Out of School Learning for Everyone

Parents who are unhappy with their public school’s performance can take the following actions to provide a better learning experience for their children:

1. Find other like-minded parents who are unhappy with their public school options and are ready to explore out of school learning.
2. Hope you live in a state that provides an education savings account to enable you to pay for your children’s out of school education, or begin working with your state legislator to introduce a bill asking for education savings accounts to be applied to your state’s out of school learning. (I realize this step discriminates against primarily black, brown, and poor families who currently don’t have the option to leave their public school since their state does not offer a voucher program to them).
3. Identify, recruit, and hire an adult learning leader, experienced in out of school learning, to help you with building an out of school learning cohort.
4. Work with your adult learning leader, let’s call them a “learning coach,” to build a learning plan that is personalized for each young learner within the cohort.
5. Check your children out of traditional public school, and let personalized learning begin.

Recently, Education Reimagined shared an interview with Olena Starchuk and Mike Russell, two Canadian parents who have chosen to build their children’s learning plans outside of traditional public school. Both parents have experience working in public education. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

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“ER: Having currently and previously worked in public education, what went into the decision to offer an alternative to school to your children? And what does that look like for your family?

OS: When I first started working outside of a school, I was working in parent education, specifically around attachment parenting. A lot of that explores relationships and connection with community. That very quickly led into an exploration of what the public schools look like around here and how that works for us as a family. We looked at the kinds of relationships and lifestyles we want to have with our kids and within the community. From there, after exploring a bunch of different options, we landed on the idea of learning outside of school.

We’ve been learning in community ever since. That’s currently what I help other people figure out how to do. For us, the idea isn’t to have school at home, but to learn in and with our community – being out there making connections and building relationships that lead to a greater desire or drive for the learners to discover their interests.”

ER: Have you found a lot of support from the community around it? Or are you the primary person leading and planning all the learning experiences?

OS: That depends. Support from community, yes. I make a very big point of going out in the community and looking for things for us to get involved in. I don’t particularly look for things for us to get involved in. I don’t particularly look for things that are aimed towards children because those usually don’t connect deeply to other aspects of the community. For example, I will search out the person on the island who’s the expert birder and we will go out with him. He loves my kids and takes them out all of the time. Our eldest daughter is actually the featured birder for the Birdathon this year.

There’s a huge amount of support from community members in that sense. In terms of the remainder of the home learning community, I do tend to take the lead. I have had situations in certain communities where there have been more experienced home learners that will help me out and that’s really lovely to have too. Although that has started to shift in the last few years as my mentors’ children have grown up. They’re in their twenties and in university. Now, I’m helping to organize things for other families.

MR: We have always been very intentional about learning – from every toy that has been brought into the household, to every book we suggest to our kids, to every person we bring into our lives. It’s all based on how we can help our children become better members of our community and enhance their knowledge of all sorts.

Olena does a lot of networking and outreach, but sometimes community members reach out to us. We recently had a fellow who is a retired doctor that does woodworking, literally knocked on the door and asked if our son would be interested in learning woodworking. And now that’s a hobby my son has picked up!

ER: What types of resources do you think could make home learning more accessible to people in your community?

OS: I think one of the first things that people need when home learning is to find a supportive community. Right now, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for parents to get together and offer each other peer support. When parents can get together and share what is happening at home and hear another parent say, ‘Oh yeah, my kids do that too,’ you feel validated. You’re not feeling like you’re doing something wrong. That support is huge.

Other resources that are helpful for people are networks that show people where they can go to find community connections. So for example, a resource list of the nearby museums and places that run field trips, or a list of community mentors that like working with kids.

MR: I think we could also use a physical location for families to come together to do this. We have some spaces in the community that hold teen nights and things like that, but I think a consistent physical location would be really beneficial. Not only as a safe space to meet, but also somewhere to build community around.

ER: What’s something you wish more people knew about learning in community?

OS: I think one of the most important things to remember when you’re talking about learning through life and learning in community is that your goal is to build relationships, create wonder and curiosity, and encourage young people to pursue their own interests. You’re not doing the same sorts of things that somebody would imagine as schooling. You’re typically not sitting down and teaching them things unless they want you to sit down and teach them things. You’re out there counting shells on the beach or growing plants out in the garden or going for a bird walk with a bunch of seniors with decades of experience.

It took me about a year to figure out how to do things differently because we’re not doing school at home – we’re learning in life, which is entirely different. Learning doesn’t have to look a certain way.”

All families, no matter their economic condition, should have the opportunity to decide what their children’s learning plan should look like. Right now, middle class and upper-middle class parents can exercise steps #1 through #5 presented at the beginning of this article. The goal now must be to give this opportunity to black, brown, and poor parents, so they can define, plan, execute, and evaluate their children’s learning – out of school.

Til tomorrow. SVB