What Is Unschooling?

My next post will tell you how we arrived at unschooling. But first I want to tell you want unschooling is.

What unschooling is not: 

it is not is letting the kids go wild all day long.

It is not letting them do what they want all day long.

It is not laziness disguised as a clever teaching method.

At the very basic level, unschooling is about the parent trusting their child's God-given drive to learn, their inner curiosity, to learn at their own pace. 

It is about observing and learning who their child is and what they are interested in. 

It is about fostering their innate love of learning.

Here are some of my definitions of unschooling.

This one comes from a blog I've been reading a lot of lately, The Path Less Taken:

"Unschooling is a philosophy that allows that given a rich, interesting environment, and attentive, supportive parents, that learning will happen naturally.  To believe in unschooling is to believe that true learning happens best when it arises from the experiences and interests of the learner, not from an imposed curriculum or a teacher or a parent.  As unschooling parents, we don’t act as teachers, but as facilitators and partners.  We do not separate the day into subjects, or into school time, or play time, or learning time.  We live as if school does not exist.  We live our lives and we learn from it.

While some people will call unschooling a method of homeschooling, I believe that this implies that it is something that is done to children, and I prefer to think of it as the manner in which we live and interact with our children."    - Jennifer McGrail

And another definition by Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn:

Defined most simply, unschooling is not schooling. Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school. More specifically, they do not establish a curriculum for their children, they do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment.

From Pam Laricchia, author of several books about unschooling:

With unschooling, learning is not focused on the skills as it is in school (learning to read, to write, to calculate, and to memorize) but on pursuing personal goals and interests and the needed information and skills are picked up along the way. Learning has real meaning and connection to their lives in that moment so it is understood in a way that a random piece of information presented by someone else is not. And because that learning is strongly connected to a real and immediate use for that information or skill, it's much more likely to be remembered. Unschooling is a great way to learn.

Now that you know what unschooling is, next I'll tell you how we arrived at this unlikely way of homeschooling our children.