Story by Caroline Bowersox
Graphic by Denise Kyeremeh
DURHAM, N.C. – No grades, no homework, no tests, no lesson plans.
That may seem like every kid’s dream, but this was everyday life for Alice Goldstein-Plesser, who was “unschooled” until she was in tenth grade.
Goldstein-Plesser often explains her education to be a relaxed form of homeschooling when people ask, but her parents didn’t take on the role of teachers, deciding for themselves what was important for their daughter to learn. Instead, she defines them more as facilitators of her learning. “They really just encouraged knowledge acquisition, and let me decide which knowledge I wanted to pursue,” Goldstein-Plesser said.
The term unschooling was first coined by teacher-turned-activist John Holt in the 1970s, and is used to describe an alternative educational philosophy defined by a lack of curriculum, grading, standardized testing, or imposed lesson plans. Unschooled children are unlike traditional homeschoolers in that they do not simply replicate the actions of the classroom at home. Instead, unschoolers are encouraged to treat the world as their classroom, choosing for themselves what most interests them and what they would like to learn more about.
Instead of spending her days memorizing multiplication tables or practicing
SAT vocabulary, young Goldstein-Plesser invested her time in what most fascinated her – acting, music, science, dance and sports. She grew up in Durham, surrounded by a larger alternative-schooling community, and was able to participate in group activities with other children her age who were also not in traditional public school.
Every Wednesday, Goldstein-Plesser would attend a musical theater class for local homeschoolers and unschoolers. She joined a competitive swim team that practiced in the middle of the day, when other kids her age would have been in school. She also played for a girls’ soccer league and performed in the community orchestra. What were mere afterschool activities for most children filled Goldstein-Plesser’s typical day as an unschooler.
One of Goldstein-Plesser’s most memorable activities happened every Monday – a full-day, eight-hour outdoors program for homeschoolers and unschoolers at Schoolhouse of Wonder, a nature-based children’s camp just off the Eno River. Their website has a guarantee slogan that reads “We will send your kids home dirty, tired, and happy. Every single day.” Goldstein-Plesser surely can attest to that.
“It was just like one counselor and like 10 homeschoolers of varying ages, like running around in the woods, and that was like every Monday, I would just go run around in the woods and learn how to do outdoorsy skills like start fires,” she said.
Growing up, Goldstein-Plesser spent a lot of time outdoors, both at Schoolhouse of Wonder and whenever she had spare time. Those experiences nurtured her interest in science, in nature and the outside world. She amassed a vast collection of scientific field guides and visited local science fairs with her family. Like many other children, she would ask her parents questions about why the sky was blue or how clouds could float.
“I’m always very impressed with their ability to like, never discourage me from learning,” Goldstein-Plesser said of her parents. “Rather than just telling me the answers, which they probably didn’t know anyways, they helped me find those resources to learn about all those questions that were circling my mind.”
Eventually, Goldstein-Plesser discerned that she wanted to pursue a career in the sciences. Neither of her parents had a background in science, and while they may have been able to provide resources to answer her questions about soil, trees, and mushrooms when she was younger, Goldstein-Plesser’s scientific knowledge began to outpace their own. As a teenager, Goldstein-Plesser decided it was time to enroll in traditional high school.
“Going to school was my idea,” she said. “I was like, ‘hey, I’m about to apply for college in like two years, and I want to experience what traditional school is like, so that I’m more prepared for that.’” Goldstein-Plesser enrolled at the Durham School of the Arts as a 10th grade student, and graduated from the school in 2013. Unlike most transfer students, she didn’t have a transcript or test scores to show the school administration. Instead, she made her own transcript – violin lessons became a music credit, soccer matches became a P.E. credit, and her study of field guides a science credit.
She initially struggled with the rigid structure of a standard high school day, especially coming from an environment where she was free to choose when, where, and how she spent her time. Ultimately, though, Goldstein-Plesser found traditional school to be quite easy. Her unschooling experience was self-directed and self-motivated, but high school was the exact opposite. “In high school, you are just given the information you need to know for a test, and there’s not really anything you need to do other than, like, sit in class and absorb it from a person who’s telling you it,” she said.
After high school graduation, Goldstein-Plesser headed to Goucher College in Maryland to study biology and play Division III tennis. She spent some time working in toxicology at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and began a PhD program at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League research university, in 2020.
Skeptics may worry about the lack of discipline found in unschooling, but Goldstein-Plesser’s story illustrates the positive benefits for some children. A research report co-conducted by researchers at Boston College and Hunter College that surveyed 75 formerly unschooled adults found that the majority of them were happy with their unschooling journey. Many of the former unschoolers reported that unschooling led to increased motivation, personal responsibility, and interest in learning, and that they had fulfilling social lives despite not attending traditional school.
Goldstein-Plesser’s parents wanted an opportunity to spend more time with their children, and were inspired to try unschooling after reading a book about the educational philosophy. They are part of a larger community of parents and educators who believe that for many children, the excessive structure and requirements of traditional schooling only squash creativity and motivation. Unschooling may not work for every child, but Goldstein-Plesser feels that it was beneficial for her. “I have no regrets about my upbringing,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine being the kid that I was when I was like, 10, envisioning that person in school and having to sit in a chair all day. I think I would’ve gone insane, like I just don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it at all.”
Many of the meaningful experiences in Goldstein-Plesser’s childhood centered around community – like playing on sports teams with her friends or learning how to build a fire with other unschoolers. Hope Wilder, a Durham native and alternative-schooling activist, founded a local program that gave children like Goldstein-Plesser opportunities to build friendships and engage with their peers.
Wilder got her start in education and the alternative schooling movement through working at a collection of environmental education programs, like the weekly activities Goldstein-Plesser took part in at Schoolhouse of Wonder. During the dozen or so years that she worked in environmental education, she listened to a guest lecture by Peter Gray, one of the Boston College researchers, and read his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. “I felt like from my head to my toes, like, ‘this is what I want to do with my life,’” Wilder said.
The last straw came while she was working at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, where she would teach science lessons to elementary school children who were visiting for school field trips. “The whole thing with doing field trip programs is you have to deliver some state-mandated curriculum in order for the teachers to justify going on a field trip. They can’t just go on a field trip because being outside is good for people,” Wilder said.
One day at Duke Gardens, Wilder was leading a group of students through a lesson on the life cycle of an insect. While she was teaching, a child turned to her and asked, “Why can’t I just look at what I want to look at? Why can’t I just learn what I want to learn?”
The experience struck Wilder to the heart, especially since she had just finished reading Gray’s book. “It felt like force-feeding someone who wasn’t hungry, instead of waiting until they’re hungry and offering them what they were interested in eating,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I can’t continue. I love children. I love working with children. I want to do education, but I feel like I can’t sleep at night if I’m forcing these children to learn things they don’t want to learn.’”
Wilder became especially drawn to how children could learn through play, and developed an interest in self-directed education, where students are entrusted with determining their own learning goals and exploring the resources needed to achieve them.
During her time working in the education sector, Wilder interacted with several homeschoolers and unschoolers, both individual children and entire networks of parents who were participating in alternative schooling in the Durham area. Sometimes, the children would age out of the groups and no parents would be left to take over leadership, or sometimes they would just dissolve completely due to low involvement. “I know children can pursue their own interests at home, but it’s really hard to learn how to live in a community by yourself,” she said. “There are lots of homeschool co-ops, but often kids aged out of them, and there’s not a solid community for them to continue.”
It became clear that not all children who were unschooled or participating in some form of alternative homeschooling had the opportunity to engage in the kind of group-focused, age-appropriate activities that Goldstein-Plesser did. Durham and the surrounding area were full of young families who were attempting to raise their children outside of the school building and its rules, but not all of them knew how to do so effectively. Wilder began dreaming of what it would look like to create a physical community where children could learn to interact with other students with the aid of skilled adult facilitators, and she opened Pathfinder Community School in 2018.
“School” was a loose term, because Pathfinder wasn’t accredited by the state. North Carolina requires all private schools to administer “nationally standardized achievement tests” to all students in third, sixth, ninth, and 11th grades. Because of its educational philosophy, Pathfinder and its administration chose not to submit its students to standardized testing, although it did provide resources to parents who wanted to help their children study for those exams. Instead, Pathfinder was classified as a sort of drop-in homeschooling resource center by the state government.
Students at Pathfinder were only required to be in the building for four hours a day and 10 days a month – much more lenient than the typical North Carolina public school. Instead of submitting to authorities like teachers, principals, and superintendents, the children essentially governed themselves.
Each morning, all of the students who were in the building that day would take part in a “morning meeting,” where individual students could announce that they were going to go on a hike around campus that afternoon or watch a nature documentary before lunch. Pathfinder called these activities “offerings,” and each child was able to decide for themselves whether or not to participate. The only activities students were required to participate in was the morning gathering where offerings were announced and a discussion-based conflict resolution circle.
The students even self-instituted a “screen break,” where they all decided to turn off computers and tablets each afternoon to play outside together. “They voted on having a screen break in the afternoon,” Wilder said. “The kids would say ‘screen break,’ and they would all start playing together, and they would just keep playing until the end of the day, so they had their own self-imposed rules about that.”
Pathfinder Community School closed its doors in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the lessons its community structure and unrestrictive philosophy taught the Durham homeschooling community have stuck around. Unschooling remains a viable option for families looking to adopt an alternative approach to their child’s education, and a similar learning community, Worldmakers Agile Learning Center, plans to open in the Durham-Chapel Hill area in 2024.
