ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) - At the bottom of a backyard hill on a dreary Monday morning, a crowd of children negotiated their own Capture the Flag rules. At the top by the house, a boy in roller skates gingerly shuffled across moist grass.
Inside the home, a dance party - set to the “Frozen” soundtrack - raged on. Nearby, other children were encasing themselves in swinging hammocks, constructing multicolored block towers, or slouching on sofas: some reading, some talking, some simply sitting.
Monday is nominally a school day, but “school” doesn’t seem apt in describing the discordant buzz of eclectic activities unfolding across the ZigZag Agile Learning Community. Set on 3 acres near Enka Village, ZigZag contains no traditional school desks. Children receive no standard curriculum nor reading requirements. Adults drift through the area but offer no directives and impart few suggestions.
This is not recess. This is not a break from regularly scheduled programming. This is the programming, run from morning to afternoon on weekdays, by a community that believes in the power of unschooling.
ZIGZAG: THE POWER OF ‘UNSCHOOLING’
Unschooling falls under the umbrella of self-directed education, a practice in which children possess complete control over their own learning. Adults act as facilitators, meeting the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, safety, shelter) while kids fill their days with immeasurable combinations of activities.
ZigZag is an unschooling collective for children ranging between ages 3-13. Started in 2015 by husband and wife Hany Nagib and Keli Bryan, the community serves 27 children each week in a three-story house and wide backyard. A child can do any activity as long as it doesn’t harm themselves, others, or the physical space.
A typical ZigZag day might include fishing, making a birdhouse, deconstructing a television, spending time in the sand pit, participating in a balloon science demonstration, having card games or a magnet race, and a cat dance party. None is mandatory, and if at any point children grow tired of one activity, they simply start something else.
“The kids can learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it,” said Kasey Loidolt, 36, of Asheville, who unschools her daughters Emme, 6, and Lucy, 4.
“It might look like playing, but there’s real emotional-intelligence learning when they socialize and work through problems.”
‘FLOWED WITH MY LIFE PHILOSOPHY’
Outside of ZigZag, many students follow more traditional homeschooling - with assignments, lesson standards and homework - while others exclusively unschool. Loidolt has chosen the latter for her daughters, going all-in on unschooling.
“There’s a lot of unschooling opportunities here,” she said. “You can go take just one class somewhere or do more in different environments.”
Three days a week, Loidolt sends her daughters to ZigZag. When not at the unschooling collective, Emme and Lucy spend time outdoors in other unencumbered learning spaces like the Free Forest School.
Neither girl can read, which is of little concern to their mother. In fact, the ages when students learn to read is largely insignificant to unschooling supporters. An inability to read, even by the ages of 8 or 9, shouldn’t be cause for panic to most unschooling parents.
“They’re learning from real life applications, skills that are more important earlier on,” Loidolt said of her daughters. “Whereas in a more traditional school, you’re sitting and you’re only learning through reading information that might not be relevant to you.”
Parents who unschool often grow accustomed to defending their educational decision. A 2013 study found overcoming societal criticism - from family and peers - remained a strong mental barrier for unschooling families.
Asheville-resident Lora Clem, 39, said her parents and in-laws have questioned whether student-directed learning could bring later-in-life consequences for Clem’s 8-year-old daughter, Skye.
“I think as my parents have grown to know Skye and seen how exceptional she is, they’ve backed off a little bit,” Clem said. “But they can definitely get in that place of worry. Are you going to do this until she’s older? How is she going to go to college? I just tell them, those aren’t my worries.”
Clem settled on unschooling before Skye, her only child, was born.
“It just kind of flowed with my life philosophy,” she said. Clem recalled a prescriptiveness in her own traditional public school experience that she wished her daughter to escape.
“A lot of people who grow up in public schools have to refigure how to be interested in the world and in learning,” Clem said. “I don’t think she (Skye) has ever thought of learning as something she has to endure. I like that she gets to constantly be in choice.”
Skye learned to read early on, which Clem admitted was a relief.
On Mondays, Clem volunteers at ZigZag in exchange for waiving the center’s $39-a-day tuition. When not at ZigZag, Clem enrolls Skye in swim and tap-dancing lessons, makes frequent library trips, and sets up playdates with kids from various educational experiences.
Grade levels can be nebulous constructs in the unschooling community, so Skye code-switches, telling friends from more traditional schools she is in the second grade.
“When I was younger, I wanted to go to school,” Skye said while grasping a fishing pole by ZigZag’s backyard pond. “But now that my parents have told me more about it, I think this is better.”
GAINING MOMENTUM IN ASHEVILLE
In America, unschooling traces back to counter-culture movements of the late 1960s. “Unschool” soon became a verb, lingering as a niche, free-spirited approach for homeschooled students. The practice remains outlawed in several countries: Spain, Germany, China and Brazil. Yet over the past decade, unschooling has shown signs of growth in the United States.
Studies suggest the number of homeschoolers who unschool doubled from 10% in 2012 to 20% in 2016. At this rate, around 375,000 children are unschooled in the United States. In Buncombe County, more than 600 children may be fully or partially unschooled within a swelling local homeschool community. Precise numbers elude researchers.
WHAT’S BEHIND UNSCHOOLING
Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College, has spent the better part of the past decade researching unschooling. Gray suggests several factors are propelling an increased interest in the bold educational practice.
First, Gray believes more awareness of unschooling makes the practice less taboo.
The biggest challenge expressed was that of overcoming feelings of criticism, or social pressure, that came from others who disapproved and from their own culturally ingrained, habitual ways of thinking about education
According to Gray, most families come to unschool after bad experiences with mainstream learning options, while around 33% choose unschooling from the onset.
Technological advances have also made homeschooling, and thus unschooling, increasingly accessible to families.
Lastly, Gray said he believes more parents recognize that K-12 classrooms and curriculum don’t always produce the skills needed for the modern job market. Memorization and fact retrieval are diminished in an economy prizing creativity, initiative and interpersonal skills. Gray says student-directed education delivers these sought-after skills more consistently than curriculum-based lessons.
IS THIS LEGAL?
North Carolina law mandates homeschoolers take standardized math and reading tests. To comply with the law, many unschooling parents casually administer exams once a year without dwelling on the results.
The North Carolina Department of Non-Public Education can request assessment data from homeschooling parents throughout the year. To comply with state law, unschooling parents must also hold at least a high school diploma (or equivalent like a GED), keep immunization and attendance records, and operate on a regular schedule for at least nine months of the year.
How unschooling students fare as adults remains relatively unknown. In 2015, Gray and educational psychologist Gina Riley sampled 75 adults who had been unschooled for at least part of their K-12 education. Gray and Riley found 83% had pursued higher education, and 44% to either be pursuing or having already obtained their bachelor’s degrees. Both these percentages top nationwide averages.
However, unschooling can require significant time and effort from parents, calling into question the scalability of the practice. Gray’s studies found roughly half of unschooling parents are stay-at-home moms, which not every family can afford to have.
HANGING IN THE QUIET ROOM
The afternoon remained gray and sunless as children huddled around ZigZag’s backyard pond to fish for orange-bellied brim. At the same time, three middle-school aged boys cloistered themselves inside a secluded nook of the house, officially called the Quiet Room. The boys had been sitting in the Quiet Room all morning and all afternoon, lolling on a sofa and talking among each other.
“If I were in school, I would be in sixth grade, but that’s technical stuff,” one of the boys, Beckett Amidon, 11, said.
Amidon attends ZigZag once a week, mainly for the treehouse project, and says he learns through a relaxed homeschooling curriculum throughout the week.
“The perfect thing for a kid to do is instead of a school forcing a schedule, the student makes their own,” Amidon said. “I just think the freedom, being unrestricted, makes us want to learn more.”
Someday, he envisions himself on a mainstream college campus, or perhaps even earlier, a more conventional American high school. At the moment, neither feels imminent.
Clem and Loidolt would also consider mainstream schooling down-the-line, if Skye, Emme and Lucy desired. Yet both mothers acknowledged they would be quite content if their kids never spent a minute in a formal school until college.
At ZigZag, the day concludes like it begins, with a community circle. As 3 pm approached, Nagib called the children to congregate in the central room. Students pushed chairs into an oval and waited in their seats.
Nagib then went around the room, asking everyone to offer reflections of their days, what made them grateful, what they enjoyed or disliked about the previous six hours.
The scene was strange only in its normalcy: a group of children sitting uniformly, listening as an adult lead a discussion. For a moment, it almost resembled school.
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