`Unschool' lessons.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

Thirty-seven-year-old Robin Clevenger has all the trappings of a Eugene everymom.

She lives with her husband and two young children in an attractive house in a south hills cul-de-sac. She schleps the kids around in a new-model minivan. She's a University of Oregon graduate who runs and swims.

But when it comes to her children's education, Clevenger has taken a screeching turn from the norm.

She describes herself as a "hard-core unschooler." What that means, at least for the Clevengers, is that 4-year-old Asa and 7-year-old Mackenzie don't go to school. They have no tests, textbooks or teachers. In fact, they've never had any grown-up tell them what, when or how to learn.

It's all up to them.

"I set no agenda for my kids' education," says Clevenger, who left a software writing job at Microsoft six years ago to stay home with her kids. "I see myself as their educational facilitator. When they are interested in something, I follow up on it. And I get things I think they might be interested in."

Recently, for example, it was a book about Cleopatra she found at a thrift store. Mackenzie was captivated. Soon, he was delving into Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," watching documentaries on ancient Rome and even bidding for Roman coins on eBay.

That's the way learning should be, Clevenger says - natural and joyous and freewheeling.

"You see it before they're school-aged - the joy with which they embrace all kinds of learning when they are young," Clevenger says. "You compare that to the feelings you have when you're an older student in school. Usually that just isn't there anymore."

Pure unschooling falls at one end of a homeschooling continuum. The kind that most resembles school, with "school time," curriculum and expected outcomes, lies at the opposite end.

The concept is not new. The late John Holt, a Massachusetts teacher-turned-author who is considered the guru of unschooling, coined the term in the 1970s. Back then, the philosophy was embraced primarily within the counterculture.

But as the homeschooling movement has exploded in the last decade, unschooling has emerged from the fringes.

Letting children lead

Whether they unschool or homeschool in a more traditional way, parents' reasons are mostly the same. Many are dissatisfied with public schools for various reasons - maybe large class sizes or the increasing focus on standardized tests - and believe they can do a better job. They may feel school fails to challenge the intellect or fulfill particular special needs, or they may be wary of bullies and the social pecking order.

While religion is one of the most common reasons for home-schooling, it falls behind social and pedagogical concerns for most unschoolers.

What most distinguishes unschoolers from other homeschoolers is the genuine belief that children learn best when they lead and adults follow.

With sketchy tracking systems and different reporting laws from state to state, no one knows precisely how many homeschoolers there are, let alone how many of those fall into the unschooling camp.

A 1999 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that more than 850,000 children were home-schooled, although other studies have placed that number closer to 2 million. In any case, experts agree the number has at least tripled in the past 15 years, and is still climbing.

The Salem-based National Home Education Research Institute estimates that unschoolers account for between 7 and 15 percent of homeschoolers. That percentage may well be higher in the Eugene area, with its reputation as a hub for alternative living. Lane County is home to a plethora of resources for homeschoolers, as well as the only two Sudbury-model schools in Oregon. With about 100 students between them, Emerald Valley School in Eugene and Blue Mountain School in Cottage Grove embrace a philosophy similar to Holt's, giving students the unfettered right to choose what, when and how to learn.

At Emerald Valley, a part-time program, all the students are considered homeschoolers, and they show up on the Lane Education Service District's official count of registered homeschoolers. Under Oregon's compulsory school attendance law, parents must register their homeschooled children once they turn 7. As of March 15, Lane ESD had about 1,700 students registered countywide.

But those numbers may be low - especially when it comes to unschoolers. Emerald Valley co-founder Les Ditson, whose four children have been primarily unschooled, says he knows dozens of off-the-grid homeschoolers.

"If there's 100 people registered, there are 50 or 60 who are unregistered," Ditson says.

Avoiding 'the system'

Robin Clevenger and her husband, Wayne Clevenger, have gone back and forth about whether to register, vaguely leery of what "being part of the system" might mean down the road.

But Mackenzie is keen on taking a chess class at HomeSource, a publicly funded resource center in the Bethel neighborhood that serves more than 700 home-schooled children. Registration is a must, so the Clevengers say they will soon comply.

Some unschooling parents refuse to register because the state mandates that homeschooled children in grades three, five, eight and 10 take an approved standardized achievement test. If a child scores below the 15th percentile and fails to improve in consecutive attempts, the state can order the child to enroll in public school.

Just reading a test can be a challenge for some unschooled children. While many easily learn to read at a time roughly equivalent to their peers, others come to it more slowly - at 9, 12 or even later.

Testing is not a big concern for the Clevengers. Robin Clevenger figures her kids would do just fine on the tests, and she's probably right.

On a recent afternoon, Mackenzie, a towheaded boy with a gap-toothed grin, showed off his vast Lego collection. Legos are among the things he loves the most, along with computer games and gardening. Recently, he started a writer's group with friends he knows through the Eugene-Springfield Homeschool Association, a loosely knit group of about 40 families who get together for various activities, such as mid-week camping, crafts and informal classes.

"I write these very interesting stories," Mackenzie says, describing a plot derived from a fantasy game he invented called "Power." The kids write stories on their own and read them to each other when they meet.

Robin Clevenger is a budding fiction writer, too, although she bets Mackenzie will follow more closely in his father's footsteps, perhaps into the engineering field.

"He can think of a Lego construction and just make it," she says.

While Mackenzie can read individual words, he still has difficulty tracking text, she says, probably due to vision problems for which he is receiving therapy. He's also struggled with physical coordination, though he certainly does not lack confidence in any arena.

"He just doesn't think anything can keep him down," she says.

Reading also was difficult for Wayne, who left high school early to complete his diploma at community college. "School was definitely discouraging for me," he says, remembering that he often felt fidgety and unfocused. He eventually earned a two-year college degree, and now runs a successful airplane detailing and maintenance business.

Robin Clevenger wonders how the insouciant Mackenzie would fare in public school: "Would he be labeled the big uncoordinated kid who can't read well?"

At 4, his sister Asa is already starting to read, just like her mother did. She's extroverted, headstrong and sassy, with a mop of curly hair and a quizzical expression. She adores animals, music and dance, and is taking violin and ballet lessons - purely by choice.

True to their tradition of traveling when other families do not, the Clevengers spent the week before spring break in Disneyland, where Asa got to build her own stuffed animal, a bear she calls Snow White who was her constant companion until a new guinea pig stole her heart.

With her intellect and social skills, Asa would likely do just fine in school, her mother says. She did, too, but that didn't mean she was happy.

"I felt really ill-served by my education," says Clevenger, who earned top grades throughout her childhood in Medford. "It didn't engage my mind. I was bored, I got into trouble."

What school taught her, she says, "was to procrastinate to the last minute, cram everything in my head and forget it the next day."

Despite federal, state and local efforts to reform and improve the educational system, Clevenger sees little evidence of progress.

"Schools were never designed to produce critical thinking, they were never designed to produce creativity," she says. "There's glimmers of that, there are wonderful teachers, but they're inside this giant machine that just crushes."

Classes "not juicy"

Other unschoolers have given the system a chance. Heidi and Toby Knight Meigs, friends of the Clevengers through ESHA, hadn't planned to home-school their 11-year-old son, Nicholas. But behavioral problems that surfaced in preschool persisted and became an obstacle to learning. Increasingly desperate, Heidi started researching home-schooling, and finally pulled Nick out of Magnet Arts Elementary in third grade.

"I'd never even met a homeschooler in Eugene - ever," she says.

She learned about unschooling through correspondence on a homeschooling e-mail list. It didn't take long for all of her long-held notions about education to tumble away.

Three years later, Nick has "blossomed," says Knight Meigs, a stay-at-home mom who also plans to homeschool her 3-year-old daughter, Savanna. At school, Nick loathed writing, but now belongs to Mackenzie Clevenger's writing group. He's also taking classes at HomeSource in Lego robotics, racquetball and the history of the Oregon Trail.

Nick says the only thing he sometimes misses about school is cafeteria food.

"We weren't able to do what we wanted to do," he says. "We had to do what the school wanted us to do."

Eugene is home to a second, more recent guru of unschooling - Grace Llewellyn, a disillusioned former schoolteacher who 13 years ago penned a seminal how-to book aimed at teens who felt the way Nick did about school. "The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education" prompted dozens, maybe hundreds, of teens around the country to do just that.

One of them was Kyla Wetherell of Eugene. As a high school junior and "star pupil" in Corvallis, she read Llewellyn's book and quit school within days.

"School just felt so regimented to me," says Wetherell, now 28. "It just wasn't speaking to me anymore. The classes were really just not juicy."

She got her G.E.D. immediately, and then embarked on a path that took her all over the globe, backpacking, bicycling, volunteering, writing and working odd jobs. Now a full-time student at Lane Community College, Wetherell hopes to pursue a writing career. She says she has no regrets about leaving school.

While Llewellyn is no longer as active in the unschooling movement, she still hosts the annual Not Back to School Camp, which each September draws anywhere from 100 to 200 unschooled and homeschooled teens to Camp Myrtlewood, about two hours southwest of Eugene.

And she's still convinced most public schools take the wrong approach to education.

"A person's capacity to learn is so huge, it doesn't need all the structure and the rules that are part of compulsory education," says Llewellyn, 40.

Llewellyn and other advocates believe unschooling should never be an obstacle to attending college. Most colleges accept home-schoolers, so long as they can demonstrate academic prowess through entrance exams, essays and the like.

There's scant data on college attendance or success among homeschoolers; the University of Oregon, for example, only began tracking homeschoolers' progress in January.

Accurate statistics on the academic achievement of homeschooled are also hard to come by, although what limited data there are suggest that they often perform better on standardized tests than their public school counterparts.

The educational establishment has little to say about unschooling, though several groups have taken positions on homeschooling. The National Education Association advises against it, saying most homeschoolers can't get the comprehensive education they need; the National Association of Elementary School Principals also raises serious questions, and urges homeschooling parents to make sure their children are well-socialized and given curriculum and tests aligned with state standards.

The principal association's president, Tony Harduar, says he's not familiar with any parents who profess to be unschoolers, but he questioned whether such a free-range approach can really give children the skills they need to succeed and thrive.

"It's not a bad way to approach instruction, because if a child is interested in and excited about a topic, they'll want to learn," says Harduar, a school principal in Ferndale, Wash. "But in some areas, unless you have the scope and the sequence that parents need to cover to make sure the child is learning, there will be huge gaps."

Some other homeschoolers question the wisdom and fairness of the parental choice to unschool. Colleen Bauman, a member of another Eugene homeschooling cooperative, says her seventh-grade daughter's homeschooled education is self-directed to a great extent, but she believes pure unschooling crosses the line.

"I have seen some failures around unschooling that disturb me," she says. "It sounds ideal - 'If the child wants to learn to read, they will.' ' But often, she says, it is shame that finally spurs the unschooled child - an unhealthy motivator, she feels.

Robin Clevenger, who hails from a long line of educators, says she's heard few concerns from friends and family about the way she and Wayne educate their children.

"I think the proof is in the pudding," she says. "They're doing amazing things. They're very bright and very personable. My kids have a really rich life."

CAPTION(S):

Asa Clevenger plays under an image of Beethoven. She studies what she chooses to and is starting to read. She adores animals, music and dance.