“First, do no harm,” was Pam Sorooshian’s goal for herself as a homeschooling parent, over 20 years ago.
“It sounds like I set the bar pretty low,” she joked to her audience at the Discovery Learning Center. Surely, one would hope, she could accomplish more than not harming her three precious daughters!
As it turned out, “do no harm” wasn’t an easy goal to achieve, and a motto Pam returned to again and again as she evaluated her parenting choices.
Extremely unhappy with the public schools, she pulled her daughters out when her oldest was a third grader. As a new homeschooler, Pam thought she’d start with unit studies.
And she looked for the light in her children’s eyes. Were they shining with interest and enthusiasm, or dimming in boredom or resentment?
Quickly, it became obvious to Pam that attempting to teach her daughters when they weren’t ready to learn resulted in apathy or struggle. Teaching was harming her children’s curiosity, harming their parent-child relationship--and she had resolved to “do no harm”!
She took a step back.
Pam found unschooling soon after, and the rest is history. She’s been an advocate for peaceful parenting and unschooling ever since. Pam answers parents’ questions on several online homeschooling groups, including Unschooling California on Facebook.
She doesn't mince words, and her words are powerful. She challenged homeschooling parents using a charter school to throw their children’s high-stakes test scores in the trash, without even opening them first. And to tell their children: “Mom thinks so little of this test that it’s not even worth looking at!”
As independent homeschoolers with a private school affidavit, Pam’s daughters didn’t take the standardized tests. “But I don’t know if I could have done that (not looked at the scores),” she laughed, “That would be hard,”
One of Pam’s biggest influences is John Holt, former school teacher turned homeschooling advocate. She quoted Holt on the topic of trust: “To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted,”
“Trust the Children” is the Homeschooling Association of California’s motto (Pam serves on the board), and the theme of her talk to the DLC. To begin to trust ourselves, Pam advised, we need to reflect on our own childhoods and school history, and recognize the ways in which we were harmed. When did we first lose faith in our own competence in math, for example ? We didn’t start out insecure. All two and three year olds are extremely confident in their abilities, Pam pointed out. Somewhere in our growing up, the light went out. “Go back to the root,” Pam advised. Rediscover that joyful, undamaged child we once were, and our children once were.
Recognize as completely arbitrary the public schools’ timeline for skills and competencies, she said. Just as it doesn’t matter if a child learns long division as an eight year old, it doesn’t matter if she learns to read at five or six, or even thirteen. Pam’s children learned to read when they were ready. One was three, one was five, and one was seven. Research done on homsechoolers suggests that the natural age for learning to read varies from five years old to nine years old, with some children reading much younger and much later.
Letting our children read when they are ready is an incredible gift, Pam said. It’s the gift of confidence in their own ability to master a skill that our society deems incredibly valuable.
Alternately, forcing our children to read before they are ready is incredibly damaging.
Forcing any learning is harmful, Pam emphasized. The desired knowledge may in fact be learned, but is it remembered? How well, and at what cost? Pam has seen the result of coercive learning in the hundreds of students who take her college level economics classes. Young adults who know formulas but don’t know how to apply them. Disturbingly, they don’t know that they don’t know! Pam has too many students who don’t care to know, or do the bare minimum to get by.
In contrast, Pam has interacted with hundreds of unschooled young adults who recognize when they don’t know something, have not lost the desire to learn, and have the confidence in their ability to learn it. They have not been harmed; their natural learning ability remains intact. Pam recommends Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn for an overview of how humans have evolved to learn, naturally and without coercion.
Unschooling paved the way for Pam’s three daughters to attend and graduate from college, but Pam insists that college is not “the be all and end all”. It’s not for everyone.
If you’d like to read more, Sandra Dodd maintains a collection of Pam’s writing on her website: http://sandradodd.com/pamsorooshian
