The Unschooled Mind

The Unschooled Mind was one of the first books that really had a great impact on me as a new home educator. Howard Gardner's book unschooled mind is really a great start for home school parents that have had children in public or private school systems prior to homeschooling. Most of us were in public or private school , and so we have an ideas of what we think education, and learning should look like. Unfortunately learning looks very different for everyone, and everyone learns in their own way.

An education is the affects of the learning has taken place. We all want our children to have the best education possible, and the only way to do that is to unschool ourselves. Don't look at ourselves and how we learn and place those expectations on our children. We live in different times, the knowledge required and how it is obtained should be different. Unschooling is simply a way of stepping away mentally from what we traditionally would look at as being learning.

Next we can physically change our environment and the environment in which our children learn in order to bring about the best success for that individual child. I say individual, because if you know children, and or have them, you know children are very different. Their personalities and interests are different. Their way of dealing with things and people are different, so why therefore would we assume that all children should learn the same. In actuality classroom teachers have told me, there is no way to implement the things in which they are taught how to teach during their training as a teacher in todays classrooms. Its almost impossible. Why? Because the system is not setup that way.
Teachers are in fact taught many unschooling philosophies.

Howard Gardner discusses in section two about the various types of learners, and conceptually how the mind works.
Garder looks into the theories of past Education Psychologist, such as Piaget, and Jung. In training, instructors are taught about the different types of learners, and learning styles, however in a classroom with 30 children it is very difficult to customize each students learning, especially when you are being pressured to make sure that students can pass the upcoming standardized testing or the school itself will be held accountable.

Gardner, like John Taylor Gatto gives solutions for students and the unschooling environment in which will bring about success based on their current development stage. Based on how the mind works, and how children think, Mr. Gardner provides excellent solutions on how not only schools, but how teachers should teach in general. I hope you enjoyed this review, and the book even more.