I just came across the term “unschooling” for the first time. As far as I can tell, it’s different to homeschooling.
I’m just wondering if anyone can tell me more about the differences, including where the homeschoolers stand on unschooling. Is there a difference in how/what you teach? Or is it just a different choice of word (i.e. philosophical rather than material difference)?
What about university? Do homeschooled and/or unschooled kids normally go?
Unschooling is one approach to homeschooling. Many of the original 1970s homeschoolers were unschoolers due to the influence of John Holt. I don’t actually know that much about it, but I gather that unschoolers argue that there’s no reason to home educate a kid if you’re just going to replicate school in the home. I don’t buy that argument, but that’s one of the things they say.
There are many books available about unschooling and the “father” of homeschooling is the aforementioned John Holt.
thats interesting. I haven’t heard of this before.
I homeschool, but don’t unschool. I had a friend that unschooled. From what I understood from what she explained to me, they wait for the child to have an interest in something, then help them learn what they want to learn. One daughter wanted to be a beautician, so she did a lot of studies in that area. The mother worked in math, science, history and such when she could, or when her daughter wanted to learn something about it. Her son didn’t show much interest in learning (other than playing outside) until he was 10. That was when he learned to read. I’ve lost touch with them, so don’t know how they are doing now.
I haven’t read books on unschooling, so can not give details. That is just one example from my experience. I’m sure there are other ways of unschooling as well.
Personally, I like gearing the child’s learning around their interests, but I would also want to expose them to many things and proactively teach them (even when they don’t know to ask for it).
Thanks guys… I just wonder what the world is like for kids who grow up with no qualifications. Do homeschooled kids normally go to university? I guess for an unschooled kid, there’s no chance. Learning to read at 10 seems a bit extreme.
The reason I ask about university is that it seems to make a huge difference to how fast you progress in the working world. You might be just as good as someone else in your job, but if that someone else has a degree and you don’t, they’ll be fast tracked. They’ll probably earn more than you too.
Does it seem fair that parents have the right to do that to their children?
Really interesting for the topic. thanks
I have just been googling unschooling and found this article about unschooling in australia by Beverly Paine a pioneer in homeschooling in Australia. It is a very interesting subject and i hope it clears up any confusion or it could leave you with more questions…??
What is Unschooling?
© Beverley Paine
The practice of unschooling is considered by many to be completely different from homeschooling, in that learning at home departs radically from the image of learning in the traditional classroom sense, with children concentrating learning through passive reception of knowledge and skills through the use of subject text books.
“Unschooling isn’t a method of instruction, it’s a different way of looking at learning.” Linda Wyatt
Unschooling is taking the process of ‘education’ out of learning - allowing learning to occur in a natural way, led by interest, passion, need, want, desire, to satisfy some immediate demand or long term goal. The essential ingredient in all of this is that learning becomes personally meaningful to the learner. This doesn’t take the ‘teacher’ or ‘mentor’ out of the picture - home learning, in whatever form it takes, is a family affair. Decisions made about learning activities are generally cooperatively decided after consultation and shared brainstorming sessions. Sometimes learning becomes an intensively personal affair; at other times the whole family will pursue an interest together with avid interest.
One of the features of unschooling is the absence of rigid time tables. This isn’t to say routine is abandoned. Even the most seemingly ‘disorganised’ home learning situations have a hidden and stable routine to each and every day - family sanity depends on this! Priorities are set according to family need and resources allocated accordingly. The greatest pleasure of an unschooling regime is being free to drop everything and really concentrate on a child’s burst of wonder as he or she discovers some new concept, some new piece of learning. Or becoming intimately engaged in their play, watching the abundance of learning that naturally flows from such interactive social play - the perfect picture of learning scaffolding.
Unschoolers tend to start from where they are at - right where they are, in the present moment. Each and every moment is full of learning opportunities and leads on to the next. The trick is not to get carried away by the excitement that presents itself, and to keep activities down to a level suitable for your children. Over stimulation is as damaging to a developing mind as overly passive activities. Take your time, take deep breaths! Recognise there is a lifetime of learning ahead for each and every one of us!
…and another article I penned on the same subject…
“What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” George Bernard Shaw
I am always satisfied and amazed to see my children pursuing new knowledge. It’s a very healthy and natural things for young children and my wish was always to preserve the intensity of their curiosity displayed during every waking hour. I didn’t give much thought to school back in those early years, but as it loomed closer I began to examine the purpose and outcomes of school education. It seemed that schools, also keen to see children in pursuit of knowledge, but in a rigidly defined way. There was no way the children could have any input into the curriculum, and even the parents seemed shut out. This disturbed me greatly and Robin and I began to look at alternative schools, and then finally alternatives to school!
In his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year award, John Gatto said, “Schools were designed by Horace Mann. . .and others to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population.” As my personal experience as a home educator grew, and I reflected on my experiences as a school student and how it had limited the way I thought about education and life, I found myself at odds with the state definition of education and at one stage refused to use the word, preferring the term ‘learning’ instead. ‘Education’ has, to me, become a fairly meaningless term, bandied about with scant regard to accountability. "
The traditional curriculum is based on the assumption that children must be taught knowledge because they will never feel inclined to pursue it themselves. Any one could see that that, when given a choice, most children prefer not to do school work and chose instead to play or engage in an activity that has immediate interest or satisfies some personal goal. In this, they are not like most adults I know. In school, knowledge is defined as school-‘work’ - and no one in our society seems to want to work - it is something we are coerced or bribed or forced to do. It’s easy for teachers and educators to conclude that children don’t like to acquire knowledge, which is why schooling became a method of controlling children and forcing them to do what the bureaucracy considered beneficial for them. Parents, eager for their children to better themselves in a competitive workforce, went along with this move, trusting that the ‘educated’ educators knew best…
Most children don’t like textbooks, workbooks, quizzes, rote memorization, subject schedules, and lengthy periods of physical inactivity. It’s not hard to see why. Few adults enjoy such tasks, and exert considerable will power or entice themselves with bribes to study subjects that have no immediate meaningful relevance.
Believe me, the work of a school teacher is vastly different from that of a homeschooling parent. In nearly all schools, a teacher is hired to deliver a ready-made, standardized, year-long curriculum to 25 or more age-segregated children who are confined in a building, often one room, all day. The teacher is restricted to using a standard curriculum - not because it is the best approach for encouraging an individual child to learn the things that need to be known - but because it is a convenient way to handle and track the progress of large numbers of children. For decades we’ve been reading about the results of the application of this standardised curriculum on our children and the bleak stories never change - a few bright lights in an otherwise downward spiral of reducing levels of literacy and numeracy.
Although it’s easy in retrospect to see the differences between the school environment and the home, many parents begin homeschooling under the impression that homeschooling is a kind of variation on the traditional public school curriculum, only delivered in the home. They tell themselves that it is the classroom, the social life and peer group pressure, the lack of resources, etc that reduce schooling to ineffectiveness in their children’s cases… Goals, objectives, set tasks, assignments and evaluation take centre stage, as they do in school. The winners in the homeschooling boom must surely be the textbook and curriculum publishing companies who go to great lengths to assure us that we must buy their products if we expect our children to be properly educated. It can be difficult for a new homeschooling family to think that an alternative approach is possible.
One alternative approach is “unschooling”, also known as “natural learning”, “experienced-based learning”, or “independent learning”, or ‘auto-didactic’ learners. It’s catching on fast, because it makes sense. What is impossible to achieve in the classroom becomes a successful approach in the home and community based learning environments. It’s empowering, not only to the children who accept more responsibility for the direction and content of their education, but also the parents.
Before I talk about what I think unschooling is, I feel I need to say a few words about what it isn’t. Unschooling isn’t a recipe, and therefore it can’t be explained in recipe terms. It is impossible to give unschooling directions for people to follow so that it can be tried for a week or so to see if it works. Unschooling isn’t a method; it’s a way of looking at children and at life. It is based on trust that parents and children will find the paths that work best for them - without depending on educational institutions, publishing companies, or experts to tell them what to do. Even though I read this in John Holt’s books before I began homeschooling, it took me years to assimilate this notion, and even longer to fully trust that my children will learn what they need to learn, when, where and how.
Unschooling does not mean that parents can never teach anything to their children, or that children should learn about life entirely on their own without the help and guidance of their parents. Unschooling does not mean that parents give up active participation in the education and development of their children and simply hope that something good will happen. Finally, since many unschooling families have definite plans for tertiary education, unschooling does not even mean that children will never take a course in any kind of a school, or use a textbook, or take a class…
What, then, is unschooling?
It’s more than following one’s interests; filling the day with play and chores and work and conversation. It’s staying busy and focussed on the important things in life - building relationships, between self and others, self and the world, self and ecology, self and community. It’s learning how to be grown-up (something many adults need to revisit!) and responsible,. It’s looking after oneself, one’s environment, family, friends and community, the world and all it’s creatures. It’s learning how to use resources sensibly and sustainably. It’s simply living.
We’ve found that when we follow our interests - and our interests inevitably lead to science, literature, history, mathematics, music, all the things that have interested people before anybody thought of them as “subjects” - we acquire many skills and retain knowledge long after the activity or passion has waned. I compare this to my years of learning subjects at school, and how little I remember from those passive lessons.
A large component of unschooling is grounded in doing real things, not because we hope they will be good for us, but because they are intrinsically fascinating. This is the key to learning - any learning. There is an energy that comes from this that you can’t buy with a curriculum. Children do real things all day long, and in a trusting and supportive home environment. Doing ‘real’ things invariably brings about healthy mental development and valuable knowledge, ultimately giving rise to insight and the acquisition of wisdom. In our home I’ve learned that it is natural for children to read, write, play with numbers, learn about society, find out about the past, think, wonder and do all those things that society so unsuccessfully attempts to force upon them in the context of schooling.
Very f ew of us get out of bed in the morning in the mood for a ‘learning experience’. I’d like to hope that most of us get up feeling in the mood for life. Children always do so - unless they are ill or life has been made overly stressful or confusing for them. I’ve had my doubts; times when it’s difficult to determine if anything important is actually going on. Natural learning has often been described as a little like watching a garden grow. No matter how closely we examine the garden, it is difficult to verify that anything is happening at that particular moment. But as the season progresses, we can see that much has happened, quietly and naturally. Children pursue life, and in doing so, pursue knowledge. They need adults to trust in the inevitability of this very natural process, and to offer what assistance they can.
Parents come to me with their unschooling questions about fulfilling state requirements and record-keeping. I found that writing down, in a logical way, ALL of the activities my children pursue - those that they initiate themselves and those that I ask them to do, from every area of life, gives me great confidence. It’s easy to translate everyday activities into educational jargon with a little thought - toothbrushing becomes Health and Hygiene, and so on. When I fill out the paperwork required for homeschooling in our state, I briefly describe, in the space provided, what we are currently doing, and the general intent of what we plan to do for the coming year. I don’t include long lists of books or describe any of the step-by-step skills associated with a curriculum. For example, under English/Language Arts, I mentioned that our son’s favourite “subject” is building websites. I say a few words about the sites he’s designed, the software he uses, and how he’s learning HTML, and that he is in contact with other website designers through the Internet. I mentioned that he reads a great deal and uses our computer for whatever writing he happens to do. I added that as he added sites to his portfolio I noticed his presentation, layout, functional design, spelling and language convention skills improved considerably.
Homeschooling is a unique opportunity for each family to do whatever makes sense for the growth and development of their children. If we have a reason for using a curriculum and traditional school materials, we are free to use them. They are not a universally necessary or required component of our homeschooling programs, either educational or legally. I’ve found that allowing curricula, textbooks, and tests to be the defining, driving force behind the education of a child is a hindrance in the home as much as in the school - not only because it interferes with learning, but because it interferes with trust.
Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s mentor and friend, said:
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less “showily”. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself… Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.”
Homeschooling provides a unique opportunity to step away from systems and methods, and to develop independent ideas out of actual experiences, where the child is truly in pursuit of knowledge, not the other way around.
My cousin unschooled her four boys. She produces children’s theater for a living (at a homeschool resource center) so they were and they were all very involved with that. The oldest went to college and is now a computer programmer, the second is attending Cornish College for the arts and is a very talented musician. The youngest two are still teenagers but have both performed in professional theatre, including Broadway productions that have been on tour in their area. Last I heard one wants to be a choreographer and the other an actor.
thanks Kimba15 for that awesome post
the only thing i will add is that homeschoolers as a group have no trouble getting in to university
and that lots of unschoolers go on to university as well
by the way john holt’s books are a wonderful read even if your not planning on homeschooling
Basically unschooling is another word for child led learning. Unschoolers do not believe in forcing their children to learn things just because they are in a textbook or a workbook. Some of the unschoolers I have followed have brilliant, expressive and artistic children. Unschoolers remain behind the scenes and let their child decide what they want to learn. They fill their homes with books, materials and the like and let their children discover their own interests. It is very similar to what we parents do in following what are children like as we create word sets and BOI sets for them. I have read several books on the subject, as I homeschool my six children. I have never had the ability to completely let go of workbooks and just trust that they are learning. We do have days where the children are very involved in their own interests and the fervor and determination they put unto their projects is fantastic. I think this is unschooling at its best. I have often wanted to unschool, it is a much more relaxed environment, but just haven’t been able to.
There is a magazine that centers around unschooling called Home Education Magazine. I used to subscribe and was always inspired when I read the articles of what other peoples children were doing. I think we have more in common with unschoolers than either of us may realize.
Yes, thanks Kimba15 - karma to you.
And that answers my question about university - thanks guys. 
Child-led learning immediately makes me think of Montessori. Do the Montessori philosophy and methods overlap much with those of unschoolers?
Yes, I will have to read John Holt’s book - thanks.
You know maddy I thought the same thing that it did sound a bit montessori but for the home!!! Maybe I am wrong?? I think it is certainly an interesting topic because we are so used to the schooling system being directed by a government set cirruculum and there are certainly things set in that cirriculum that are completely useless to learn that you will never ever use.
I would certainly like to hear from parents who are unschooling their children and the results that they are getting.
I used to read a column by Sandra Dodd. Maybe if you do a Google search you can find some of her articles. They are so inspiring. She wrote for Home Education Magazine and I loved her stuff best of all. Her kids were awesome!
The neat thing about unschooling is that children follow their passions and have such a hunger to learn, because it is what THEY want to do. I read about a teen who learned German on his own, because he wanted to, among many other things.
There are two otherbooks that I have read on the subject that were great.
Christian Unschooling and Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves
Laurie, the moderator for Teaching Baby to Read Yahoo Group unschools her 10 children. I think when you have big families, you have to resort to some form of it, there is just no way to keep it like traditional school. JMO