Unschooling Explained

Uschooling finally explained:

Unschooling is based on a set of beliefs about life, learning, trust, freedom, respect, and empowerment that you either embrace or you don’t. You can’t “sort of” unschool: that’s called relaxed, eclectic homeschooling.

Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are natural unschoolers. It’s how they live and learn, until they reach the age when society has determined that they’re no longer capable of continuing to guide their own explorations and discoveries, and that their learning must now be:

1. handed over to an authority figure to lead
2. divorced from daily life
3. segregated into discrete subjects
4. filled with boredom and tedium
5. coerced

Adults are also natural unschoolers. Once we finally age out of compulsory schooling, our own unique needs and interests direct what we learn, when we learn it, how we learn it, how much of it we learn, and why we learn it.

As adults, we first recognize a need or a desire to learn something. Then we locate the resources and materials to learn it. Then we study or practice until we’re satisfied. Finally, the cycle begins anew with the next thing.

Unschooling simply extends that trust, freedom, respect, empowerment, and responsibility to “school-aged” children.

Unschooling is not the same as child-led learning. People who do child-led learning are oftentimes creating compulsory lessons or schooling out of their kids’ interests, which unschoolers will never do. Additionally, some people think that unschooling means that the parents are hands-off and wait for a child to express interest in something. Unschooling parents actually expose their children to a lot of different ideas, activities, etc, but their kids are free to take it or leave it with no punishments, manipulation, or coercion. The consent of the one doing the learning is paramount.

Unschooling will look different for each kid, because each kid is unique. Unschooling works with, rather than against, human nature. Unschooling allows kids to focus on who they are right now and who they want to become next, rather than wasting enormous amounts of time on always preparing them for something in the future that they may or may not even actually need. Unschooling assures that what is actually needed actually gets learned and used, rather than memorized for the test and promptly forgotten.