Exploring what Unschooling is
What’s unschooling? I try to figure it out.
This post is a continuation of another post, called What Is Unschooling?
John Holt
The term unschooling was coined by author and educator John Holt. He wrote books such as How Children Learn and How Children Fail. He also edited the first magazine dedicated exclusively to homeschooling, Growing Without Schooling.
Holt believed that compulsory schooling was simply not fit for the way children actually learn. He considered the traditional school model, which attempts to control and regulate how children learn, a detriment to the natural learning process.
Holt thought of schools as a resource, similar to a library, rather than the primary provider of education. He felt that children learn best when they are with their parents and are engaged in everyday life and learning through their surroundings and circumstances.
Spectrum
Unschooling is a spectrum. Families that unschool vary on their adherence to the principles.
On one end there are “relaxed homeschoolers.” They prefer to follow their students’ lead with interest-led learning, mostly. They also have some subjects that they teach in more traditional ways.
At the other end are the “radical unschoolers” for whom everyday life is in fact the only educational activity. Their children fully direct their own learning, and nothing is considered a “must teach” subject. Some of them even denounce certain terms and words such as “teach”.
However, everyone who takes on unschooling has a desire to instill in their children a lifelong love of learning — a realization that learning never really stops, and that learning can happen anywhere, at any time.
One way they accomplish that is through the art of “strewing.” This term refers to ensuring that interesting and engaging materials are readily available in a child’s environment. The practice of strewing creates a learning-rich atmosphere that encourages and facilitates natural curiosity.
Benefits
Unschooling has many advantages.
“the hungry mind is the single best predictor of educational achievement.” — Sophie von Stumm
Stronger Retention is one of them. Children (and adults!) tend to retain more learned information on topics that interest them. Our skills remain at their top when we use them every day. Unschooling capitalizes on that fact. Instead of being forced to memorize random facts long enough to pass a test, an unschooled student has a vested interest in learning the facts and skills that pique their interest. An unschooled student may pick up geometry skills while working on a building project. She learns grammar and spelling skills while reading and writing. For example, while reading she notices that dialogue is set apart by quote marks, so he begins applying that technique to the story he’s writing.
I personally would rather my daughters love mathematics, but not know how to do calculus when they graduate, than ace calculus tests but despise maths for the rest of their lives.
Unschooling also builds on natural gifts and talents. It can prove to be the ideal learning environment for children who might be labeled struggling learners in a traditional school setting. A student who struggles with dyslexia, for example, may prove to be a creative, talented writer when he can write without worrying about having his spelling and grammar critiqued.
That doesn’t mean that unschooling parents ignore vital skills. Instead, they allow their children to focus on their strengths and help them discover tools to overcome their weaknesses. This shift in focus allows children to reach their full potential based on their unique skill set without feeling inadequate because they process information differently than their peers.
It might go without saying, but unschooled children have strong self-motivation. Because unschooling is self-directed, unschoolers tend to be very self-motivated learners. One child may learn to read because he wants to be able to decipher the directions on a video game (I myself learned English by playing adventure games). Another may learn because she’s tired of waiting for someone to read aloud to her and, instead, wants to be able to pick up a book and read for herself.
Unschooled students tackle even subjects that they don’t like when they see the validity in learning them. For example, a student who doesn’t care for math will dive into lessons because the subject is necessary for his chosen field, college entrance exams, or successful completion of core classes. I have seen this scenario played out in multiple unschooling families that I know. Teens who had previously balked at learning algebra or geometry jumped in and progressed rapidly and successfully through the lessons once they saw a legitimate reason for and need to master those skills.
Learning styles
Psychologists have documented many differences between children in the way they learn. People vary in their “learning styles”, that is, the preference in how they acquire new information.
This is something that parents and teachers have noticed long before.
Unschooling is all about catering to these differences, these styles. In a traditional school setting, teachers seldom evaluate an individual student differently from other students. By definition, unschooling is geared towards adapting the learning journey to the way the child, individually.
Some kids are more visual, while others absorb more when they listen. Some are more kinetic while others can sit and read for hours. Some want to know everything about everything, immerse themselves in a study, while others just need to get the information useful to them, and get on with their pursuits. Some are planners, others are led by the moment. We don’t need research to tell us this (though there’s plenty that does).
Unschooling lets the student decide by naturally identifying where their strengths lie.
Unschooling is also attuned to the level of readiness of the child/student, regardless of their age or grade.
Developmental psychologists note that just as children reach growth milestones at different ages from each other, children are also prepared to learn different things at different ages (Vosniadou, S. (2001), “How Children Learn?”, The International Academy of Education). Just as some children learn to walk during a normal range of eight to fifteen months, and begin to talk across an even larger range, unschoolers expands that to the ability to read, for example.
In fact, experts have discovered that natural learning produces far greater changes in behavior than do traditional learning methods. Traditional education requires all children to begin reading at the same time and do multiplication at the same time.
On the other hand, unschoolers believe that some children cannot help but be bored because this was something that they had been ready to learn earlier, and even worse, some children cannot help but fail, because they are not yet ready for this new information being taught.
What does it look like?
Some might think unschooling sees kids watching TV or playing video games all day long. However, in most unschooling families lack of formal learning does not mean a lack of structure. Children still have routine and responsibilities.
The most significant difference most people might notice between an unschooling family and a more traditional homeschooling family is that learning happens naturally through life experiences for unschoolers. There are discussions about current events and news stories — from geography to geopolitics. There’s researching and planning — from nutritional facts of the week’s meals and how they affect human physiology, to architecture concept for the purpose of designing an enclosure for a pet gerbil. There’s plenty of reflection and additional studies, whether it is to do with playing a game or walking in the park.
While unschooling isn’t always done without homeschool curriculum, the curriculum is almost always student-directed. For example, the unschooled teen who decides that she needs to learn algebra and geometry for college entrance exams may determine that a specific math curriculum is the best way to learn what she needs to know. The letter-writing student may decide he’d like to learn cursive because it’s pretty and can help him with his interest in typography and graphic design.
Unschooling does not mean unparenting and it doesn’t mean unteaching. Unschooling is just a different, holistic way of looking at how to educate a child. — Kris Bales, Thought Co.
Trust
Many unschooling parents point to trust as a key factor in their success. Trusting their children to learn all they need to know. Trust that their children will learn when they are ready and interested, even if that means on a different timeline to schooled children. It’s important to them to give their kids the respect they deserve and the opportunity to make their own choices.
Moreover, unschooling parents prioritise the relationship they have with their kids above achievements (often, it’s not a choice — trust and attachment has proven to lead to higher achievements). These parents (like me, like you) make sure to have ample time together, and to deepen the connection with their kids by actively spending their childhood with them, rather than sending them off to experience it somewhere else.
In that, unschooling is a lifestyle choice.
It’s important to note, though, that trust doesn’t mean neglect. Unschooling parents tend to have an excellent sense of when their kids require guidance, support, or even just encouragement and affection. A sense that more often than not exceeds that of school teachers and counselors.
Socializing
An important misconception to dispel is that unschoolers are socially isolated. This is a common fiction in criticising homeschooling in general.
Children are socialized by four agents in society — parents, school, communities and media. However, most people focus on school is the only one. Yet, when pressed, most people admit that a playground of 200 children and one teacher or supervisor is not the ideal arrangement to teach children the proper way to get along with other humans. There is plenty of unavoidable teasing, bragging, one-up-man ship and bullying.
First, friends do not always come from school. Children thrown together because of age do not necessarily get along with each other due to different temperaments, cultures, and gender role expectations. Friends are everywhere in a child’s life, not just at school. Clubs, sports teams, interest-based extracurricular classes and neighborhoods are a great way to meet a variety of multi-aged friends.
Second, children are more in need of adults than peers. The smaller the child-to-adult ratio, the better. Children learn proper behavior toward each other by the presence of aware adults, who teach positive social skills. Adults are nurturing, not peers. For this, I recommend the ultimate argument for parental attachment in the book Hold On To Your Kids, by Gordon Neufeld.
Third, there is a myth, not supported by research, that children exposed to negative socialization like bullies, sarcastic comments, teasing, etc., learns how to handle it better later in life. Research proves the opposite; that a child who has had minimal bullying and teasing, tends to have better long term self-esteem and self-confidence in adulthood. Early exposure to nasty socialization leaves lifelong scars. The best way to avoid this is to have a lot of adults around to monitor negative socialization and gently correct it, as well as model assertiveness skills, confrontation skills, kindness, manners, and conflict resolution skills to children.
Some studies suggest that unschoolers may be more mature than their schooled peers on average (from “Comparison of Social Adjustment Between Home and Traditionally Schooled Students” and “Home Schooling: Back to the Future?”), and some believe this is a result of the wide range of people they have the opportunity to interact with.
In recent years, due to social media and other digital outlets, unschoolers have many more opportunities to meet and interact with other unschoolers, sharing experiences and making friends with a similar lifestyle.
What do they NEED to know
Unschoolers strongly subscribe to the notion that learning any specific subject is less important than learning how to learn.
I subscribe to it as well.
“Since we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever must be learned.” — John Holt
Practicing the ability to learn on their own logically makes it more likely that later, when children become adults, they can continue to learn what they need to know to meet newly emerging needs, interests, and goals. And that they can return to any subject that they feel was not sufficiently covered or learn a completely new subject.
The future, demanding a good grasp of an ever changing body of knowledge, as well as the acquisition of new skills, will welcome such adults with open arms.
“If children are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than anyone else could make for them.” — John Holt
Final words
“The greatest adventure in the world… is learning about it!” — Me
To summarize this long primer about unschooling, I hope you gather from the words above that unschooling is not a discipline (in fact, it’s kind of the opposite). It is a mindset that champions children’s curiosity and intense interests.
What does that mean to you? It’s your choice, or rather — it’s theirs. Let them make it.
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