In this reflection piece, I will discuss my frustrations with conventional schooling and university education. I discuss why there is a need to reform mental health practitioner training. As well as how the unschooling movement has lessons that could be learned and applied to conventional education and what the advantages and disadvantages of unschooling might be.
Before my enrollment at The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), I was pursuing a Masters in Psychotherapy at Regent’s University London (RUL) in the United Kingdom. After two years of attendance at RUL, I chose to transfer to CIIS due to my frustrations with the psychotherapy course. My motivations for studying psychotherapy were so that I could positively impact the mental health of individuals. However, my frustrations grew as I realized we were learning a failing system for dealing with the mental health crisis. I came across research by Khan et al. (2013) that showed that psychotherapy was no more effective than a placebo in improving mental health conditions. This research confirmed to me that I should turn my attention to improving psychotherapy itself.
For psychotherapy to improve, there is a need to change the university education system where it is taught. I was attracted to CIIS by the spirit of activism that the institute aspires to. The module on Knowledge Work and the Modern Academy has demonstrated to me how CIIS is not content to simply perpetuate the colonial method of teaching whereby the student is seen as a bucket that merely needs to be filled with information (Segre, 2015). I felt a strong sense of relief in reading about Wilhelm von Humboldt and his realization that students have “the need of a free environment for the growth of knowledge” (Segre, 2015, p. 4). Furthermore, Humboldt thought that the university’s teacher’s work “should be at the service of the growth of knowledge” (Segre, 2015, p. 174). The idea that we as students should be contributing to the growth of knowledge inspires me to see my work as a contribution to something larger than myself and thus gives me more motivation to work.
At RUL, I realized that we were taught that a psychotherapist is a person who is sought out when a member of society falls off the hamster wheel of modern Western culture. The psychotherapist must then help to get the person back on the hamster wheel. The university gave no attention to the question of whether or not the hamster wheel was where the client should be. Nor how the hamster wheel might be made more accommodating to members of the society, so they don’t fall off in the first place. Estimates from (Merikangas et al., 2010) suggest that one in four people in the United States of America will have a mental health issue supporting the notion that society's mental health problem is a serious one that requires deep examination.
An obstacle to improving education that universities like RUL have is that their syllabus constrains them. When I raised my concern with RUL professors that we were learning a failing system, they acknowledged this. However, they responded that we had a syllabus to learn and could not deviate into topics like this. They stated that exams and assessments needed passing for the student to be deemed competent enough to be licensed psychotherapists. I agree
(DiClementi, 2021) that certain professions such as brain surgeons and airline pilots should be required to demonstrate knowledge and skills relevant to their roles for the safety of all, but more freedom for deviation is necessary for the fields of psychotherapy and psychology. This deviation is especially true given the need for reform of mental health practices and society’s creation of mental health problems in individuals.
Segre (2015, p. 176) supported this complaint about rigidity to syllabi in his critique of the post-Humboldtian academic. Segre says that students have become “more an encyclopedic type of scholar than an innovator” and “remain excessively subject to professors and dependent on the textbook in vogue; they are more inclined to conform than to grow intellectually and are, above all, career-oriented.” At RUL, the students are rewarded simply for learning the material and punished for attempting to reform the system. Perhaps RUL believes that once a student graduates into the psychotherapy profession, they will then be able to improve the domain from that vantage point. However, in the Humboldtian university’s spirit, the best area for reform would be the university. This domain could be where ideas are shared and evolved in a collaborative environment. Once a psychotherapist is in practice, they may be less likely to have the time or the inclination to focus on reforming a profession that they are reliant on for their livelihood.
Segre (2015, p. 149) shares how Sir Francis Bacon had similar criticisms of universities in the 16th Century. Segre states that Bacon saw universities as “excessively oriented toward the teaching of some professions and hostile to innovation; [the university] neglects universal principles and discourages creativity...and there is no exchange of knowledge among institutions.” The modern university grew out of the Industrial Revolution’s circumstances, which has led to a competitive environment where universities are discouraged from sharing their knowledge because it might give a competing university an advantage.
Sir Ken Robinson (2013) agrees that our education system has developed this rigidity because it was “designed in the educational culture of the enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution.” Robertson believes education’s objective is “essentially about conformity, especially as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula.” Popper (Popper, 1986) shares these sentiments and explains that testing is prohibitive to learning because you cannot quantify knowledge, and it is even harder to measure it. While universities spend their time trying to measure their students, they block the progress of knowledge and creativity to society’s detriment.
Robinson (Robinson, 2013) demonstrates how our education system is “modelled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it” by giving the following examples. Schools and universities are like factories with their “ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects… [and organized into] batches...by age group”. While universities give more freedom to students than schools, there is still a great deal of university education rigidity. Robinson’s ultimate motive is to clarify how important it is to give students more freedom and creativity in their learning. The Unschooling movement demonstrates the effectiveness of this style of education.
Unschooling has grown in recent years out of frustration with conventional schooling. The educational theorist John Holt coined the term in the 1970s (Gray & Riley, 2015). Unschooling is a type of home-schooling that does not follow a curriculum (Khan et al., 2012). It does not try to replicate conventional schooling but in a home environment. The child directs their course of learning, and there is no separation between living and learning. The process of learning is done through living. You can see similarities between Unschooling and the Humboldtian university in Segre’s (2015. p. 174) explanation that students in Humboldtian universities “were free to create their own curricula according to their personal interests and intellectual or professional aspirations.” A longing for the return to this Humboldtian ideal is seen in this growth of the Unschooling movement.
Estimates suggest that approximately two million children are home-schooled in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics., 2013). Of these two million, it is estimated that 10% of these children consider themselves unschooled (Gray & Riley, 2013).
In Gray & Riley’s (2013) survey on unschooling, they found that many parents were influenced to abandon traditional schooling because of John Taylor Gatto’s work. Gatto was a former “‘New York State Teacher of the Year’ who left teaching because he was convinced that compulsory schools, no matter how one taught within them, were doing more harm than good.” This statement resonates strongly with me concerning my time at RUL. By perpetuating a failing system of psychotherapy, we were not only wasting our time and money but were also harming future clients who will not receive the optimal form of therapy. The sense I got from RUL was that they did not want to sway from mainstream modes of teaching due to fears of a loss of funding or loss of certification.
Unschooling has become a counter-cultural movement, and one of its biggest obstacles is society’s fear of change. In Gray & Riley’s (2013) research, they found that the parents of unschooled children found the most significant challenge “was that of overcoming feelings of criticism, or social pressure, that came from others who disapproved.” If more parents were made aware of the limitations of conventional schooling and the strengths of Unschooling, perhaps their attitudes would change.
A quote from a teacher who participated in Gray & Riley’s (2013) study illustrates my sentiments about conventional education and its damage to students. This teacher removed his children from traditional schooling because “it pained him that so many students had simply given up all enthusiasm for learning” by the time they reached college. And that “the kids had either learned to jump through the hoops or had completely stopped trying." While it may be that parents of conventionally educated children are aware of the limitations of this type of education, there is a similar fear of what Unschooling would do to their children.
One of the most common fears is that unschooled children will be socially awkward. Gray & Riley (2013) found that the parents of Unschooled children reported the opposite. The parents said that “their children were happier, more agreeable, or more socially outgoing than they would be if they were traditionally schooled.” In another study addressing the Unschooled children themselves, Gray & Riley (2015) found that there were just 3 out of 75 respondents who were not happy with their unschooling. These children reported that they did feel isolated but that this was because they were “in dysfunctional families with mothers who were psychologically depressed and fathers who were uninvolved.” This complaint shows that for Unschooling to be successful, the family environment needs to be supportive. For a child in a troubled household, even a low standard, conventional school may be a better place for them than their home.
Another fear of Unschooling is that the children’s academic standards will suffer. Again, the research confounds this notion by showing that homeschooled students outperform conventionally schooled students on every measure used, including standardized tests and grade point averages at university (Gloeckner, G. W., & Jones, P., 2013). However, it is essential to note that these researchers did not suggest a cause-and-effect relationship. It is possible that these children possessed above-average intellectual and social skills due to predisposed characteristics or other influences rather than merely their style of schooling. This research does at least address the fear that unschooled children would suffer from poorer educational outcomes (Ray, 2013).
A further limitation of this research is that these surveys only allowed participants who had had a minimum of three years of unschooling. Therefore, any family who could not adjust to or suffered adverse effects of unschooling could not have shared their negative experiences in the surveys.
A potential downside of removing a child from the traditional academic environment is that they would not contribute to the existing field of academic knowledge. Unschooling may create excellent artists or entrepreneurs, but it may detract talent from scholarly activities such as university-based research. While 80% of respondents to Gray & Riley’s survey went into higher education, the majority went on to creative and entrepreneurial jobs. The unschooled adults complained that they felt too constrained by the university's structures. However, this is more likely to be a problem with the universities than unschooling’s effects on the individual. If we take the Enlightenment’s idea that knowledge grows by building upon previous research (Segre, 2015), the unschooled child may miss out on this. Their separation and isolation from other students may mean that they cannot collaborate with others to grow knowledge. However, with the movement towards online learning, this may become less of an obstacle.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to see accelerated changes in styles of education. Parents have become accustomed to their children learning at home in an online environment. This change may be an opportunity to delve further into the benefits of an alternative learning method to conventional schooling. Unschooling may be too extreme for mainstream parents. But, perhaps schools and universities can learn the benefits of giving students more freedom and moving the learning style slightly away from its industrial revolution-based methods. This movement may increase students’ motivation and create a faster progression of knowledge growth to meet the demands of the mental health crisis.
References
DiClementi, A. (2021). Unschooling and The Future of Education with Lainie Liberti. The Bio-Hacking Secrets Show.
Gloeckner, G. W., & Jones, P. (2013). Reflections on a decade of changes in
homeschooling and the homeschooled into higher education. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(309-323)
Gray, P., & Riley, G. (2013). The Challenges and Benefits of Unschooling, According to 232 Families Who Have Chosen that Route. Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, 7
Gray, P., & Riley, G. (2015). Grown Unschoolers’ Evaluations of Their Unschooling Experiences: Report I on a Survey of 75 Unschooled Adults. Other Education, 4(2), 8-32. https://www.othereducation.org/index.php/OE/article/view/104
Khan, A., Faucett, J., Lichtenberg, P., Kirsch, I., & Brown, W. A. (2012). A Systematic Review of Comparative Efficacy of Treatments and Controls for Depression. Plos One, 7(7), e41778. 10.1371/journal.pone.0041778
Merikangas, K. R., He, J., Burstein, M., Swanson, S. A., Avenevoli, S., Cui, L., Benjet, C., Georgiades, K., & Swendsen, J. (2010). Lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in U.S. adolescents: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication--Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A). Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(10), 980-989. 10.1016/j.jaac.2010.05.017
National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). Parent and family involvement in
education, from the national household education surveys program of 2012. U.S. Department of Education. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013028.pdf.
Popper, K. R. (1986). Objective knowledge (Rev. ed. ed.). Clarendon Pr.
Ray, B. D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(324-341)
Changing education paradigms. Robinson, S. K. (Director). (2013).[Video/DVD] TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms
Segre, M. (2015). Higher Education and the Growth of Knowledge (Kindle Edition ed.). Routledge.