can get away from the idea of efficiently learning, that the unschooled children have to efficiently learn what is learned in school. If we take that standard of the curriculum out of the equation and just look at the learning that is actually happening, not comparing it. I would guess it's intuitively clear even to not non-unschoolers that the things you learn when you learn them voluntarily will stay in there. You know, they jump at something and then they learn it. And there's no pushing around. You know, we all know from our own life that when we're really motivated to learn something, we're really curious about it, we really or we really need to know because now the tire is punctuated. We have a flat tire, we're in the desert, we have two liters of water left, and we don't speak the language, and we don't know how to change a tire. So if we can't stop someone who can help us, we're quite in trouble actually. And we need to communicate with that person. I guarantee you, you're gonna learn a lot from that moment, or you're gonna learn to change a tire. So, and children who I'm not saying they're under that kind of pressure when they're home, when they're unschooled, but they're under that kind of motivation. They really want to learn when they learn something, and they're not even learning it because they want to learn, as Sandra said about so the gaming is just always such a great example. Um, but you know, if if they want to win the game, they need to overcome this obstacle, or they want to complete the game, and and they really want to complete the game, so they have to get over this obstacle, and and so they learn. I just and or they're really interested in this novel they're reading, and they want to know what happens to the main character, and and and somehow all of this maybe it's set in some historical time, or maybe it's sci-fi thought experiments about how technology could work, or whatever, all of that just enters and becomes pieces in in that big puzzle of things that they can think about, and it's very, very efficient. Uh, it just becomes part of who they are and and what pieces they have to work with when their brain is working. I've been, and of course, this is stories, but I've been overwhelmed so many times about what they know. And I think about teenagers now because I I'm surrounded by I work with a lot of, I have a lot of teenagers myself, and and then I see all their friends, and we we attend all these events with a lot of teens, and I'm just overwhelmed by the things they know. But they don't have to arrive at the point of teenagers to to sometimes um what's the word? Surprise us. One of my favorite stories, I've probably shared it before on the podcast, is when we many years ago, when yeah, that must be 10 years ago, my my now 19-year-old son was nine, and we were in Paris, and we went in. We have this tradition. When you go to Paris, you have to see Mona Lisa in the Eiffel Tower. It because we have family there, we've been many times, and it's it's kind of a joke, you know, you don't have to look at Mona Lisa every time. But anyway, we go to the Louvre, we have to see Mona Lisa because that's the tradition. Um, and it's a very, very, very hot day. And uh the Louvre is very, very warm inside, all the windows, none of them open, obviously, because you don't want the artwork stolen, you need to control the temperature or the humidity, all of that. We're sweating. You can't take off your t-shirt because you're in France. Um, so uh, what do we do? We go to the basement, and in the basement, they have a collection of uh all kinds of stuff from old Egypt. Um, and we thought, let's go see that. We've seen the lady now, we will go down and and look at um everything from Egypt. I cannot say the right word in English. Every time I try, I fail. So now I'm just working around it. Egyptology? Egyptology? The it uh okay, and then say it collect the Egypt the collection. The

Cecilie Conrad: 01:03:10
Egyptian Well, I wouldn't.

Sandra Dodd: 01:03:13
Are you do you want me to say Egyptological? Well, no, actually, I don't know. I can't see it either.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:03:18
No, no, no, anyways, we go down there, we start looking at stuff from Egypt, and and uh this nine-year-old kid, remember, he can't read. This is the same kid who learned to read at 13. This kid he can't read, and he just starts explaining everything to the rest of the group. So uh his three siblings and his parents, and we're down to the nitty-gritty. He finds hieroglyphs pointing at them, showing us. You see this one? Can you see how it's been changed? This one actually looked different when it was first made on this Sakophag. Saco, I don't know the English terms. Um, look how they changed the top of it, and you can go over here and see. Here is a newer one where that hieroglyph looks like this. So this is so, but they went back in time and changed all of them because now they wanted this to look different, and so they changed their own history, and he was just going on and on. This Egypt story is a very long, long story with a lot of different cultures emerging and falling apart and all that. And I was like, I have I'm an unschooler, I'm with this kid 24 or 7. I have no idea how he knows all these things. I don't know why how he learned. I know now because we talked about it, but in the in the moment, I was just, how does he know? Where does this come from? He can't read. We we didn't watch a big fat documentary on hieroglyphs. I don't know what's going on here. This happens very often. They pick up something and they pick it up to some detail that's crazy, and they remember it. So once they are in a very hot day in France and and it's too hot to look at at the fine arts, so you go to the basement and look at other stuff, suddenly, you know. And then of course it becomes this exploration, and it has to become an exploration in French because they're not very accommodating at the Louvre, or they weren't at the time. So you're reading all the signs in French, which is hard when you don't speak French. So I had to do all of the um I speak French, so it became a language lesson suddenly, and lesson, but it became an exploration of how do we get from the limited French that I can read to the things my son knows. It would be way easier for him to read it because he he has all the lingo. I didn't. Became a very, very fun afternoon. One of these stories about how they efficiently install or how they know a lot of detail about something very specific. And no one taught them. It just happened. And I see that with a lot of teenagers now, a lot of young people that. They have extensive knowledge about things. They know a lot about the things they know about. Um, and and I want to say one more thing about that, which is they've learned these things under no pressure. No one's been judging them, no one's been pushing them, no one's been telling them what to learn and not learn. No one stopped them when it was a rabbit hole, when they just went down some strain of this thing, some what some might call irrelevant, little detail, and spent too much time watching YouTube videos, reading Wikipedia, making drawings about some minor detail. Let's say about what kind of shoes they were wearing on that expedition, Sandra talked about last time. Uh not last time, just a few minutes ago. Um, what kind of shoes were they wearing? And they have no idea what continent it happened on. They don't know the year, you know, they don't have that framework that we think they should have. They're just interested in shoemaking at the time. And and we might think, but actually, all of these rabbit holes they go down becomes this framework of extensive knowledge, of detailed knowledge, of research, of knowing a lot about the thing that actually interests you. So maybe they become a designer or an archaeologist, understanding everything about foot culture, whatever, it doesn't matter even. Um, I'm just trying to get at a point where as there is no emotional damage, there is no, there was no pressure and there's no trauma, no one's been judging them, no one's been making them feel they should have known the year and the continent. Then once you talk with them about things and there's some what could be called holes in the fabric of the knowledge, you realize I have holes in my fabric of the knowledge because I have no idea about the shoes or other things I don't know. And it becomes this just interested conversation. We can all flip out our phone and use Wikipedia and become a little smarter and figure out how it all fits together. They have no shame when they don't know a detail and they have no problem figuring it out or saying, Well, I don't really care about that kind of thing. I care about other things. And and and they move on beautifully and and care a lot about the things they care about. And and that makes for the knowledge they do have to be, let's use the word efficient. It's there, and they can use it and they can put it into play.

Sandra Dodd: 01:08:52
I think the efficiency is time, the the lack of of parental duty, uh work and how much can be learned in the same amount of time that kids are in school, how little can be learned if they're careful, because kids try not to learn in school, a lot of them. They just they take it as a game that if they can sit through a class and not do anything, they won. And so if in the absence of all that, if the parents aren't worried about what they what their responsibility might be in getting their kids to learn, or they can come to see it differently, where their responsibility is providing a clean canvas, you know, clean, give them a table, give them some things to work with, give them some ideas, access to videos, move old movies, new movies, whatever it is that that will cause that child to have new thoughts and see new things. So the parent can provide those things, make them available, and the efficiency is how much information those kids take in and process and connect without any effort on anyone's part. It's very impressive. There was a discussion. Uh I I used to do a lot of text discussions, sometimes two a week, you know, over these mass last many years. And some of them are uh there are transcripts online on my page, but there was one where we were talking about tension and not tension like where people are mad at each other and somebody's about to scream. The tension that holds bridges up, the tension that holds a tent up. So you have some things pointing up and some things pulling down, and that tension holds the tent even if it the wind blows. Um, and so then we're so we're in this discussion, and I saw the thing about sailboats. I said, like the ropes on sails, and then in comes Frank Meyer into the chat, and he has he he can sail. He had a boat, I think he got some damage in a hurricane, but um, but he he knows a lot about sailing. And they had a like a little, I don't know the names for levels of sailboats, but you know, yacht-ish, you can go a long way on it, people can sleep. Um, and so Frank shows up and reads back a little bit and he goes, Oh yeah, and he starts talking about I said, So the tension that new unschoolers come in with, I'm not gonna be able to quote it well, but people can find it on my site if you go and look up uh efficiency, because it turned into a discussion of energy and efficiency. And Frank described how sailboats work, and then he said, When you start a trip, you know, you take the boat out, you're doing the best thing that you know at that moment to do as to setting the sails. And he said, and then the wind comes, and what the wind's trying to do is push the boat over, and so you change the angles of the sails so that you're taking that wind and the boat's moving. And so Frank is just you know describing it just quickly. So if anybody who's listening here knows about sailboats, go and read that, go find uh just look up efficiency and boat and you'll find it. But it's it's really interesting because he really knew what he was talking about. And he said, it's like that with new unschoolers, they don't want to do too much of this and not enough of that. So, but he he described it in that sort of way. And so he said, So you start and then you have to adjust it as it goes. And the same with when you start unschooling, you start with the best you know, and then it doesn't work very well, or one day people aren't in the mood, and then you so you figure out how to adjust for that until after a while you're really efficient. And so I'm like, oh, so I was reading that today and I went, Oh, it did turn to efficiency. Um, because he was talking about how you efficiently, in the same way that a sailor needs to know a lot about the boat and about the wind and about the sails and the ropes, unschoolers start to learn what it is that they need to help their kids have a good unschooling experience in the moment, and they adjust as things go, as things happen. That's great.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:12:50
I think I'm defaulting to criticizing the school system, and I'm not sure. I'm going to do it again now. Go ahead. Another thought I've had, and I've had it because I have been working with math recently. I'll explain why uh soon enough. But I've seen uh math books from the school system. And it made me think about what I call stupid learning. I'm sorry, excuse me. Please forgive me, everyone, but I call it stupid learning. I think in the school books I see a lot of stupid learning. Um, I see a lot of technique learning and umor attempts to. This is created so that we can try to teach children things in stupid ways. And I call it stupid learning because it looks like this way of teaching something is based on the idea that to learn something, you need a base knowledge of it, and you need some sort of curiosity. It seems like the school books know this, and so they teach things before they really teach them to get ready to teach them later, to create that base knowledge, which means the child is just going to be confused because there's no real explanation going on. It's like, I don't know, it's weird. And and then they try to create some sort of curiosity. Uh, in my language, I would call it ho hodie po. Um, I don't really know how to translate it, just like some sort of um, I don't know, try to make it colorful or try to make it um, they try to translate the math into um some sort of um story about young people in the school setting because they think that will make it more relatable for the children, or but in a in a in a just talking down to the intelligence of children, actually, some adult idea about what it feels like that and and that's not an adult who actually knows what it feels like, it's weird. Um so it becomes this stupid version of the thing that you're trying to teach the child instead of just saying what it is, you you're making it lighter or without all the explanations because you think that's too hard. I don't know. And and so they're real holes in it, they jump logic steps with missing parts, so it's not logic. So you ask the child to just accept it so that maybe later on you can learn the logic behind it, which is just damn confusing. It confuses even me. I'm quite good at math, and I can't figure it out because there's just things that don't work, and then you have this trying to get them interested by putting it in some framework that's completely irrelevant and not interesting, it's just distracting, it's it's not helpful. I've seen it in the math books. I also think I see it with um the way they teach to read and write. It's as if it's made for only those who have a hard time reading and writing. So the techniques are there because it would work in case you have a child who's struggling, and then you start using it for smaller children who are not actually really ready, or maybe they are ready, but they need some space, you know, they need to just absorb. But now they're working with stupid learning, and they're taught that they need to learn it this way, and it's stupid, and they only learn half of it. But that's so ridiculously ineffective, it's amazing, it's overwhelmingly ineffective, isn't it?

Sandra Dodd: 01:16:54
And so to what efficient it's a waste of some people's time, but the teacher's teaching, the teacher's doing what he's getting paid for. Yeah. And you said they skip a step, but maybe you're maybe they skipped a step that you needed, but maybe the other kids either weren't listening and didn't give a rat's ass because they weren't gonna do it anyway, or they already understand it well enough that this is just a review. And that's what I was talking about, the 10 who who already know the 10 who might be actually lear candidates for learning, and the 10 who aren't candidates for learning because they're not ready for it, they don't care, they hate you, they hate the subject. So the the thing that's come up a couple of times is that example I gave of schools switching their focus or their philosophy from rote learning and memorization to exploration and logic and you know, understanding and switching back. Probably what's happening is half the kids benefit from one way and half the kids benefit from the other because people have different personalities, different intelligences. So the kids who think in math ways, like my husband, who could set up this schedule, you know, for driving across town in super efficient ways, he said from the time he was really little, he saw things in patterns. And so when they started teaching him math, he got it instantly. And he was telling me this earlier this week about when he was when he first went to the university and they gave him replacement tests, and they kept giving him tests, and he kept like he's getting up to the point where he could take math that was for juniors. Um without and I said, Are you thinking are they gonna give you credit for the stuff you the other stuff? And he said, No, they didn't offer that. If they had offered to let him just take the tests, he could have gotten some college credit, but he didn't think to ask. So yeah, um, and I and I wasn't that way with math. I wanted them to tell me what it was good for. And I told him one time years ago when we were young, I said, I didn't like math in school, I didn't understand what they were talking about. They'd give me a list of 28 problems that were just numbers, and then there would be two, and they were stories, they were questions in English. You know, what how would you do this? How much fence do you need to buy? How many bananas does each person get? You know, that kind of stuff. And I said, word problems. And he said the most wonderful thing to me that made me feel so much better. And he said, the word problems are the only math there. The the number, what they call number problems, that's the math is already done of some story they didn't tell you, and all they want you to do is do the calculations. Right? Oh my gosh, I did understand math, but I only understand it if it's in English. You know, tell me what the problem is. What do you what do you need numbers moved around for? And then I was happy. But if they just say blah, blah, blah, bunch of numbers, you know, algebraic formulation, do it. What is it? And it doesn't matter, just do it. So I always want to know what it was. But the kids who don't want to know what it is would would work really well by just memorizing and doing calculations and not being asked for what the concept is. So that reminded me of Sue's daughter playing with workbooks. People used to say, Would you ever let your kids do workbooks? And I said, Yeah, I would put them with the coloring books and the dot to dot in the mazes. I wouldn't make them do workbooks. And whatever her daughter was using that book for, puzzles, probably, like a puzzle. Work this puzzle. She wasn't trying to figure out what the math was or what I don't even know what kind of workbook it was, you know, what what the history of verbs or whatever it was. She didn't care. She wasn't trying to, you know, be an archaeologist or an anthropologist figuring out where this came from and what kind of people do it. She's just working the puzzles. And so some people from that would figure out some math concept and some wouldn't, and that's fine. So if we let our kids approach and experience and play with things in their own way, with their own interests, with their own personality and their own intelligences, that's efficient.

Sue Elvis: 01:20:51
I never thought of that before, Sandra, about um playing, um, doing workbooks as puzzles, but now thinking about it just on on the spur at the moment while I'm sitting here listening. Uh she probably the rules for filling in the questions on that page. So she sort of said to herself, she probably said, Oh, I know the rule for this. Now I'll fill it in. But there's a different rule for the next page. And it's like figuring out, yeah, as you say, a puzzle, what's the code? How do I break this code? But it's going to be different. And you don't remember it, you just work it out for the page. Oh, yeah, I understand that, but it's not really useful as far as uh long-term, like you were saying about anthropology or whatever. She's not thinking, she was not thinking about how she would ever use these um concepts that she was learning about. It was just a game. So I've never thought about how it was in some ways useful for her as an exercise in puzzles that she enjoyed that. All I thought was, she's not learning that. Why do it? I'm just ticking off boxes, and it looks like my daughter has learnt all these, um covered all this grammar. And really, yes, she did, but she hasn't retained any of it. Well, um, I was also thinking about in terms of efficiency, that if we're trying to cover the school curriculum, which we had to do as home school uh as registered homeschoolers, then unschooling isn't really an efficient way to cover exactly what they're doing at school. I remember looking at the syllabus before our registration visits and thinking, wow, however we're going to prove that we've done all that. And it seemed to me that the only efficient way to do it was to buy workbooks based on what they would use at school, a geography one, a history one, a science one. I'm not saying that's an efficient way to learn, but an efficient way to look like you have covered the curriculum. But I mean, we did we managed anyway. But I was also thinking about how unschooling isn't of an efficient way for kids to learn what they need to know. And then I'm thinking about Cecilia and her web of knowledge and how we all have an individual web. And that led to a thought again about ideas out there in society. And we were talking last week, I mentioned a book called Tiny Experiments. And I I don't I went down a big rabbit hole after reading that book and discovered such a thing called digital gardens. I don't know if if you have come across that. And people are, if you, for example, the most efficient way of doing a digital garden, uh doing a yeah, a digital garden, you can do it on paper, but digitally it's more efficient to put together your own personal garden. And what you do is you maybe pick up a bit of knowledge, have an idea, and you make a note about it in your digital garden, and then you connect your ideas until you've got a big web. And in the process of doing all that, it leads to more ideas and more thoughts, so that it's a way of of course, uh, an innovative idea is combining two ideas, separate ideas, somewhere else, and you put them together, you've created something new. And so, this web, you've got all these ideas and thoughts all connected together, and it just reminded me again of what we were talking about about our children's and our own uh personal network or web of learning. And I just thought as I was reading about these digital gardens and listening to all these people on YouTube talking about them, and I thought, wow, you've discovered something that we discovered ages ago. You have just um you've just given us some ideas, the tools, some new tools, new technology in a way that we can visually see it on a screen. Uh, instead of just have um seeing it inside someone's head

Sue Elvis: 01:25:35
or whatever. But yeah, I really like that. Digital gardens and that um the value, the efficiency of learning and the efficiency of having our own personal web of learning, how that's the way uh that we're gonna move forward with our own ideas, our own thoughts. Um, yeah, well, that's how we're going to get the knowledge that we personally need and are interested in. So my digital garden's growing. So isn't it always?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:26:11
We're always learning.

Sue Elvis: 01:26:12
We are, but I guess sometimes I think I've got this big digital garden in my head, and I haven't been putting it down in a visual form. And if I sat there and put all the notes down, there wouldn't be enough space. All this unschooling has, yeah, these internal digital, not digital because they're internal, but our internal gardens of knowledge. So, but the way it's called garden is the idea starts off as a seed. You write your seed down, and then you're connecting things in and you're thinking, and it grows to a seedling, and then it might grow a bit further. And and what I really loved about it too was you don't have to start, you don't have to think you have to have a finished idea. You just have a seed and you let it grow and you collaborate with other people, and your idea will germinate your seed, and then it will grow to whatever it's supposed to be, and you've got your uh end idea, which I suppose isn't might be the start of a new one and keep on going. But I rather liked the imagery in those digital gardens. Um yeah, very unschooly, I think.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:27:31
The web of knowledge, how it works, how efficient it is to have a web of knowledge that actually makes sense for you yourself.

Sandra Dodd: 01:27:39
Another related analogy to that is the explanation for what radical unschooling means, which is radius, it radiates from the roots, but like from the seed. So, whatever your first idea is, that unschooling is, if that just grows and spreads. So, oh, you know it will work for learning to speak, you see that it will work for. Learning to count and for seeing the patterns in those numbers, and pretty soon you're seeing that it works for learning about food and learning about other people who aren't in your family. And you know, it's just if you treat each thing in an unschooling way, because you're unschooled, because you've become an unschooler, because you come to see learning in its own natural ways, then that's that's what radical unschooling was meant to be from the roots. And I haven't I have advice for new unschoolers here to be more efficient. Don't uh come to where you don't think in terms of subject matter, history and science. Because one thing about that is it encourages school kids in school to decide early on at a very young age that they hate English or science or history or math, hate it, not gonna listen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't care. Math and science cover so many areas. If how can a kid hate everything? Hate the Vikings and the Egyptians and you know, North American, Native, uh, you know, what was called till the other day, Indians, and the Indians in India and Australia. When do people go to Australia and why? That has to do with American history, but most people don't think about that much. Um so all of these things eventually become one big set of knowledge. But when kids are little, if they just hate hearing about World War I, they're so tired of hearing about German submarines or whatever it might be. So they decide they hate history just before it comes to some other subject that they might have loved. So don't talk about history to your kids. If you talk about ships and sailing, talk, let it be that. And don't say, oh, this is technology. It's so it's science, and it's also history. And it's also geography, because we're talking about who had what kinds of boats. Eee, don't do that. Avoid it. Just talk about the thing that they're interested in at that moment and don't categorize those things. Partly because it'll help your de schooling to undo those categories, partly because some things fall through the cracks like architecture. No kids in school learn about architecture. It's not a thing. But the white people build things, houses, bridges, boats, all kinds of things that they have engineered or that they traditionally build out of adobe or wood or brick or rock. The people in that area, the old guys, might know how to do it. And other people in other places will have no earthly idea how they're doing those dry stone walls, the dikes in Scotland. And and people in New Mexico, some people just learn to make adobe houses by seeing their grandpa make it. They know how to make the bricks, they know how to frame the windows, they know how to make the roof waterproof. But there's no sense, you know, they're not setting up a symposium to teach anybody else. It's just a thing that the local contractors know. So where in school do they talk about that? They do not. But if a kid is interested in that, that's geography and that's history of science, but don't say so. But it's it's good for the parents to know it, but not to cling to it. Not to uh if you have to report, start taking notes. They just covered three subjects at one at one blow. That's great. So it is inefficient to even look at the kids with the idea that you need to put them through this shoot to to do science, and that's enough science for the week. Come back, come back. Now we're gonna do history. Ah, that's full of science. So don't, don't the less division you have in your heart and your soul, uh, the better that your kids will like all the things that come across. And the things that they don't like, they'll avoid, but don't worry about that because it's gonna connect somewhere else. All those connections can be made as long as the kids are curious, and they don't have to learn everything before they're 18 either. Because they'll, if you're lucky, if you show a good example to them of being interested as an adult in all these things that come by, they can do it forever too. They can do it for life, pretty efficient.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:32:04
And even children who come out of the school system don't all know everything. It I we touched upon it earlier in this conversation, how unfair it somehow is that for home educators, they it seems like the governmental um checking system is checking each child. Did they learn all the things? Whereas if they check a school, they check did they teach all the things and they accept that some of the kids come out not being good at math or not succeeding in let's say say languages, whatever. But for our children, it becomes this idea that all of them have to check all the boxes of all the academic stuff. And and maybe as unschoolers, or not maybe, I believe that as unschoolers, we have to let go of that idea. Some children will never be interested in history, not in a way that looks like history to the rest of the world, anyways. Um and they might be good at something completely different. I think it's an important thing to let go of.

Sandra Dodd: 01:33:10
But whatever they are interested in, they will naturally know the history of that thing, whether it's Nintendo gaming systems, you know, what came first, and uh, you know, S N E S or 64, why, why, what does that mean? You know, 8-bit, 16-bit, 64-bit. When that comes by in math, powers of two, they have it. They already know it because they know about Nintendo's. The kids who don't know about Nintendo's, that's fine. They know about something else. If they if they're interested in clothing or sewing, they'll know the history of different kinds of fabrics. What wasn't available in in what days, what was not popular in what days. People went a long time not wearing wool here. It's just you know, partly we're in the desert, but it just you couldn't even buy it if you tried. Or linen, linen was impossible. And now, if you're sewing, you can get wool and linen really easily because fads, fashions, manufacturing opportunities change. And people who cook know that some ingredients weren't available, or some ingredients that used to be available are hard to get now. They'll just learn that, and that's history. But there's no sense calling it history because in no history class in the world in school are they going to talk about those things.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:34:19
The thing is also, then this is actually a good critique, good example of a critique of the idea of efficiency, is that you have this, let's say, the scaffolding of learning history is that you learn some names for some stages of the history of humanity. Um, and that's the idea. That's that's what we have in our minds. They need to know these different things, and they need to be able to say the industrial revolution and know what become that it comes after the French Revolution or whatever. And and and so these are like the headlines, these are the scaffolding parts. Um, but maybe the scaffold is very different. It doesn't have to come from that. When my mother was a child, the scaffolding was the line of kings. So you had to be able to know the line of kings and uh and know what they did and who they were. And and and by knowing the line of kings, you'd had the scaffolding for your understanding of the history of the world. It's it's pretty arbitrary what the scaffolding is. And if you're very interested in cooking, then maybe the scaffolding will be the introduction of spices in your country or traditions for cooking Christmas meals, how they changed over years, and what happened before there was even something called Christmas, what was the traditional winter meal at that point? And that will be your scaffolding. One of my children is very, very much into dogs, and I I've had so many years of just translating everything she learned into dogs. So if and she does it herself. Okay, I get this. If it was a dog, then and math becomes dogs, and history becomes dogs, and psychology becomes dogs, all kinds of things. She just takes it back to okay, but if this was a group of dogs, then this would happen. Or yeah, so and I think if we're pushing our logic of what the core is or the scaffolding is or the basic is, we're ruining their natural attempt, not attempt, their natural process of establishing scaffolding base layers that or seed points, which is a way better way to think about it, it's less mathematical, less linear. Their seeds that they put in their inner gardens, we we we devaluate them by saying it's something else. You need to learn the line of kings. We're not interested in the shoe part, kings, or wars. I've been taught a lot of wars. I was never interested in history before I started learning history from a different angle because the wars is just not I don't know, not interesting. Wars and borders and governments. So we're ruining efficiency by deciding what's efficient, basically. We have to let's point it. Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:37:24
Scaffolding is a really good term to use. Pam Sarushian used that a lot. That kids come up with different scaffolding that they're building on, but they fill it in.

Sue Elvis: 01:37:35
You can have a scaffold of musicians or artists or literature or development in the thought of mathematics, if that's what you uh are interested in, philosophy, theology.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:37:51
Or human cooperation with dogs. We have it back to you know, cave paintings. That's the scaffolding for my daughter's understanding of the history of the world.

Sandra Dodd: 01:38:01
It's great, it works. I had an anthropology professor who told us when I was in at university said dogs have lived with people since before they were friends, you know, they would live near people because they'd eat the scraps, and the re and people it was a uh symbiotic relationship because people can't hear that well, smell that well, and dogs can't see that well. Yeah, so that was awesome. So if there's if they're sleeping at night and some other animal comes, the dogs will know first, and the people can jump up with the sticks and do something about it. Yeah, works really well.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:38:38
Yeah. So another thing, and I think we need to wrap up soon, but I wanted to touch upon Sue said that in Australia she had to prove or somehow make sure that her children year to year was subjected to a specific chunk of knowledge that somehow is provided by the state. And I think unschooling is very affected by the laws around it. When I talk about stupid learning, it might be because where I come from, the law basically says when they arrive at being 15 years old, so they've done the 10 years of mandatory schooling, they need to be at a level high enough to enter what we call the youth education. So they don't have to know the same things as in the public school system curriculum, but it has to have the same level, and this doesn't always work in real life. Some of the checking people they refer back to the public school system lists of things they learn in fourth grade and fifth grade and so on and so forth. But the reality of the law is actually they just have to, when they are 15, be at a point where they can enter into the youth education. So I've been looking at well, we we exited that whole thing when we started traveling, but the idea in my mind has always been that they need to arrive at that point at that age. And I've never I have been worried, but the worry have uh evaporated over the years because I've seen how things just happen naturally. So I'm like, yeah, whatever it's gonna happen, whether I'm there or not, basically. Um but it

Cecilie Conrad: 01:40:44
does make things like, well, math is just such a clear example, it's not the only one. If you need to be able to do these things mathematically and understand them on an in-between level, then maybe just learn that. You don't have to learn all the precursors, you don't have to learn all the steps before. You don't have to let's say you need to be able to multiply, but only with numbers up to five. There's no reason to, you know, you might just might as well just learn multiplication. When you sit down, just sit down, learn it all right away and all the details of it. End of story. Tick box. Someone actually came out with a book here in our country. Uh, it was a grandfather who used to be a school teacher, and it's called Granddad's Work uh Math Book. He came out with a book because he thought all the school books were just too much and there was too much stupid learning in it. And it's uh 120 pages, I'm gonna say. Covers everything, everything you learn in those 10 years. And and he has three three examples of of um problems to solve for each thing you need to learn uh on each stage, kind of, because he says if you can do it, you can do it. You don't have to do it 500 times. If you can do it, you can do it, and that's all you need to learn. If you love doing it, go ahead and find more resources on the internet and do it a hundred times. But if you can do it, you've understood the math behind it, end of story. And so, what I'm aiming at is just to say to me, efficiency is to look at well, where do we need to arrive at? If we need to arrive somewhere, we so what's then goal? Do we need to take all these 200 steps behind it? And I just see that because of the difference in the laws, maybe some people have to do all the stupid learning or the lower level learning, or the, you know, if you have to report back every year that you've done something specific, it's a different story from coming from where I come from. And that makes it inefficient because you have to disturb the natural flow of learning.

Sandra Dodd: 01:42:54
But the kids probably learn so much that you're not taking away from the time they needed to learn more. I don't think that if you take some time out to look at some formal math so to prepare them for a test or whatever it's gonna be for a particular school entry. If the rest of their time has been spent in exploring and and playing and discussing and discovering, I don't think that an occasional departure for some formal reason is going to take away anything they've learned.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:43:28
No, they're not gonna unlearn it. Yeah. No, no, and and and I also think uh as we've talked about many times, we live in in some version of reality in a country with and a state and a town and with with some laws and some neighbors and some things we have to relate to. So if we as unschoolers have to report back to a school system twice a year and they want us to do some specific things, and that's the gateway. We have to do it, otherwise they will not leave us alone. That well, then do it. It's not like it's going to ruin unschooling. You just do it and move on.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:44:06
Yeah.

Sue Elvis: 01:44:06
Or sometimes you realize by observing very carefully and uh noting down things your kids are doing that you've covered it anyway. It just doesn't look like they have it in the curriculum. Uh it's all wordy, it's all he sometimes looks at the curriculum and think, what does that mean? But if you familiarize yourself with the curriculum, what they're actually looking for, you can find examples that your kids have done. For example, um, I remember ratios, and I could have sat down because we had to cover ratios, and then I realized my kids were interested in Creamary's doll's house, which is the um replicas, little furniture in the big this huge big doll's house, but it's all done on ratios. It's uh so I don't know, a percentage of the original uh piece of furniture.

Sandra Dodd: 01:45:05
Well, like model trains, like model trains have a scale. Yeah.

Sue Elvis: 01:45:08
Exactly. And so as long as I recognize that that's ratios and my kids were interested in it, I could tick that off and think there's no point doing some fancy examples, as you were saying earlier, Sandra, about uh having a story for your mess or just having those algebraic um equations, it makes more sense in when you have a context. Kids can see that what a ratio is when they're looking at the doll's house. Now, they might not have the language, but they know the concept. And so quite often, if a parent is very observant and familiar with what's expected, we can see that learning going on efficiently while they're doing other things, while they're just interested in the world and um playing.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:46:07
So yeah, I agree. And also I want to kind of take it back because we don't have to do it. We don't have to do what the system is trying to demand of us. It's actually important that some people in in all of the different societies challenge that system and say, Do we really have to do that? I I come to think of uh an unschooling mom I I um recently met who's German, living in Germany, openly unschooling her children. Uh, she walked into the office of uh, so they she got the letter that she had to send her kids to school and otherwise this, that, and the other. And it's quite illegal in Germany to home educate. And uh there was an address on the piece of paper and an opening hours of the office, and she said, Why don't I go talk to them? So she walks over there, knocks the door. No one has ever done that before. It's not an office with a guest chair, um, because no one does that. And and she says, and they were like, What are you doing here? And she said, Well, I got this letter, and can I talk to the person who sent me the letter? And they were totally confused. But finally, she talked to them, and she basically just said, You know, I know that you're doing what you're supposed to do. You, it's your job to do what you're doing. I'm I'm just here to tell you, I'm not going to do it. You don't have to send me any more letters. I'm a citizen in this country. I feel I have the right to live here. I'm German and and um so are my children, my husband, and and we we like our house. And but I'm not going to send my kids to school. It's not compatible with our values, it's not, it it doesn't really work for me. So don't keep telling, keep sending me those letters. It's not it's not going to change anything. Um, and and they were quite confused, and they were like, Well, then what do we do? And I said, Well, you have to figure out what the laws are. But you and here's my number. You just call me, I'll come back and have a conversation. And so the story goes on. And at the end of this story is,

Cecilie Conrad: 01:48:12
oh, but if you don't send your kids to school, there's a fine to pay. And so she pays a fine twice a year. She shows up, pays a fine. Hi, it's me again. Still not going to send my kids to school. Here, here, you got your money. Goodbye. And that is challenging the system, but she did it in a nice way. She's a very kind, nice person. She was not fighting the system, she was not attacking the system, she was being nice. So, what do I need to do instead? So, anyway, I think we should all we should, of course, do that. We should. And we shouldn't roll out workbooks if they say our kids need to learn fractions. We can see how do they do that in real life and translate it, translate what we're doing into something understood by the system. That's great. It's just a lot of work, apparently, in Australia.

Sandra Dodd: 01:49:01
They may just need the notation, they may have the concepts already and the abilities, but they need to see what it looks like written down, and that doesn't take very long. Um, all two of my kids took remedial math classes when they were late in their later teens, and one tested out of it. Like we went and took the placement tests for the community college, and one didn't need the remedial, might have taken one anyway, just because he wanted to get up to speed. So they're teaching everything that kids learn in 12 years of public school and teaching it in six or eight weeks. So that's what my kids did. And they but they didn't they understood the ideas, but they didn't know the notation. It would be like being a really good singer, but not being able to read music. So uh gradually over those few weeks they learned to read it. And when they could read it, they just zoomed.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:49:48
Wow.

Sandra Dodd: 01:49:48
Because they had examples like like furniture or whatever. They had the examples already in them and understood how it what it was for. So they were living story problems. Who had never seen it written down.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:50:03
One of my children is doing the exact same thing right now. They uh have decided, um, all four of them, actually, um, but my two middle children who are 17 and 19 have decided that they want to enter university at some point. And to do that in this country, you need some specific level of exams. And there's no well, it's a very long way around it if you want to go that way around it. But they thought it'll be fun to study these things anyway. I want these exams so I can enter university in a few years. But they had to test into that system, as they've not been in the regular system, they have no papers, no exams, no nothing. So they were testing into the system of the what we call the youth education. That's preparation for university. I think it's like, I don't know, maybe your year 12 and first year of college level kind of thing. Being fully unschooled, there's a lot of school format they've never done. And my daughter has done very little math. She's not very interested. She's done no math, really. Uh, my son makes math, does math for funsies, so that was different. But my daughter's 17, never, never really done any math. It's a lie to say none at all because sometimes she's been playing with it, but yeah, basically nothing. Um, and she tested in, and the lowest level they can test at this point that the adult education they call G level G. Um, and she she tested over that, which actually surprised me quite a lot. So now they want her to start at level D. So she's and I'm like, she didn't do anything for 17 years besides playing. And now, so that's the first nine years of math that she knows, apparently, without doing anything. And now she's going to do the exam in December, so she has three months to collect everything for

Cecilie Conrad: 01:52:09
I think it might be your first year of college, something like that.

Sandra Dodd: 01:52:13
It's very interesting. And even so, I don't want people who hear this to be afraid. Even if she takes that test and fails, she'll know then what part she did right and what part she needs more work on. She can take it again.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:52:23
And she's doing it voluntarily. She she's just spent a month in Southeast Asia with her boyfriend and his family. She came back and said, I think I want to learn math. And then, well, it all spiral off from my oldest 26-year-old daughter, who did first year of high school, dropped out to do an author's education, has had a career as an author. And not that she's giving that up, but now she's so that's been the past 10 years of her life. She's 26. And now she said, I might want to study biology at the university. So I'll do that youth education thing. I'll just do it online casually. And when she said that, the two younger siblings, 17 and 19, said, Why don't we all do it together? So that's how they entered some more formal education and needed to be tested in. It's just interesting how it all came rolling like that. But actually, she said, I think I want to learn math now. And it came when she was 17. So I know we're wrapping up, but one if I can give a last piece of advice, it's patience. Just be patient, let go and be patient. All the things we're pushing for when they're 10. It might never happen, but it might very well happen when they when they are older teens. Suddenly they want to know and they sit down and they learn.

Sandra Dodd: 01:53:44
Or they find out they already knew.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:53:46
Yeah. Yeah. And they just need it a little more organized, or they need to know the notation, or they want to do a workbook. Anyways, we've been talking for two hours. It's very late in the States. I suppose Sue needs to go take care of her family, and I am going to celebrate a birthday party today. So I have work to do.

Sue Elvis: 01:54:10
It's been nice to I've enjoyed the conversation, and I think I might use that word efficiency in my uh discussions of unschooling from now on. Because yeah, thank you, Sandra, for the topic. It was a very interesting one to explore. It was great. And good night. Thank you for staying up that late.