Free-Range and Unschooling Guilds

Life skill testing? Sounds like a bad idea, because, well, it is.

If you’re wondering what on Earth I’m talking about, it came up in yesterday’s post when I wondered if perhaps unschooling kids could hang out with vetted Directors of Tactical Ops, (DTOs aka nannies), while traveling with their parents on work trips. As a brief recap, I reasoned/hoped that kids could travel with their parents on business trips, hang out with local DTOs, and then explore the area with their parent over the weekend. It’s not quite what’s known as World Schooling, where families travel the world freely instead of going to school. It’s a middle ground. From the kid’s point of view: Mom or Dad are travelling, there’s stuff I could experience, I’m going with them. There were two issues though, one was vetting DTOs. The other one, the one that led me to thoughts of life-skill testing was vetting kids, in order to qualify them to wander around towns with DTOs; to answer questions like, can they handle public transit, big cities, museums, or whatever the occasion might call for?

The gang being vetted for mountain safety by the National Park Service

I asked for feedback on the LetGrow.org support group on Facebook, and something better came out. What if instead of testing kids, we just recorded what they could/liked to do while they hung out in their own towns. How could this be supported and taken on the road? One way would be with a national association of free-range/unschooling groups: a guild of sorts.

In their own towns, unschooling kids find each other. Most towns have homeschooling groups that host playground days, museum days, campouts, and other events. What if these groups communicated to form a guild-like network? My original idea of host-city DTOs might work, but what if it were just as easy for unschooling/free-range kids to hang out for the day with other like-minded kids where they landed? I know the gang here would have a blast showing other kids around San Francisco. I’m guessing/hoping the same attitude exists across the country.

Here’s how the whole thing would look for vetting kids. Local homeschooling groups would keep records of the events they hosted, (most of them already do this through internet groups), and records of who participated, (for those that want to be vetted in other towns). These records would be aggregated by an unschooling/free-range guild. Since I’m just brainstorming here, maybe existing democratic and Sudbury schools could serve as the hubs of this guild where they exist. When kids were out and about traveling, the guild could be used as a two-way communication tool to help decide if an event would appeal to a kid. Kids and parents could find events that were appealing. Local unschooling/free-range groups could checkout what the visiting kid has done before to provide feedback to the visiting family about the event. For example, “We’re going for a three mile hike in the mountains, all downhill. It looks like you hike all the time, please do come along!

I don’t know if the plan would work, but it seems like it would be worth a try. I’ve had great luck doing similar things with organizations for adults I’ve belonged to. Typically if I call ahead, to the group’s local organizers, they can find a member willing to show me the sights if I’d like. Of course, we don’t vett each other beyond the fact that we belong to the same group.

And at the end of the day, perhaps that’s the best way to implement this idea as well. Perhaps once they’re aware of each other, free-range/unschooling families could communicate with each other to decide if their plans for the day were a good fit for other kids or not. The guild would still serve to facilitate communications, but members would work with each other to decide what would and wouldn’t fit. I like that model better actually, because in my mind it fits more precisely with what free-range is all about for me, the freedom for each family to make responsible choices that fit for them.

What do you think? Could kids traveling with their parents be welcomed by a network of like minded kids excited to show them their hometowns? Could families help each other out across the country? Is there an even better way to pull all this off? I know programs like this already exist for exchange students for example. Is there already a group that does this for other kids, and I’m just missing it?

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Copasetic Flow

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