Cecilie Conrad: 0:14

Welcome to the Ladies Fixing the World, Season 2, Episode 9. I will start by welcoming Sue Elvis and Sandra Dodd. We are today talking about how do we know they're learning?

Sandra Dodd: 0:28

When I was first talking about unschooling they're mostly thinking about young children they said how will we know that they're learning? And I said how did you know that they could walk? How did you know that they could talk? And that seems to some people who haven't de-schooled yet that doesn't. That has nothing to do with it, because, like well, all little kids learn to walk and talk. But the point that we were trying to help them see is that all humans will learn all kinds of other things if they're left to explore and ask questions and play and poke around, ask people questions, and so the way that you know that they're learning is they're asking you questions about that thing and you see the level of the questions rise and you see them doing things and you see them talking with their siblings or friends about things. And one of the hardest things for new unschoolers to do is not to jump in and summarize or declare I see you're speaking about science. I'm so proud to know that you're learning science. Don't do that, just let it be life. But it's exciting.

Sandra Dodd: 1:28

My boys when they were little probably four, five around there took a city swimming class at a city swimming pool. We live in the desert. There's not natural water you can swim in, really Not much of it. So kids don't learn swimming on their own very easily unless the parents have a swimming pool. So anyway, they're at the pool and they're taking these little kid classes and on the way home one day they're sitting in the back of the van and very rhythmically they're saying never swim with a buddy, always swim alone, always swim in a storm, always run by the pool.

Sandra Dodd: 2:05

They're going through all the rules opposite. So in school, I mean first thing is I knew, they knew the rules and they kind of memorized them in order. Or maybe they were looking at a paper they couldn't read yet, so I guess, guess not, and they were just both in unison saying these rules wrong. So in school one of the things they were doing was using opposite terms always instead of never, or run instead of walk or whatever. And that's something that generally is in school in language arts for people who are nine or ten years old. So as a former, former teacher, I'm just sitting here going, okay, that covers this, that covers this. But for me, as a mom, I knew that they knew the swimming pool rules enough to play with them, and I knew because they were playing with them isn't there a context to the question?

Cecilie Conrad: 2:59

I mean I I get the same question. How do I know they're learning?

Sandra Dodd: 3:04

They're asking about testing. I think they're saying well, I need to test them, don't?

Cecilie Conrad: 3:07

I need to make them recite or prove or summarize there a measuring stick kind of background to this question, where there is an assumed specific of what they need to learn and maybe also an assumed pace, as if you could kind of fall behind. I mean, there is this idea in the school system of falling behind. And maybe you didn't, you didn't learn enough in third grade, so you have to do third grade again. That would be falling behind. And maybe you didn't. You didn't learn enough in third grade, so you have to do third grade again. That would be falling behind. Um, or you know, you didn't, I don't know, so we don't have that background, that measuring tape thing going on in an unschooling context. I mean, I do see that they're learning, but I think sometimes the idea behind the question how do I know they're learning? Lacks the word enough, how do I know they're learning enough? Or how do I know they're learning the right things, or how do I know they're learning fast enough.

Sandra Dodd: 4:16

And maybe I'm just changing the subject here, but maybe it's relevant my mother-in-law when we were first starting, when I told her we're not sending Kirby to school, but maybe next year, she said are you gonna have him tested? And I said no. And she said how do you? How will you know he's not behind? And I said I, I know he is behind. And she's like a little bit shocked I said but I wasn't through. I said I know he is behind in some things and he's ahead in some things.

Sandra Dodd: 4:54

I think every little kid at school, even the ones who are too shy to speak, who seem very still and hidey, you know, averse to communicating with adults, or even little kids, avoidant kids they probably know something really cool that those other kids don't know, or can do something really cool that those other kids can't know. And how do we know? We don't know. I taught seventh grade for a while and those kids are seventh graders, are 12, 11 or 12, maybe some turned 13 that year and I wanted to make them feel better about themselves. I wanted to do that thing that I was just talking about like acknowledge that people know different things, and I said I have always liked language since I was a little kid. I'm teaching English because I think it's fun. I think it's exciting and you have to take it, and you might as well take it from me. You're not going to take it from somebody. I'll be more fun, I said. But just because I know a lot about words and writing doesn't mean I know about everything I said. If so, I'd set up situations where I tell them what I wasn't good at. I said if we were under attack somehow and someone needed to run and get help, it wouldn't be me, and especially if the person who runs has to cross the river to get help because I can't swim. So they're all kind of laughing at me and I'm just saying I'm only good for teaching English. I can sing, you know.

Sandra Dodd: 6:20

So I say a couple of things, but there are a lot of things I don't know. I said what if we have to feed ourselves? So who in here knows how to make tortillas? About eight hands shot up. And I said you guys are going to save our lives because I don't know how to make tortillas. And they laughed own language who in here can ride a horse? Because we might need that. And so we're setting up this sort of situation where we need to be self-sufficient. Of the people in that group. There was no big scenario. I didn't say war or anything, everybody else is dead. It wasn't a science fiction movie setup. It was just what if?

Sandra Dodd: 6:54

And so I said if this was a class in that if we were learning about horsemanship, then you'll be the teacher, and if we're learning to teach tortilla, to make tortillas, you have to be the teacher because you have to help us.

Sandra Dodd: 7:10

And that was a way for me to have some humility at the beginning, to point out to them that I don't think I know everything and I know there's stuff you know that I don't know. To point out to them I don't think I know everything and I know there's stuff you know that I don't know. Just so happens that at this time, you know, every Monday through Friday, I'm supposed to persuade you to be interested in English and literature and whatever it is. And so that was helpful to me when I became an unschooler later to remember that whole setup, because I used that a few years and I think it made the kids feel big, because they weren't big, they were young, they were pre-teen, young teen. But it made them realize that there are strengths that they have that aren't they're not going to get any school credit for. But that are real world useful values, virtues um skills, talents.

Sue Elivs: 8:01

So I wasn't you would tell you you were telling them that all their skills that they did have, like, um, swimming and riding the horse and all those other things, are valuable skills, whereas I think a lot of kids get the message that there's only certain things that are valuable and we go back to I'm good at playing video games. Well, that's not valuable. Things like that maths, english they're valuable, and so the other artsy sort of things don't add up. And so maybe that's a problem as well is in the parents seeing the value of everything a child is learning, so that they're not learning enough. But what do the parent expect the kids to be learning more of? Not more of how to play a computer game, um, but more of more math skills. Maybe they need more math skills, they need more, uh, writing skills, uh, that sort of thing but isn't it?

Cecilie Conrad: 9:59

I mean we have.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:00

We all live in Western, so-called Western worlds that are not the same but have some parallel structure, and one of these parallels is the school system that's more or less works the same way everywhere. We even export it to all the cultures we can think of and we have the curriculum and it's the same things that are important everywhere, the same academic subjects and the same idea of, you know, teaching children based on their age, and they all need to learn this exact same thing. There's hardly any, you know, split off up relative to interest or personality or whatever gender could be anything, and some things would be more fair than others, but it's still the same mechanism, the same thing anywhere, everywhere, that some things are considered worth working hard to absorb and some things are considered waste of time and some things are considered more like a hobby. So horseback riding and swimming would be more hobby-based and and learning languages would be the academics and you have to learn them at a specific time. So that's why you could be behind. It's the same framework everywhere and that's I know.

Sandra Dodd: 11:30

I know something about that because it's part of the industrial revolution and factory practice. Like, you can set up an assembly line and at the end you pretty much produce a thing. So at a car factory they set up an assembly. He wasn't an educator, he was a guy who got hired to take care of the kids of people. I think it was a cigarette factory. Do you guys know this? I think they were working in a cigarette factory and they wanted to make one of their benefits that their kids could go to school. So he creates this school.

Sandra Dodd: 12:23

So the whole fad in those days was we can make an assembly line, we can have a conveyor belt and as they go by we add a thing, we insert a thing, we polish something up, check it. So I think it's partly that model that makes people think how do we know it's going to work? How do we know they're learning? It's like where's the quality control? Who checks and makes sure that we're producing, making something Joyce Federal has. I'll try to remember. I'm making show notes. Yeah, show note notes.

Sandra Dodd: 12:56

Joyce Federal wrote about the products of education. Talking about that, you know, what do you think the product would be? What are we producing. Okay, joyce, on products, because if we change, if those parents are willing to step away from the schoolishness that they are living in and de-school themselves and we can talk to them about what we're producing is the best version of your child having learned in a natural way. It's going to be different for every child because they have different interests, different talents.

Sandra Dodd: 13:35

I really like Howard Gardner's theory of intelligences, where he acknowledges musical intelligence and kinesthetic intelligence as important as verbal or mathematical. He has interpersonal, where people can be good at communicating and seeing and reading other people. He has interpersonal, where people are good at realizing what they're thinking and how they're feeling and what their capabilities are and what their problem is. Some people don't even ever think about that because they just don't. Some people are really good at movement, at dance, at sports, so good, I mean. You just you know people like that who, just, if you throw a ball at them, they catch it. They, they're not, they're not going to screw up. They will swim across the river and run and save people, or whatever they need is needed, because they have that physical ability. My husband, my husband, yeah, um, so I, though, can sit and talk about it and take notes.

Sandra Dodd: 14:32

That's what I can do I can write about it, so different people that parents.

Sue Elivs: 14:39

Parents listen to what we have to say and are willing to do that de-schooling and see their kids as more than what would they want to encourage and nurture the gifts that each child has, regardless of whether traditionally they are valued. But I think the situation gets complicated when you're in a situation like us where we have homeschool registration and kids are supposed to follow the school syllabus. All homeschoolers have to follow the syllabus that they're doing at school, and so the parent has to prove that their children are learning science and maths and geography, history, whatever, and it is all slanted towards English, maths, science maybe those are the most important subjects. So a parent isn't really free to not think in terms of have they done enough science, have they done enough maths, have they done enough English? Because they have to prove to the education department that at least their children have been exposed to these subjects. And that's the tricky bit I think to.

Sue Elivs: 15:59

How do we unschool? And behind the scenes and in our own heads as a parent, we're thinking that, but not letting it impact on our children's natural learning and not letting it impact on or compromise our way of life. So we're not. We just want to nurture our children and all those talents that they have, but also find a way to satisfy the education department and present records to them which are labeled science, english, math. And that's where I think a lot of people have a problem. I always think that it would have been such a luxury if we didn't have any such thing as homeschool registration, and I would love to if nobody had it. How much easier it would be to reassure parents and to get them away from analysing it as if we're doing school.

Sandra Dodd: 17:37

In your case, when people ask those questions, they're asking it because of the laws, perhaps, but there are people. There are many states, many large states in the United States that have no oversight whatsoever. Texas may now, but didn't for a long time. I don't think they do. You just say you're homeschooling and you are, that's it. They'll leave you alone. People in Texas ask the same question.

Sandra Dodd: 17:59

So in that case it's not because the state's going to ask, it's because their conscience and their history and their parents and the voices in their heads are asking. So we can answer those questions about how I shouldn't say we, because I'm looking at the two of you and it's this is not the we I'm talking about. I could answer those questions about unschooling and about natural learning. I can't answer questions about the laws in any other state or province. That has a lot of more requirements. I mean, I used to have particular names to name people who could help them in Pennsylvania or Iowa or wherever there were rules, but I don't personally want to compromise what I'm offering and sharing and collecting about how learning happens in the absence of those things offering and sharing and collecting about how learning happens in the absence of those things.

Sue Elivs: 19:01

Maybe that's. It is in some ways, good that we all have different experiences, because there's a lot of different situations out there with people unschooling and because we've been through the system and we didn't compromise our unschooling, because I did a lot of background, behind-the-scenes work that's useful to people in my situation. But I love hearing, sandra, about if we had no homeschool registration. I love hearing how you describe nurturing our children, because we can still aim for that within the framework that we have. I got very creative, I managed to do all that and it gives us this vision and this motivation for finding a solution to the registration problem without compromising our kids learning and also not getting overly concerned about have they done enough of this? Have they done enough of that? There are well, I found ways around all that, but I think maybe a lot of new newish unschooling families. Maybe that's a big thing and why they do focus on a lot on are we doing enough of this? Are we doing enough of that?

Cecilie Conrad: 20:28

but I think the big deal here is there is the background that I was maybe not successfully trying to describe before of this being a reality, like it's as if it's a given that children have to grow up in this framework, with this curriculum and the school year and the back to school at the end of summer, and then there's a new agenda of things they're supposed to learn and all of that. That's the context and it's a very parallel context for all of us. If we try to step out of that and become unschoolers, then we're challenging that context, we're doing something different, we're asking questions and then, if there's another layer on the other side of it, I see it as like so I'm here in the middle trying to ask questions and do something to set my children free. I have a background where the reality is everyone else is doing the other thing and in front of me there's a law system stopping me, asking me to translate all the things I'm doing here into that which is in the background. So that can be a big mix up in the mind of the parent.

Cecilie Conrad: 21:46

And if you're trying to de-school yourself and think some new thoughts, it be very, very confusing to have to register and have to pay attention and and have to do that, all of that footwork that you did to to ensure that what you did in a natural freestyle way was, at the same time, to be understood from the registration as good enough and on time and not falling behind for all of your many children. That gets to your head and and that's why we have to do the d school work, we have to to stop ourselves and and and extract ourselves from that background and ask the questions and remember oh, I'm doing all of this translation work for legal reasons, not because it's real, not because my kids have to learn this at this time. It's not real. It's just like I don't know something I have to do because that's the reality that I'm living in.

Sue Elivs: 22:50

I think you're quite right there, cecilia, that sometimes I used to think we live this amazing unschooling life and then behind the scenes, I'm making all these notes, translating it all into educational language, are learning in a way that satisfies them. But the amazing unschooling life can it really be translated into these black and white documents which look very official and very boring and it doesn't tell the story, but it satisfies the education department?

Sandra Dodd: 23:40

no, the school and the education department don't want to know about your amazing unschooling life.

Sue Elivs: 23:44

They want we had a nice person who came to visit us and we can.

Sandra Dodd: 23:48

You're talking about a person I'm talking about the department an individual. But overall they don't want they don't want any proof that that their way isn't the only way. They don't want you coming and proving that somebody could have fun and still learn. So you need to keep that to yourself, ma'am. You need to just state what they want you to state about science and math, and one way that a lot of parents do that is they do something more like a portfolio where they take their kids to museums and they take pictures of what they're doing, or they run a project or something a fundraiser and then they document that my children handled this much money. They wrote this report, they put it in the bank, something that looks schoolish to school, because school only wants to see schoolish. They want to see your schoolishness and then go to bed. So when families have to present their schoolishness, very many times people do like you're saying, sue. They do it quietly. The mom, after the kids are asleep, you do it in private, you turn it in and then you sleep happily and the school sleeps happily and your kid's never even new. So if there are ways people have criticized me, I had a concept years ago called strewing, where you just bring something out that you think is interesting, the kids will pick it up. Don't introduce it, it's not show and tell, it's just the thing. And they pick it up and they play with it and they will learn and they will tell you things about it and they'll experiment with it and they'll play with it. If you can do that with those, with ideas, places, objects, about the subject matter that you need to report, the kids may never know that they were demonstrating to you that they knew what that was, if it's a, if it's a stick insect or something, and they go yeah, this is a bug, this is this, this is that. And then they look up what kind of what particular kind of stick insect it is and what the eggs would look like. Great, you don't have to say a word. They're going to mess with that themselves and then you just document it. So you didn't teach and they still showed that they learned and that's a good way.

Sandra Dodd: 25:45

I love the internet, I love Google search, I love you know, I people people say, don't use Google. I love internet search engines, whatever they may be called, and I love seeing kids find things quickly, because when I was a kid, we did so much schoolish memorization of things and definitions and writing definitions and trying to figure out the difference between things and the similarities. Kids do that anyway for fun. They will talk about the similarities and differences between cartoons they like or video games or different kinds of bicycles, or aluminum baseball bats and wooden baseball bats Whatever it is. They do that themselves. It's a natural human thing to care about words and definitions and what's like this and what's not like this, so you don't have to teach that to kids.

Sandra Dodd: 27:15

But when those things are about the subject matter that you need to report, it's like a test. That's not a test. It's like a demonstration, like an experiment, like put them out there and see what they do with it. Oh, they did the right thing. Okay, check, and I'm sorry for people who have to do that. There are some pages on my site that are curriculum. It's like a curriculum that defines the things that unschoolers do in schoolish terms and I'll send a link to that too to put with the show notes for this. But, sue, let us go back to the topic please, because you saw how your kids were learning. You knew they were because you wrote reports about it in secret at night. So how did you see? How did you know that they were learning? What were the clues? What was the evidence?

Sue Elivs: 28:03

oh, I think we uh I got ahead of myself last episode. Do you remember I was telling you the story about how we were being interviewed for Homeschooling Summit and the interviewer, two of my daughters as teenagers, were also interviewed separately to me, and that question came up how do you know they're learning, how do you know you're learning? And we just thought what a ridiculous question. That was our first reaction. Of course we know you're learning and we just thought what a ridiculous question. That was our first reaction. Of course we know we're learning. How do we as adults know we're learning when we're doing some research I'm researching my blog problem and I know when I've learned something new? So in those sort of terms, it seemed to me to be a silly question. We just know when we're learning, we develop, we gain skills, we solve problems, we get satisfaction from whatever we've learned the research, the problem that we've solved. We get excited, we're curious, we gather facts. Uh, it just seems self-evident to us that we are learning. If we weren't learning, we wouldn't grow, we wouldn't progress, we wouldn't solve problems, we wouldn't have that feeling of happiness because we are growing people.

Sue Elivs: 29:29

But putting it into measurements, are my kids, am I, am a mother at this age got the same knowledge as this mother over there? Of course not. I mean, we've got different interests, as we've already spoken about that. Different kids have different talents.

Sue Elivs: 29:50

So it all comes down to, I suppose, as you were saying about de-schooling, getting rid of that idea that we have to measure these things and we'll have to have value certain things over other things. It doesn't seem to me to matter if there's no home education department looking over your shoulder, if you have total trust in your kids and you can see that they're not struggling with anything and they're able to do all the things that they want to do. But yeah, I think the especially homeschool registration it does complicate things and it keeps our minds focused on those words english, math, science, uh, age appropriate and. But the thing I think also that's important about that is that we have confidence in our own children and are willing I was always willing to when I we had our homeschool registration visits if somebody ever said oh well, your child hasn't got age-appropriate maths.

Sue Elivs: 30:59

I would stand up and say, just like you said earlier, sandra, but what else do they know? Well, they're not focused on that at the moment. Those skills will come, but at the moment they're really science-based, or they've been writing a lot of stories or whatever, or I'm confident that they're going to gain these skills and this is the way what I'm doing to expose them to mess maybe a bit of, as you said, a bit of mess during I've got all these wonderful resources not workbooks, but other things that I'm strewing. My kids are going to learn it. I'm full of confidence about it because I understand my kids, I know how they learn best, and I think that's something that the education department has no idea about. And so I was always confident and I was never scared about these registration visits and they always went well, to the point that I think we converted our person who came to see us quite a lot of times. She always said she loved coming to see us and she and she used to say I can see your home is just bursting with learning.

Sue Elivs: 32:13

And yeah, it wasn't hard to prove that, that, even though we hadn't filled in all the workbooks, we had other things that my kids had got involved with and were passionate about, and they were willing to talk about them. That well, they couldn't help it. You know, tell me about that music video you were making. Tell me about that novel you wrote. Tell me about that run. You went on um, tell me about something you've made. And yeah, they were happy, growing, fulfilling, I guess, working on the things that were important to them and developing their natural talents. I don't know if that was a long-winded answer, sandra, I probably didn't even answer the question this is a long-format podcast because we want all the nuances.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:12

I think they are very helpful for those who are wondering on these things.

Sue Elivs: 33:19

Sometimes when I'm talking I think, oh, look after I've said what I've said. The listener's thinking, well, she went off track a bit there. What has that got to do with what Sandra was asking?

Sandra Dodd: 33:30

Well, but it did. But you were kind of telling the story of how you saw, how the inspector, the overseeing teacher or whatever they call it there, saw what your kids were learning, because she saw their projects, she talked to them, she saw the atmosphere in the home. For the parents who are watching this and wondering how they will see learning in their own children if they haven't gotten very much into unschooling, I think the conversation we had a couple back about conversation is probably it. That's probably where you learn the most about what your kids know, but also what they say about movies that they're watching or what they say about music they've heard. There'll be indications in there, the level of their awareness or thinking or prior knowledge. And we don't if we don't have to, we don't have to analyze that. It's an odd question how do you know? But I think the examples of how did you know they were walking, how did you know they were talking, how did you know they could ride a bike, those are legit Because although they're more physical and photographable, you know there's the kid on the bike.

Sandra Dodd: 34:36

You can take a little video. You maybe can't do that about history, but it works the same way. If they're not saying what do you mean? This? You know they're not asking those questions Like.

Sandra Dodd: 34:45

I've never in my life heard of this. I saw I like video lately. I'm really liking videos where people in one country will talk about their impressions of another country or what they think is stupid or wonderful about that country. It's just interesting. It's sort of about it's a little bit about stereotypes and prejudices, but it's also about the sort of channels that people's knowledge flows in. So I was watching some Brits and they were asking them questions about the United States and one one person was saying I didn't even have any idea when the United States became a country or how. And on our end we're like way aware of when and how. We know that England doesn't accept our 1776. They have 1783 or something that the Brits will say you know. So we're like all on it because we're proud of getting away from England and England's like yeah, whatever, we're not going to talk about that, let's talk about India, let's talk about some other stuff. And then they quit talking about India after a while. But you know so.

Sandra Dodd: 35:41

So every, every country has their, their own, personal, the way they're telling their own story that other countries don't even know about. You know, we don't know what German schools say about World War II. We're not German, doesn't matter. They're saying something over there to those kids, poor kids. And when they say, how will they know? The question would be, how will they know what? And that is becoming increasingly scattery over the last few decades too. Um, about what? What is it that people need to know it?

Sandra Dodd: 36:16

There's so much information now and and I it may be the same where you are, but in the united states we used to have four tv channels. There are three networks, and then educational tv. Everybody got the same tv. If you had a television and you ever turned it on. If you turn to CBS at a certain time, everybody who has CBS is watching the same thing. Your choice is turn it on, turn it off or switch to another channel. So that created a lot of common knowledge. We had seen the same news broadcasts, the same weather report, the same comedies, the same dramas, the same after-school specials. So now that's gone.

Sandra Dodd: 36:52

Those networks still exist, but at the same time you could be watching that. You could be watching Netflix or old shows from years ago or just something somebody videoed today. You know, somebody just made a video today with some commentary about who knows what. Some ducks are crossing a road and it's funny. There's all kinds of stuff, and so the chances of everyone in New Mexico having seen the same thing in one day is impossible now. It used to be, maybe you know we all watch the same newscast, but that's gone. So even the idea that someone my age I'm 72. I'll be 72 this year how old I am? I'm 71. Um, um, I I. When I was that story I told about the kids and what are you good at in the tortillas and stuff. He says something about video games and I thought video games. I think the only games out in those days were Pong and space invaders on an Atari.

Sandra Dodd: 37:50

But so my expectation of what it is that you would learn in school is way different from people who were just born in the 21st century, if they went to school because they're already old enough as 25. People that were born and have finished high school and are at university now, who didn't even live in the 20th century. What they think it is that kids need to know is different, and the kids that we're worried about are yet not born or have just lately been born. Our little kids are younger than all of the people I just talked about, so we don't know what it is. The school system doesn't even know what it is. What they're teaching in 2025 won't be what they're teaching in 2035.

Sandra Dodd: 38:33

And so that's another consideration. That's where unschooling can work very well, because our kids are moving along, living along in this year in this place, wherever they live, wherever they're visiting, wherever they are being exposed to people, ideas, music, video, buildings, whatever it is that they're experiencing. Each individual is experiencing on his own and no one can predict or foresee or guarantee or prove what he should have learned, what he will learn. It's all wild now. It's all going in whatever direction it wants to now.

Sandra Dodd: 39:12

So to call kids back and say, come back, come back, we're going to teach you what you needed to know in 1995, doesn't make any sense. But a lot of educators are that way because they were trained in the days that 1995 was modern and progressive and they're stuck there because they finished their master's degree. They're working in school system. You know what I'm talking about, right, right, that people just like they finish school and the guarantee of school is once you finish, you don't have to learn anything else, which is sad and terrible, but a lot of parents felt like that, like I'm out of school, I don't have to learn anything.

Sandra Dodd: 39:44

But if they're going to become unschoolers, they do need to learn some things like what, what learning looks like in the absence of school, which they never had to even look for or think about before. They got to assume there wasn't any learning outside of school because that was to school's advantage. So if they thought school and teaching are necessary for learning, they are going to be saying they're going to be asking questions like how will we know what they're learning? But once they can step however many steps they can step away from that, they'll see it differently. It just looks different when you're learning for fun, when people are laughing and telling jokes and from those jokes is coming knowledge, so hilarious sometimes. At the same time you're feeling oh, this is nice, you all. Maybe your face hurts from laughing because all these people of different ages and different experiences are coming together to look at something, to point at the things they know about it and how they can turn it upside down and make it funny. I love that.

Sue Elivs: 40:45

Um, another thing from what I was.

Sandra Dodd: 40:47

Perhaps oh.

Sue Elivs: 40:50

So carry on.

Sandra Dodd: 40:51

I won't forget Go ahead.

Sue Elivs: 40:53

No, no, I interrupted you, sorry, sandra, I just I was jumping. I was jumping years, go ahead. I was thinking about what you were saying about. We all have different stories and you talk to conversations that are just such an integral part of unschooling life and we've talked about this before, cecilia, I remember you were talking about what we always talking about conversations and coffee, aren't we?

Sue Elivs: 41:17

And you can be amazed sometimes what our kids actually know, uh, where they pick that up? Where do they learn that things? I don't know. My kids will learn different things to your kids, but perhaps there are more fundamental things that we should be thinking about. Are our kids learning? Are there any fundamental, not facts, but things like I don't know, I don't know.

Sue Elivs: 41:55

Well, I got down to in my blog post. I got down to it's a foundation of love for a star to be accepted as you are, to be valued. Kids need to know that they are valued and all their interests are valued. They're accepted as they are, they're loved unconditionally, and to me, that was much more important than the facts that I was presenting well, presenting strewing the facts that my kids were being exposed to because facts and history you can go and look it up on Google anytime now when they're a little older, and I can go and look it up as being much older. But are there any fundamental things that we want our kids to learn while they are in our families with us? Throw that question out there.

Sandra Dodd: 42:45

Our last podcast gathering this group was about math, mathematics, and something I thought of that day but I didn't get around to saying was when I was a kid. They said parents would, the teachers would say in the 1960s, you're not going to grow up to have a calculator in your pocket. You know, you have to memorize these timetables. And and even before, when, by the time I was in college, they had little portable calculators, solar powered. You could just leave it in the window and it charged itself back up, and they were tiny and they were awesome. And before that they had had those big Texas Instruments calculators. It was like a big adding machine. They cost over $100. They didn't do everything very fast. And so already in 10 years after that, I subscribed to Newsweek and they sent me a free solar calculator.

Sandra Dodd: 43:33

And now everybody's phone is not just a calculator, it can answer all kinds of questions. It can translate languages. I can read Korean. If there's something written in Korean that I want to read, I turn my phone to Google Translate Korean and I hold my phone up to it and it shows me the words in English. So the things that the teacher said we wouldn't have in our pockets, we have way more than the teachers ever thought, so that became not true. They also used to have this measure and this threat. You have to learn enough math that when you're grown you can balance your checkbook. I write one check a month to the guy who sprays for bugs because he likes to do stuff on paper. My husband likes to do things on paper. He still writes some checks. I don't have to balance my checkbook because I married somebody who likes math better than I do.

Cecilie Conrad: 44:17

Well, I live in a country. I don't live in it any longer. I'm from a country where checkbooks are an extinct technology. We are too.

Sandra Dodd: 44:26

We don't have any of that it's getting that way here. When we wanted to get more free checks on an account that we've had since the 1970s, they said oh yeah, well, you have to order from this other company and it's going to cost you five dollars. And my husband said wrong, wrong, we're an ancient contract. We get free checks, find us some, and that's just funny because we were so used to that being the way it was, and so it's starting to change here too, but it's. But that was the big fear of parents and teachers in the 1960s. What if these children grow up, graduate from high school and cannot balance a checkbook?

Cecilie Conrad: 45:00

OK, I think we need to get down to the core of it. I'm sorry for it, but I'm just going to say it the idea that there is something, a one-size-fits-all curriculum, a base, a core, a chunk, a jigsaw puzzle of things that everyone needs to know, that has to be deconstructed. It might be right at some point in history. I don't care at this point, for now that's not the case. We don't all need to learn the same thing. We don't all need to be educated to have the same battery of information stored in here and skills the handwriting we can all read. My kids can't read handwriting, so we need to get away from that idea. It might come from something, maybe the assembly line. I've also heard stories about the Victorian Empire and you had to be able to move admin people around the globe, so they all had to speak English and write in the same way and do math correctly.

Sandra Dodd: 46:17

I don't know where it comes from, I don't know when it stopped being relevant, but it's definitely not relevant any longer right, because now people use computers, but used to be able, you needed to have your handwriting legible to all the other clerks in the world.

Cecilie Conrad: 46:33

Well, it makes sense my kids can't read it. Even if I just make a to-do list for Sundays when we do shared cleaning, they're like okay, tell me what it says, I write down we have these chores, let's do them, and they're like, no, but whatever. Then I send them a text message and they can read it. Doesn't matter really, that doesn't matter really. What I'm trying to say is that general idea is actually part of that background that we, we, we are measuring up against. When we get that question how do we know they're learning? So just question do we really need to have that core, all of us? That's level one. Level two is in do we have it?

Cecilie Conrad: 47:22

So I was educated in that system, but I don't have it. If I stop and this is a de-schooling hack that we sort of, I suppose, all know but if we stop to think about what do I know, what do I, what skills do I have? Because, of course, yes, I have my iPhone in my pocket and I can look up all kinds of things and do math and have all the apps, but I think it's quite smart to have some of it in my brain. I do agree that education that sits in here and is part of me not part of my smartphone is very practical. I need some dots in there so I can make lines and connect things. Otherwise it's not fun. But the dots that I have in there, the pieces of information and the connections I've made over my life, how many of them stem from my school hours?

Cecilie Conrad: 48:14

In my case, and most people I talk to? Not a lot, percentage wise. It's not what I carry with me. And how many of the things that I was supposed to know did I actually know when I was 15 and stopped basic schooling? Not a lot, I guarantee it. Not a lot. So it was a waste of time to try to get me there because I didn't get there and most kids don't get there. And if they get there, it's not 100% the school. A lot of it is some passion or some parent or some amazing book or some library or something else.

Sandra Dodd: 48:57

I can remember a specific instance from my childhood. I used to get a little newsprint cheap little magazine that you had to stick the stickers in. It was a little booklet from National Geographic for children and then they sent you a sheet of stickers with it. So you have to put the pictures in the book yourself by finding the right page and licking it and sticking it in there. But I learned more from those than I did in science and geography. So when I went to school and they start talking about some country in Africa, I just go ding back to my National Geographic chapter on Kenya or whatever. I'm like okay, got it, tell me more. So I had a hook to hang it on because I was gathering up stuff by myself.

Sandra Dodd: 49:34

I had a little toy on punch card days. This was mid-60s and it was Rocky and Bullwinkle, which was a cartoon here, and it was Rocky and Bullwinkle's quiz game, and you put it on a little board which had foil, probably some kind of metallic you know that the electricity could go through and it had a battery and you put the punch card down. It has questions. I remember one of them what's the money? What is? I don't remember the term they them what's the monetary unit of Japan? And it was yen. So they give you some choices and you take the little marker and you stick it in the hole that says yen and a little light bulb lights up. That was the whole thing. But at our house we knew all the answers to all those questions. It was just a little trivia game that we got for sending something in from a cereal box, from breakfast cereal. I loved that game. I wish I still had it, dead as it would be. I just wish I had it to show that this was early punch card technology for little kids.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:28

I think I had that. I think I had something similar and I could layer. Did you layer a new sheet on and then you have to take the old one off?

Sandra Dodd: 50:40

You put a new one on so that the that the lead can can be touching.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:42

I think they have something similar with different things on it. Yeah, so the teachers.

Sandra Dodd: 50:47

The teachers probably felt like they were great teachers because I knew so much, and they might have been, I don't know. But I was just. I was just buying my own information to what I already knew and I remember lots of things from school. And when people say I don't use anything I learned in college, I think, ah, I use everything I learned in college. But I took psychology and English and education and I do. I use all that. I loved anthropology. I discovered anthropology a little bit later. I would have thrown everything aside and just done anthropology.

Sandra Dodd: 51:16

But when I came back to my school when the university year ended, I was a year ahead of kids. I ended up graduating from high school early, going to college at 17. I was barely 17 when I started and I got out at 20. I was just zooming because I wanted to get out of there before my parents divorced, before I had no home base because I knew my parents weren't doing that well. So I got out. Anyway, I went back to my school and I said ta-da, I've graduated from college, I'm going to be a teacher. I went and was talking to some of my old favorite teachers and every one of them went music, english Music English I didn't know. I didn't study music at the university. I took like two classes, a few classes on Renaissance music, playing, recorder and stuff, but that was just for fun On the side. It never occurred to me that people around me thought I would be a music teacher, that I should come back and teach music. That didn't seem for some reason to be a thing. But all the things that I did learn at the university I still consider that I wrote yesterday.

Sandra Dodd: 52:19

I wrote to Skylar Wainforth for something that I learned about Mormon missionaries who come back. Somebody made a statement that when the Mormon missionaries come back and they're like 20 years old, some of them, if they served in a very different kind of culture, will look for a woman of that ethnicity to maybe date or marry, which is unusual because the Mormons in Utah this is talking about Utah, salt Lake City they're very white and they're told to marry within their own gene pool, pretty much. But I thought that was interesting. So I wrote to Skylar because she and her husband are anthropologists and I said, ah, skylar, is this imprinting or what? And she wrote back already about natural selection and human instinct to choose outside your own gene pool. And so that was a fun exchange for me and Skylar, fun for me anyway. I may have asked her to write a report. She didn't plan on writing, but that's interesting to me, like why, why Nobody's going to ask me. I'm not going to be in any position to know or care or do anything about it.

Sandra Dodd: 53:19

It just fascinated me to think. If someone goes and lives somewhere for two years when they're 18 or 19, 17,. Did that imprint what women should be like? Or did they just go there and they were lonely and saw all those girls and thought a lot of thoughts? I don't know what, but that's anthropology. How are people? Why are people? What's with people? And I think it's interesting and it's helped a lot with unschooling.

Sandra Dodd: 53:43

What kind of people have a hard time unschooling? What kind of people find it really fun and easy? Does a difficult childhood maybe add to the joy that some moms take in being a good mom? It did for me, and I know some people whose upbringing was peaceful and solid and they didn't have problems with their parents, so they didn't have anything to prove or overcome or to go against. And still so maybe for them unschooling might be a little harder. They may not have as much motivation or impetus to be a better, different mom. So, like for me, the ball rolling was for me to do things I wish had been done for me, like what would have been great when I was a kid, what would I have loved to have had somebody do for me, say to me, provide for me. And I tried to do that. So sometimes a little adversity helps with being an unschooling parent.

Cecilie Conrad: 54:41

Maybe it seems to me looking at it as the anthropologist I'm not, you know but from that point of view, well, it's a good point into the question that is also often asked do we have to be perfect to do this? Do we have to be teachers? Do we have to be proficient in some way? What if we are not sufficient? What if we're not 100% balanced? What if we're not strong? Can we still be unschooling parents? Can we still provide a good enough childhood for our children? And now we're sort of breaking off main topic.

Sandra Dodd: 55:21

That's the topic for next time, that we already have.

Cecilie Conrad: 55:24

But I'm just going to circle it back, if I can, to. It's one of the things that makes us ask this question how do we know they're learning? So one thing is that we have to handle legal issues that can be heavy, as they were in Sue's case, and less heavy, as they were in Sandra's. Mine was not too hard either. But there is also the inner doubt Am I doing good enough? How can I know that they're learning? And I think we have to come back to that with all the questions I've tried, we've tried to raise in this episode.

Cecilie Conrad: 56:06

You know what is it you think they have to learn? Why do you think you have to check it? What kind of measuring stick are you putting up there? Why do you think they have to learn things at specific times? How do you know that the things you're looking for, if they're missing, are better than the things that you see?

Cecilie Conrad: 56:29

Because this is one of my big things with my own schooling, and and a piece of advice I often give is think about all the things they could have learned if they hadn't spent all that time in school. You can never know what would have happened if, but you can clearly see that they're doing something that they're interested in. They're doing something with passion. Might not be math, might be something completely something with passion, might not be math, might be something completely different and you might not see the point. But you don't have to see the point. You don't have to see the point of what they're doing. Maybe they're playing tennis all the time for two years and you're like but what about math? And maybe we should try to let go.

Cecilie Conrad: 57:21

So this is I took a note and I called it go radical. We have to think about the things, the things they do learn, when they do not learn the things that are core curriculum in school context. They're learning something else and if we push them to do something specific, we will never know what they would have done with that time. And very often it's very important stuff and sometimes we're blind to it because we're from a different time. We have different emotional setup. We don't know why it's so important for them to knit sweaters for three months straight or whatever they're doing.

Sandra Dodd: 58:07

but apparently it is. I want to remind parents who are listening to that you shouldn't be discouraged if you hear people like cecilia talking about her kids doing very school things, cool, cool things, very cool things. Sorry, I said school and having a passion, because some people go my kid has no passion, my kid just he sits around, he'll lie around or he'll play video games. So I don't want people to think that their child has to have a big hobby or a big passion to be learning. That's not so. But it helps for the parent to start to see that even if that child is a little more laid back and a little less maybe passionate you know, intense that doesn't mean they're not learning. And learning doesn't show. That's something that hasn't been said yet. Learning you don't see people learning you see them respond or joke or ask or say or build or knit, but you don't see their thoughts. You can't perceive what they're thinking. And so having faith in your children as competent humans and having faith in human nature and how learning works, that's the kind of faith that helps a lot. To see it enough times, to see enough times that your child learned something that you didn't see and they really did get it will help the parents see other similar learning. But you have to relax and be willing to see it. If you're looking for school and all you see is people sitting lying, looking out windows and playing video games it looks like, then by your school definition, they were doing nothing. If you see what doesn't look like a math paper as not math, then it's the parent. That's the problem. The parent has held up a school overlay and they're looking through that to get their child to look like school. Send them to school if that's what you want. If you want to get away from school, leave the school where it was and come into the real world, into the real natural world, where semesters and school years and all of that are not natural. They're constructed by schools, they belong to school, they are of school.

Sandra Dodd: 1:00:09

But speaking of school, I was going to tell another story about when I was teaching. I was teaching 15-year-olds this time. So they're getting slightly romantic. They kind of are starting to like the opposite sex or same sex or however. They're liking other people. They're getting the urges.

Sandra Dodd: 1:00:23

So we had a magazine and there was a Romeo and Juliet. It wasn't straight Shakespeare, it was a little bit translated. It was set up like a movie script, and so we're reading. It's like pick a part, everybody, have a part if you want one, and we'll just sit at the desks and read it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:00:40

So they're reading, and somebody in there asked a question that I myself, as a kid, asked most of my teachers why do we have to learn this? What is this good for? And I'm thinking all righty shakespeare, I like shakespeare. I want to give a real answer, though, because some of these kids don't and never will. This might be it for them. After today. Shakespeare's over for them, and I thought what is it really?

Sandra Dodd: 1:01:04

And I said now, when people know me, they think well, you say this all the time. I said it for the first time that day. I myself was not yet 30 years old. And there are all these 15-year-olds looking at me and I said to get more jokes. And there are all these 15 year olds looking at me and I said to get more jokes. And after I said that, I thought that's where jokes come from. Jokes are funny because it took two different things you knew and put them together in a new way. That's how humor works. So I was standing there going oh no, I'm not thinking about Shakespeare. I'm thinking about humor, and I just said, the more you know, the more jokes you'll get. And then we kept reading and that's never left me. Whenever I hear a comedian or whenever a movie is funny, it's like, okay, that's funny because I knew something about that city or about that kind of person or about that job. And there will be people who see it and go. I don't get it, it's not funny, that's because they don't know enough.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:02:00

My kids just shared with me over dinner today. Uh, they've been reading good omens and watching the show and they were talking about this whole concept of heaven and hell and the devils and the angels, and what is good and what is bad, and and and one of the characters, uh, who's a bad guy, who's a demon? He doesn't like um making one person's life hell because that's not very efficient. He has to annoy a lot of people with the things he does. He wants to really, you know, do his job well. And then they shared with me some of the things that this devil came up with and, because I know the context, I was just laughing so hard when they said he built the m25 around London. I think the name is so that's the highway going around London. And you know I don't know if you've been there, I've been there a few times it takes four insert swear words ever to get around London because that highway is always under construction. Nothing is moving. It's supposed to idea that this was a devil's plan. It was just so funny.

Sandra Dodd: 1:03:26

It was so funny. I have been as a passenger, yeah so I can't drive there.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:03:33

It was funny, so I knew something, and then I totally got the joke.

Sandra Dodd: 1:03:36

They're so proud of the roundabouts because that, even though it's like a highway, like we would think of it as a freeway because it's to bypass London, but you can get out and get to another part of town or out of town, but there there keep being these roundabouts where people are going as fast as the possible wrong way, you know, from my point of view, three lanes wide, and they just sort of spin themselves in there and spin themselves out without killing everybody. So I'm always afraid of and impressed by the roundabouts. Yeah, so when it's going fast you're going to hit a roundabout and if you're local it's fine, and if you're not local it's horrible. So the devil sent me there one day. Yeah, well, I've been there a few times.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:04:17

Anyways, I just reminded me of, yeah, the jokes you'll get, but the question, the question, really, how do we know they're learning? It has to be followed up by why do we need to learn? Why are we afraid of it? Why are we afraid of it? And maybe also, why is that in focus? Why is that the point? Is the point learning, or is the point something else?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:04:51

Because if it's not really enjoyable to read Shakespeare, the meta learning the real thing you're really going to learn is that you have to read something really boring and hard to understand that you don't want to read. That's how a lot of kids go away from a Shakespeare class. Yeah, that some idiot wrote 500 years ago, and now I'm being tortured with it in school and I'm even getting a questionnaire and I'm not going to be able to answer it, so I'm apparently also stupid. That's where they're really learning, or? A lot of kids not all, of course, obviously, but a lot of kids. That's what they're learning, but that's not what we're talking about. If we talk about are they learning, then they would say, oh, we successfully taught them Shakespeare. But I mean, as Shakespeare comes up every second episode, I talk with you. It's so pretentious so it could be anything.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:05:52

The point is, when the school system says we're teaching A, very often K is learned. What is learned in the math class is I can't do math, I am failing, I can't keep up with my mates, my way of thinking is wrong. It's a whole new other math problem that you know. People do math in different ways. But in the school context, with the workbook, it's very often one way to get to the answer, not 10 different ways. So you also learn your line of thinking is wrong, even though it might be right, but no one notices because they're only looking for that one way. And I think we need to ask that meta question also about the homeschooling situation, the unschooling situation. It's not about whether they ever read Shakespeare or not. Lots of kids grow up, lots of people live an entire life without ever reading any Shakespeare, and those are perfectly good lives. Yeah, yeah, fine.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:03

Cecilia is very brave and feisty and told the school that they don't get to test her kids. They only get to look at her situation as a school. Is it failing or succeeding as a school? Are you providing what schools provide? And then I left the country. Provide, so I didn't. And then I left the country.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:07:20

I mean, I was brave, we never know what would have happened.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:23

Perhaps that was, that was the speech on the way out and that she slammed the door.

Sandra Dodd: 1:07:27

It wasn't exactly, but I mean, yeah, I'm not recommending this to anyone, it was no but it does make sense, you know, because they at school they're not judging schools by the grade, in a way, they are sometimes by the, by the scores the kids make. But and then in Sue's situation I think, if her kids are not above average she's afraid, like they, like the school is like OK, you can do this, but your kids have to be above average, while half of ours will be below. You know, it's OK for schools to fail kids, but it's not OK for a family to. So none of that is fair or right or good. I don't like it. I don't like that schools are poking their you know faces into people's houses and going what are you doing? What are you doing when we don't get to do that to them? Not really. You know we don't get to complain and go. Why are so many of the kids at school unhappy? Why are so many of them feeling like they're stupid and will never learn math and and they're creating non-readers? Unschoolers don't have to endure that. They don't have to endure the. Now I feel stupid because I can't do it. If they're just, if they're just approaching the world in their own way, in their, from their own cells, within their own minds and eyes and seeing things when they see them. They don't have to be compared to other people and compete to see who can learn something fastest. They can just learn it in a peaceful, natural, sweet way.

Sandra Dodd: 1:08:46

And my daughter was over here. She's 33 and she doesn't have Wi-Fi at her house except on her phone, so she wanted to come over here and use her computer to file her taxes online and to register her car online, which you can do now. And so after she was finished, she said oh, that was a. That was. I'm glad. I'm glad I did that, cause you know it was time I have to do it.

Sandra Dodd: 1:09:05

It was there's pressure and what? How? I don't remember the exact phrase she used. And I said well, that's because you never had to do book reports, because, you know you, you got to bypass all of those little deadlines and pressures of school. And she said, yeah, I guess so.

Sandra Dodd: 1:09:23

But the thing that she felt pressured about was a real world thing registering your car, paying your taxes. She didn't have to practice for 12 or 13 years with book reports and tests and final reports in history or anything like that. It's wonderful, it's a luxury in history or anything like that. It's wonderful, it's a luxury and it just has made her life so much more peaceful. And there are things that she's surprised that people don't know who did go to school, that she picked up because she happened by and it was interesting. So I think if unschoolers can see that learning is the effect and the culmination of all little things that people have picked up in whatever way, through games or humor or music or conversations at home, board games, anything, anything that they picked up, they hook it to something else and you hook enough stuff together. You've knitted yourself your own model of the universe.

Sue Elivs: 1:10:21

What if we put aside homeschooling and put aside like registration, and put aside school and didn't think about what, not influenced by those at all? What would we as parents, when we get to the end? What would we have liked our kids to have learned? What do we want them to learn while they're living their lives with us as unschoolers? Can we come down to just a few basic things? Like I was thinking, we can learn anything anytime. It's never too late to learn anything, and I think that's a very basic thing is that sometimes parents worry have we got enough of this? Have my kids learned enough of that? But learning goes on all the time and I grew up not knowing how to use a mobile phone or a video player. You learn as you go, so maybe you can learn anything at any age. Learning never stops. It might be a valuable thing for us to impart to our kids that we want them to learn that.

Sue Elivs: 1:11:35

I was also thinking I would have liked to have known that I was valuable. You're valuable. You have these talents. You have a purpose in life. You can. It's okay to go out there, try things and make mistakes. Yeah, it's okay to learn things in your own time as well. You don't have to compete with anybody. There's none of the. These are sort of fundamental things I was thinking that I would like to impart or I hope I imparted to my children that it's okay to be.

Sue Elivs: 1:12:13

People are curious. Um, follow your curiosity, follow your dreams. There's uh. And then it doesn't really matter whether they have learned what the schools think is important or what the homeschool curriculum says, because we have curious kids. They know they can learn. They know they can try things and fail. They know where to go and get the information from. They know that when they want to play those video games or practice their dancing or their music or even their math skills, that that's quite all right because they're part of them. These are their talents, their interests, their, their passions, and somebody believes that they're valuable enough for them to spend the time learning more about and get.

Sue Elivs: 1:13:06

I always think that it'd be lovely when our kids left home believing they have enough self-confidence and they believe that they're going to find their place in the world. It might take a while, but they have a purpose, and I think that's so much. When I left school, I had no idea that I was valuable. I had no purpose in life. As you said, sandra, earlier, I had that experience of finishing university and thinking I'm never going to learn another thing, ever again. Nobody's going to make me learn anything, and I had lost all my curiosity and I don't want that. Well, I didn't want that for any of my children, and those are the sort of things, that fundamental things, that I wanted my kids to learn. But they're not the regular. Well, I hope that they can balance checkbook or I hope they can write an essay in case they go to uni or all those kind of things.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:14:14

I think also the classic academics. That would be the optimal takeaway from school childhood. It's not at all the core of what I would like them to know. Most of mine have not left yet. I'm a little bit reluctant to say what I would like them to know because I'm open for it to be a little bit different.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:14:52

But learning that you can handle a lot of different situations in life, that change is not dangerous, that I mean we talked about unconditional love before that you are loved in this world, that you are welcome in this world, that some someone else needs you and that your unique take and your unique talents are needed in some context, some form. You don't have to be like everyone else. You have to be exactly like you. Like it said apparently on the first university know thyself, so we can. We can go and look for a lot of knowledge, but but if we know who we are and we feel confident with our two feet planted on the ground in this life, I think that's a very important, important mindset maybe to start off from, rather than how many languages you speak or how many fancy books you've read or how many musical instruments you play. I think all of these skills and markers of knowledge. These skills and markers of knowledge. It's not at all the core of what I find really, really important. It happens to be in our context that learning is a privilege. We really enjoy having time to deep dive into things and it could be all kinds of things crafts or games or academics or music or dancing or anything To really have the time for that time where you don't have to manage your physical body or make money so you can pay rent and bread, um, do practical stuff that needs to be done, but time to well, you can learn from all these tasks. I know I mean it's and it can be really fun, but I really cherish the time I have for learning, for studying, for focused taking in things that I want to learn.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:17:35

And I think my children, when they deliberately sit down to learn a new skill or deep dive into something they are interested in, they really know that it's a privilege, that it's fun, that they're doing it because they want to and that's a takeaway they get from this kind of life. It's a complete upside-down world. They don't hate learning, they love learning. They do it for funsies, they do it if they have two extra hours. That's what they'll do, and it can look in many different ways. Sometimes it looks like a video game, sometimes it looks like just lying around on the sofa, but if you pay attention to what they're actually doing, they're learning. They're working on acquiring information on something that they're interested in I think that it would help parents.

Sandra Dodd: 1:18:34

As a goal maybe and it could be a defense we could say this is what my kids are learning. They're learning to learn. They're learning how to get information. They're learning that they can as sue said, said at any age, in various circumstances, they can learn, so they know how to learn. And that's not to say they know how to learn so they're just going to sit around and not learn. That's not how it works. But if a child has been unschooled for, say, 10 years, and then you say how you want to learn to do this thing and they go yes, I must take a class, something went wrong, because taking a class shouldn't be the first thing they think of. If they're used to learning in a natural way, in the real world. They can nowadays go get a youtube video. That's how a lot of people do. If they're going to fix something or try to troubleshoot some appliance they have, or clean their vacuum cleaner, whatever, they don't take it to the shop before they go to YouTube and where some professional is saying oh, this particular model has a weirdness right here, undo the screw like this, take that hairball out of your vacuum. That's not even learning about the vacuum cleaner. It's solving one little problem. It's figuring out what would help me right now. What do I need to know or what do I need to get? How can I get it?

Sandra Dodd: 1:19:54

The internet is what people used to think you'd go to the library for. You go to the library to ask the librarian what resources do you have? To answer this question and the librarian would know what books they had and set you down with a book. Now people just Google it and you don't even have to type anymore. You can just say hey, siri, I have this printer that I need to change the ink in, and Siri will send you to either the manual of the printer or a video or something.

Sandra Dodd: 1:20:20

So the world is different from anything any of our teachers predicted or imagined. And if our children lived in that world and were prevented from being in that world and being confident in it and not ashamed of being in it, happy to be in it, then they can live in it, can acquire more information, assistance. If they want to learn blacksmithing, they might be lucky enough to meet somebody and watch them actually doing it with the live heat. But if they don't have that opportunity, they can go online and watch blacksmith videos, and that is something that no one should be ashamed of. People should be thrilled about. Oh it's amazing.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:21:03

It's amazing. I love it. It's the things that are possible now. It's overwhelming how easy it is to acquire knowledge and how much is available out there and and and to the extreme of how much detail and how many different takes and things and you can study anything and learn anything from the comfort of your sofa. It's amazing, and that's what I'm saying when I'm saying sometimes it looks like just lying around on the sofa, but it's not. I wanted to add one thing which I think is an answer to the question how do we know they're learning? But also some kind of I don't know, maybe on my list of what I want them to learn or what yeah, I think I want them to learn, or what. Yeah, I think I want them to learn this um, ask questions. Be really good at asking questions, keep asking questions.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:22:15

Having a culture as a family where we ask questions, interested questions in all kinds of things. Why did Shakespeare write in that way? Why do we have to learn? Why do we love Shakespeare? Why is the monitor angled that way, from the standards on? I don't get it. Why did they come up with that kind of frame for that? Whatever video game? It sparks the mind to think, and when we ask each other questions about the things we're doing or the things we're working with or the things that are happening around us, it's as if we put the train on the tracks. But it's also a way to see that we are learning to hear that the mind is puzzled and if it's not, if the question is really boring, we're working with the wrong thing. So the whole mindset of questioning everything, which is like a standard headline of unschooling, it's all. It's not just questioning everything like rebellion to the system, it's also just think about the questions that can be asked and ask them.

Sue Elivs: 1:23:36

Maybe we have, as parents, have to give the idea that it's okay to ask questions too, because you hear parents say too many questions. He's always asking questions. Questions are important, but as adults I've noticed that some adults are afraid to ask questions because they don't want to look stupid I should know this, or maybe I'm, and so they know they don't want to look stupid. I should know this, or maybe I'm, and so they don't learn the answers, and I think that's very sad. So I love what you've just said there, cecilia, about. Questions are great. We always ponder. We ask questions, but make it safe for people to ask questions, and I think we have no trouble doing that in our unschooling homes. Ask questions I think we have no trouble doing that in our unschooling homes. We're always asking questions and following them up and getting curious and excited as we're trying to find answers, but I don't think that happens all the time.

Sue Elivs: 1:24:38

I don't remember being in a position to ask questions when I was growing up and when my son went to uni and he was doing a Bachelor of Nursing and he had loads of questions and he used to put his hand up I've got a question and he was told there was no time for questions and he got squashed. And he got squashed and, yeah, that comes back to time, doesn't it? That? Coffee and sitting around the table or lounging around, we have time to ponder questions and to find satisfactory answers. Or even if we don't find an answer, it's exciting, interesting to look at the possibilities. Exciting, interesting to look at the possibilities. I like that.

Sandra Dodd: 1:25:27

Cecilia, I remember being in school and asking questions because I was curious, and some teacher answers can be that's not going to be on the test, or you don't need to know that this year, or they're going to cover that next year.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:25:43

That doesn't happen with unschooling, so that's great. I've never had a teacher come up with that response. Not that it was not going to be on the test, but okay. I grew up in a school system with not a lot. We actually only had a final. We only had tests when it was over. That was fun.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:26:05

I think another thing is we can ask these questions and we have time for these questions, because there is no agenda, there is no curriculum, there is no. You know, we have to get through the next five pages of the workbook within this week. That's not the framework of an unschooling family. So we have time and I've said it before and but'm going to say it again one of my experiences is that if we can wait, it's in your slogan-y thing read a little, do a little, wait a while. Sandra. What is it you say read a little, try a little, try a little, wait a while. So wait and maybe wait a long while. I'm not now. I'm not going to say something now that could be taken in the wrong way, because I'm not saying that all children should arrive at being interested in the classic academic elements of basic schooling that they would have had exposure to in a normal school setting. I'm not saying that they all have to get there, I'm just saying that in my experience, if I can wait, what I see is that they pick it up by themselves. And I'm not doing a lot of strewing, partially because of the lifestyle that I have, with no base, but I just saw a good example is my now 16-year-old daughter. She's done with basic mandatory schooling. The way it looks in our country. It looks in our country, um, she wouldn't be. She would be in the equivalent of high school, early college, I think, um, american style.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:27:54

She wrote a very long list of things to do when we moved into the house in France where we just spend a month, um with something 35 points, and she was laughing a lot. I'm not sure I'm going to complete all of them, but this is what I want to do. And then she did a focused list of only four things that were important to do while in this house, so within this month of peace and quiet, and one of them was mathematics. It said, and I was like what? You never, ever were interested the slightest. You want to get to the conclusion. If you have a problem that involves some sort of math, if you need to figure something out. You want to figure it out, but you do not care how to get there. If someone will do it for you, you're happy.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:47

Why is this on your list? I don't get it. She's 16 years old. She has not done any workbooks, any websites, any.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:28:59

She did like a little bit of fiddling with it a year ago because she had some idea about something I can't remember, but this is a girl who has not worked with it at all and she's not naturally interested in any way. But now suddenly it was on the list and I'm not sure exactly what her answer was when my jaw dropped and it's not the point either of what I'm saying. It's not what her reasons were right now longer than what would have been expected in the school system for them to show any interest or passion around these academics. But then suddenly it's interesting to them Suddenly. This is what they want to do and then they do it. And if they don't do it, I don't care.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:30:01

It's only been on the list and mathematics is one of the 36 things that she didn't do. She did other great things. So it was just on the list. But I was surprised it was.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:30:13

But then again I wasn't, because it feels like a lot of these things we want them to learn in their school time the mandatory early schooling prior I don't know what you call it primary school, I don't know the first 10 years, let's say. It's as if we want to push it earlier and earlier and earlier, as if it was better to learn it when you're eight than when you're 18. But really, if you learn it when you want to learn it, that's when it makes sense, that's when it's going to stick, that's when it's going to be fun, that's when it's not going to be a waste of your time, that's when you're going to ask all the right questions and go on an adventure with the thing, whereas when you're pushed to do something way before you're ready for it, way before you want to, it's just going to hurt. Or way before you want to, it's just going to hurt. So well, that's just the point.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:31:12

If we can wait and have time for whatever is important for the children when they are younger at some point, it's as if it's just a huge change between a 10-year-old and the almost young adult you are. When you're an older teenager. It changes the way they approach things. They want to learn the seriousness of it, the speed at which they can acquire these more structured academic knowledge things it's it's amazing to see. So just wait for it right.

Sandra Dodd: 1:31:50

It's because of what they already know, because they're adding to a large body of knowledge. They're not being baffled with something they never heard of when they're little and saying if you don't have to understand it, just recite it back to us, just do this exercise, just make these marks on the paper and trust us, that's not learning. And if they wait until they're interested and they're adding to what they've already experienced in the world, what they've already thought while they were lying on the couch, what they've already seen, when they were at some museum in France, you said you're not strewing, but you are. You're taking your kids to different places, putting them in a different house or campground and saying there's a world you haven't seen.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:32:31

Yeah, yeah, it's the same thing, it just looks different, yeah. It's good, obviously.

Sandra Dodd: 1:32:35

Oh yeah, I think it's easier to learn when you're older, because you have more experience.

Sue Elivs: 1:32:41

But it's also easier to learn Maybe motivation too. Sometimes motivation comes into it as well, that you suddenly have a reason that you didn't have previously and that motivation focuses you to learn quicker too. So maybe can I just go back to the questions, because I had another thought about questions there. I was thinking about what we're doing sitting here and what I do on my blog and what you probably have done a lot of both of you as well is we're pondering unschooling and we're asking questions about it and we're having the conversations. And certainly I don't sit here at the beginning and think I know all the answers and I like listening to you both and thinking about your responses and adding to my understanding and expanding my thoughts on unschooling.

Sue Elivs: 1:33:43

And I'm thinking about people who are listening to podcasts as well. They have questions and so we're all learning here that this is a very good example of how we have, we want to learn and how we learn by pondering a quick, having a question and sometimes oh, one of our episodes we did on self-directed Cecilia we come up with the conclusion that there are no answers, no definite answers. Do you remember that? That some situations in life with our children we don't have definite answers about, but we ponder and we do the best we can. We don't have definite answers about, but it's we ponder and we do the best we can.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:34:27

So sometimes there isn't a perfect pathway, uh, to do all we want or whatever, but we do the best is it kind of a provocative conclusion, or part conclusion, to the ones who are ready to de-school a little more, to say how do we know they're learning? That's the question, and the answer is we don't. Can we handle not knowing whether they are learning?

Sue Elivs: 1:35:04

Do we trust? Do we get to know our kids and trust them and the process? That's amazing. We don't really know what they're going to have learned by the time they leave our circle. But if we understand how learning works and we know our children and we trust the whole process and trust our kids, then yeah, we won't know exactly, but maybe it's all right.

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:35

I think we do know they're learning. We see it because we are with them.

Sue Elivs: 1:35:40

But we don't know what they end up learning. We know they're learning. No and there's another danger. There's another danger. That will they learn? All they need to know is the question oh no, nobody does, does anybody?

Cecilie Conrad: 1:35:54

we don't know nobody learns everything.

Sandra Dodd: 1:35:57

No, exactly everyone. Everyone has gaps, everyone. Everyone can if they're, if they're not ruined, if they're not, if school doesn't beat them down to the point that they're not curious anymore and they hate school and they hate learning and they want to get away from it. If that condition does not exist, if they're still open and happy, they can still keep learning and they don't have to stop at 18 or stop at 21 or stop when they get a master's degree or anything. There's no reason to stop. But I think it would be too scary and probably untrue to say we don't know that they're learning.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:31

But sometimes parents will see a child who walks early. If a child walks at six months, first parent, if it's a first child, sometimes parents get excited. But if it's a second or third or fourth they're like, ah, sit back down, don't get up. But if they see a child walk early, they sometimes project that out of the future. Oh, then he'll run soon, then he'll be an Olympic gold medalist.

Sandra Dodd: 1:36:53

Or if a child is verbal very early or can read at two or three, like some kids do, just learn to read when they're little, with nobody trying to teach them or anything. They just some once in a while one picks it up, then the parents might go oh, he'll have a PhD in literature. So the parents need to not do that too, to just say maybe a child will be super interested in a sport until he's 12 and he's done forever. He's not going to become a professional and buy you a house, he's just going to be a guy who played until he was 12 and did something else after that. So I think that it's important for parents to accept that learning is lumpy. It won't look like any ideal curriculum, there's no guarantee and they don't see the actual learning happen. They see the effect of it.

Sue Elivs: 1:37:37

Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:37:39

Yeah, and sometimes it works in different ways than we think it does. I've been corrected many times in my assumptions on how things are learned by what happened. So I think I know things, and I know things about processes how to learn to read, or how to learn to play a musical instrument, or what do you need to do in order to learn whatever. And then I have been trying, and I very often fail, but to some extent I've succeeded in stepping back and allowing my children to just have their freedom and do whatever they want, and I've seen that they sometimes learn things in in completely different ways compared to how I thought it was necessary to do it. Um, I have little examples and big examples I right now I can think about when my the same daughter, the one who's 16 now, and she learned to read, to write um, not the capital letters, but the other ones, I don't know, low lowercase letters they call it which is lowercase lowercase so she could write with the capital letters.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:39:02

She wanted to learn the lowercase ones and that took like a year of my schooling when I was a child. So first you learn the whatever. But, um, I was not very patient, so I just and neither is she, um. So she said, can you just show me how it's done and I can do it in that way? So I did it once. I took out a big piece of paper. I wrote the capital one and then the little one next to it, the lowercase one, um, next to it. So for reference she had the one she knew and then she could see the other one. I did it, put it on the wall and the next day she could write with it. I don't know how she did it, she didn't stay up all night, she just did it.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:39:47

Um, my son that's the other example I can come up with right now my son, the youngest one, who is now 13.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:39:54

I've always known he's he's got a big talent for music and a big passion for it, but he's never been wanting to play an instrument and and I'm just so it's been so hard for me to shut up about it. I failed. I will admit it, because I've learned. You know you have to learn the little motor skills and you have to rehearse for two years before you really get proficient and then it becomes fun and you can play around, be creative. But you have to learn the chords and you have to keep trying. And 20 minutes every day, all the things, all the voices in my head of how to to learn to play a musical instrument. And I've really tried to shut up and I've really failed to push him and he kept saying what I need right now is to listen to a lot of music. That's what I need and at some point I'll pick up an instrument, but right now all I need to do is listen to music and it looks very late.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:41:02

It looks like lying around on the sofa with your headphones on. It is what it is. It is lying around on the sofa with your headphones on. And now, a few months ago, he picked up two instruments not one but two and he can play with his eyes closed, making up new music and coming up with new ideas, ideas and I want him to record it because I think it's so good. I want to listen to it when I'm cooking it's. It came out of nowhere. It came out of. I don't know how he's done it, but it happened overnight, more or less. So that's another wait, a while story, just wait, and yeah and shut up.

Sandra Dodd: 1:41:57

I learned two instruments slowly and painstakingly when I was young, and two easily and almost suddenly when I was grown or teens when I was a teen. So I know exactly what you're talking about.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:42:10

Yeah, a lot of things we've learned about learning is wrong, and a lot of things we've learned about how we see learning happening is wrong, and a lot of things we've learned about how to test learning has happened is also wrong the assembly line style of learning that has been going on for the past 80 years, 100 years, maybe, not quite, probably is not.

Sandra Dodd: 1:42:38

It works in a way. It works in a way for some percentage of people and it's damaging for many others. And so I think schools are not as bad now as they were 50, 70 years ago. They're getting better. It's wonderful to have the opportunity to have an option, and so, with unschooling, I've never people have said to us so do you want to destroy the schools? Do you want everybody to be unschoolers? I'm like nope, unschooling doesn't work unless the parent really wants to do it. It's something that the parents really have to embrace and explore and kind of commit themselves to for years. So no, I don't expect everybody to do that. A lot of people have to go to work. They're using school for daycare. They need school. Some kids like school. I liked school. It was more fun than being at home. So I know schools are fine to be where they are.

Sandra Dodd: 1:43:46

If pile of ideas I have on my website that they can come to and just poke around and follow a link to another. Some more, some more, some more. What about this problem? What about history? What about that find ideas and stories from other families from years past and decide if they want to live that, try to live that way for a while and then maybe they don't like it, maybe they embrace it. But I think what we're doing we, the three of us are still learning about learning, because we get some theory that we had from unschooling one of our kids that worked great and then the next kid comes along and doesn't work anymore. So we're still seeing how individualized it really is, even though we've been doing it. So I think that may be something to say to the unschooling parents who listen to you you're learning. You're learning all the time. Figure out how to learn it. There are lots of ways to get more ideas so that you can try this yourself read a little, try a little, wait a while, watch.

Sandra Dodd: 1:44:47

but sometimes wait a long time and wait and be patient, but it's just it's. It's providing an opportunity for an alternative and maybe some confidence. That has worked well. Some of the people who went through this are at universities. Some just get jobs right away. Some go off exploring the world in courageous ways. And there's no sense gathering all the stories of all the unschoolers and some of them maybe aren't glorious examples of anything, but still, if you compare that, if you overlay that on school, at least none of them got out of school with really bad grades or were deprived of graduating from high school because they owed money to the library or the gym, you know silly things, silly school-only things. Our children were able to be spared that and there's an advantage to that, to being your whole self at whatever age you are. I'm rambling, I'm sorry, but it's still about learning. It's important rambling.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:02

I think it's important stuff. If I'm a little zoning out, it's because it's quite late in my end.

Sandra Dodd: 1:46:09

Yeah, we should quit, so you can sleep, so Sue can eat.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:13

I've heard my children brush their teeth.

Sandra Dodd: 1:46:18

So it's bedtime in Spain, breakfast time in Australia, and I need to fix dinner soon in New Mexico.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:46:25

Well, I did also arrive yesterday, so I'm a little exhausted from the whole transplant of the family from rural France to big city life in Barcelona, I will admit it. It's been a really good conversation and I think you had a very, very valid point, sue, that we're all learning here, and I didn't have all the answers when I started. I still don't have them, but I got more clear on on what are the main points I can come up with around the question of how do we know they're learning and why do we think we need that and what kind of learning are we talking about. It's been very interesting, thank you.

Sue Elivs: 1:47:10

I've enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, sandra and Cecilia see you next time.