public monuments and examines the current debates over whether they should remain standing. also being published this week all their chuck klosterman looks back at the social political and technological happenings of the 90s marked by the growth of the internet. and in the 50s time magazine former managing editor james gaines profiles political activists of the 1950s who he argues upend the notion that the the decade was synonymous with conformity. find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold and watch for many of these authors to appear in the near future on book tv. i want to show you now the cover of this new book unschooled. it's called raising curious well-educated children outside the conventional classroom, and it's written by carrie mcdonald ms. mcdonald before we get into the substance of the book. tell us a little bit about yourself. sure, it's great to be with you peter. i am a senior education fellow

at the foundation for economic education to celebrating our 75th year anniversary. this year is the country's oldest free market think tank. i'm also an adjunct scholar at the cato institute a frequent writer at forbes. and as you mentioned the author of unschooled which came out in 2019 in the spring of 2019, but actually had quite a bit of renewed interest over the past year plus given the school shutdowns and the upsurge and interest in homeschooling and alternatives to schools particularly with again school shutdown. and delayed reopening plans now on a practical level. have you been a teacher in a classroom or do you have children who are of school age? so i am a homeschooling mom myself. i have four children who have never been schooled who range in age from 7 to 14. and so the book does tie in some of that sort of personal experience and reflection, but i

you know traveled the country and writing the book to visit other homeschooling families as well as self-directed learning centers and other schooling alternatives that are really catered to families looking for something different something more customized for their children's education outside of again the traditional school environment my background, my undergraduate degree is an economics and then i went to graduate school and education policy at harvard and that was really where i became interested in education choice and freedom and alternatives to school and education entrepreneurship really entrepreneurs coming up with new learning models at the k to 12 level and new ways the demand the parents. for something different for their kids will carrie mcdonald you say your children have been homeschooled, but have they been unschooled? is there a difference? yes, so yeah, so the difference is that homeschooling and

unschooling are of course both alternatives to school outside of a conventional classroom, but with unschooling it's really focused on self-directed education. so if we think about unschooling a sort of disentangling education from schooling including school at home methods of homeschooling so, you know sort of the stereotypical of version of homeschooling where you might have a parent sitting around a kitchen table with textbooks and sort of replicating school at home. i challenge that a little bit in this book and suggest that you know, you don't need to replicate school at home even in homeschooling models that you can encourage children's natural curiosity and creativity and then as a parent really connect those interests and passions that your kids naturally have available community resources, the people places and things around us. so how do you get to the basics

of teaching math and reading literacy to children if in an unschooled environment? yeah, so i make the point very clearly in the book that it's every parent's responsibility to make sure that their children are highly educated and i would argue that that is true whether your children are in school or are not in school that parents need to make sure their kids are actually learning and being educated and i think with unschooling because there is so much more family involvement in education because parents are really tuned in to their children's strengths and weaknesses and areas of interest. it is easier to again connect those resources and build upon the knowledge that children have and their natural curiosity to discover. and so i do go through the book talking about, you know how to approach reading and and math through and on the schooling. approach and i think it's important to mention that unschoolers are not sort of

anti-curriculum or anti-- this you know, sort of the accoutrements of traditional learning. it's just that the idea is that it's self-directed. it's student directed as opposed to top down and so you'll find that many unschooled children will gravitate to a curriculum for some subjects or all subjects many unschoolers end up taking community college classes in the high school years. in fact a survey done on a grown homeschoolers, excuse me. grown on schoolers by dr. peter gray. who's a psychology professor at boston college and an unschooling advocate who wrote the forward to my unschooled book he and his colleague gina riley discovered that most grown on schoolers did spend time during their high school years taking community college classes often getting an associate's degree at the same age that their peers would be getting a high school diploma. and then being able to enroll in a four-year university transferring those credits and saving quite a bit of money. so it's also really practical

approach particularly now with skyrocketing tuition rates at universities. well, it seems that the homeschool and the unschooled movements have grown exponentially in the last 20 years. is that saying something about public education? homeschooling has grown tremendously over the past couple of decades your right the first year that the us department of education began tracking homeschoolers was 1998 at the time. they counted 850,000 that number soared to about two million just under two million and 2016 and then over the past year of the school shutdown since the pandemic began in march 2020. we've seen a tripling of the homeschooling rate from that pre-pandemic level so that the us census bureau released report in february. finding that now more than 11% of the overall k-12 school age

population is being homeschooled, which is over five million students. that's tremendous growth and one of the things that the us census bureau found in particular was that that growth was really being driven in large part by black homeschooling families. there was a five-fold increase from march 2020 through this the school year that just ended of black homeschooling families to now an over-representation more than 16% of the overall school homeschool population identifies as black compared to about 15% of black students in the general k-12 public school population. so is that is that sending a message about public school? well, i think for this year for sure parents were really frustrated about delayed school reopenings zoom district schooling was not meeting the needs of many students and parents felt like they could do things better particularly once

they got a glimpse perhaps at what some of their kids were learning or were not learning in the classroom through remote schooling beginning last spring. so i think part of it is that i think the overall growth in homeschooling over the past couple of decades has been really more of a desire to provide a more personalized customized education. in fact the us department of education data from 2012 and 2016 shows that the number one reason that parents are choosing to homeschool is concern about the environment of other schools, including bullying negative peer pressure that sort of thing. so and the number two reason the number two motivator was desire for academic excellence, so i think that is somewhat of a reflection on the conventional school system, but really a sense of parents being re-empowered to help guide their children's education and learning and give them a more robust education that they may be getting elsewhere.

carrie mcdonald in unschooled. you used the term coercive schooling. what does that mean? bullying is sort of this idea that you know, we are compelling students to be in schools through compulsory schooling laws as well as through these course of measures top-down measures of you will learn this subject at this time in this way with very little customization. and in fact, we've really doubled down on the standardization of learning over the past couple of decades beginning with the passage of the no child left behind act in 2001, which i get into in the unschooled book and that's just accelerated over the past. of decades the new york times came out with a an in-depth article on homeschooling several years ago and they found that some of the biggest growth in today's homeschooling families is happening in urban secular families who were particularly turned off by this growing

standardization of schooling common core curriculum frameworks, and so on frequent testing push for academic standards at every younger ages expecting kindergarteners to be reading and all of that that really turned off a lot of parents so, you know this idea of injecting education with more freedom and consent over coercion and conformity. what's been the role of technology in furthering unschooled and homeschooled children? well now there are just so many online resources for homeschoolers and conventionally school children. we've certainly seen the reliance on technology over the past year. i think that it's been certainly bumpy at the district level and public schools that have tried to implement remote learning in many cases, but there are incredible private learning online learning programs that homeschoolers continue

continually rely on that. i think other families were able to really discover over the past year. i'm thinking of something like khan academy the nonprofit organization that is sort of the leader and online free learning videos. they're particularly known for their math curriculum. a lot of homeschoolers have been using them for years and i think more families discovered them this year and there's just this proliferation really of high quality online learning resources that makes homeschooling and these other schooling alternatives more accessible to more families. you touched on this a little bit earlier carrie mcdonald, but you talked about natural learning. could you expand on that a little bit? so the idea is that young children are naturally curious exuberant creative. they're always asking why. and are really eager to explore and discover their world and as i mentioned peter gray who wrote the forward to my book as he has so eloquently put you know,

these natural drives for learning and discovery don't sort of magically turn themselves off when a child turns five or six years old. we turn them off with our coerce of system of schooling and so the idea with unschooling and sort of separating education from schooling thinking about schooling as one method of education, but certainly not the only one and arguably not the best one for the realities of the 21st century. the idea is just to not shut off those natural drives for learning discovery creativity and curiosity and instead allow those drives to flourish, you know, we think about the of needs of the 21st century where we are increasingly competing and coexisting with robots and machines. you know, what is it that distinguishes human intelligence from artificial intelligence and it's things like creativity curiosity originality ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit and

so often those are the qualities that get diminished in a course of system of schooling, you know, we sort of trade originality for obedience in schools. we create trade creativity for conformity in schools. and that really shuts off those natural human drives for discovery and learning that are so critical now more than ever. all right. what's a downside to unschool to unschooling? you know, i think there is a, you know true upside. i think that this really is a moment that families are discovering conventional schooling is not meeting their needs certainly hasn't met the needs of many families over the past year and now more than ever families are looking for alternatives support for school choice has soared over the past year parents are put back in the driver's side. they've been re-empowered to take the reins of their children's education and seek other options and there are so

many, you know education entrepreneurs online learning programs community resources that are there to step in and support these families looking for a different way to learn carrie mcdonald is the author of this book on schooled raising curious well-educated children outside the conventional classroom. thanks for joining us on book tv. great to be with you peter. thanks. on book tvs author interview program afterwards syndicated columnist george will reflected on what he calls the unruly torrent years between 2008 and 2020. that that's unusual for you. say most people say gee how do you come up with things to write about that's the most commonly asked questions of a columnist and it's the question. i when i begin as a column, let's ask my friend bill buckley. yeah. is it how do you come up with things right about is that the world irritates me three times a week? well, i'd say the world irritates me amuses me peaks my curiosity.

the world is just littered with things to write about. it was set of napoleon. that he could not look at a landscape of that scene of battlefield. if you're a columnist you ought to be able to you can't look at the world without seeing column topics. yeah, they just come at you. visit booktv.org to watch the rest of this program where you can find it and all previous episodes of our weekly author interview program by clicking on the afterwards tab near the top of the page. i'm john walters president ceo of hudson institute. i'm very very happy to be joined today by the authors of this new book viral the search for the origin of covid-19 if you are interested as i think we all have suffered through this topic in where this pathogen came from, i believe this is the best book that has been written to date is thorough it is explains the science and it it tells