Originally written in 2006 – updated in 2011 

Ron & Andrea over at atypicalhomeschool.net are asking unschoolers to answer these questions for the next Carnival of Unschooling. (A carnival is a collection of related blog posts).

Update 2011: The Carnival of Unschooling moved to this blog after a while and was called Unschooling Voices. The carnival has retired but you can read the archives on this site. 

1. Unschooling feels, sounds or appears like a good philosophy to follow, but ________ prevent me (or make me hesitant to) follow through with it.

2. Unschooling my child(ren) has enabled me to see ________

I guess the first question would be directed to those who are just starting out their unschooling journey, still thinking about it or have extreme circumstances where unschooling would not work.

Here’s my answer to question #2.

Unschooling my children is enabling me to see that learning is everywhere. The more they are out of school, the more I see the curiosity and spark in their eyes.

Unschooling my children is enabling me to see that learning is fun and enjoyable. Learning is not filling in a bubble on a test. Learning is not being told to memorize a bunch of facts that they could very easily find, in a matter of minutes, online or in a book.

Unschooling my children is enabling me to see that their interests and passions are valid and important.

Unschooling my children is enabling me to see them…for all they are and all they can become.

Unschooling my children his enabling me to see that life really is for living and exploring and singing and creating and discovering and trying and doing and being.

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It’s not enough to leave a child to fend for themselves when it comes to discovering new interests and the world around them. Unschooling parents should look for opportunities to expose their children to to a variety of people, new ideas, the community outside your immediate one and activities that don’t normally come up in your daily life.

If your family life is rich and full, there will be things to do, places to go, projects to tackle, interesting things to discuss. Don’t watch and wait for signs of an interest. Go out and bring them to your child…..to your family.

And when they find interests, support them! Get interested yourself, at least enough to understand what they’re doing so they can discuss it with you.

This is not about money either. Go to the library, free concerts, museums that have free admission, activities in your local parks….there’s tons of stuff if you look for it and are open to new things.

Unschooling is anything by passive and direction-less.

It’s about lighting a fire.

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My family has been unschooling for 10 years now, since our oldest was 6. We live our lives without school, we don’t separate life into subjects. Everything is connected, one thing leads to another, and connections are constantly being made in our brains.

We are learning beings, it is inherent in us to keep on learning.

Our kids wake up each day and decide what they want to do, I’m not sure if it’s really a decision or just following a natural flow of things. We have lots of choices since our lives are not tightly scheduled.

Some advantages of unschooling are:

-Freedom to learn what, how and when you want.
-Freedom to eat when hungry, sleep when tired, use the bathroom as needed without permission.
-Freedom from being graded and tested.
-Freedom to be who you are, to figure out who you are, your likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, interests, style, hobbies etc. without being forced to conform.
-Having control over your own mind and body.
-Real, natural learning.
-Learning in your own way and time.
-Not having to conform to school standards.
-Closer family.
-Freedom from school schedules and constraints.
-Living and learning in the real world, real life, not an artificial environment such as school.

One of the important things to remember is that each child has their own unique timetable and their own way of learning. I believe that unschooling fosters and encourages the individual and does away with averages and milestones and timeframes that someone else has set as a standard of achievement. I am their mother, I nurture them, I love them, I listen to them, I observe them, I talk to them, I spend time with them, I play with them, I respect them, I give them time, space and freedom. I also facilitate and by that I mean answer questions, look things up, provide resources, take them places, offer suggestions, ideas and pretty much just help them figure out their world. I love being with my kids and sharing their lives with them. We learn so much from each other.

They are interesting, curious, inquisitive people. We talk about everything under the sun. We all have different personalities and bring something unique to the table and generally have a good time with each other. We take each new day as it comes, learning is happening all of the time, and it’s inevitable.

The unschooling life is a wonderful way to live with your children. We are our children’s partners in life. We have been building the foundation of trust and respect for 16 years. We learn about the world by living in it. We follow our interests wherever they may lead. We are happy, whole people just living our lives as if school didn’t exist.

“There is no difference between living and learning… it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being separate.” ~ John Holt

Written in joy by Stephanie Waldron

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Anyone who has spent any time at all exploring unschooling, likely knows there’s a variety of ways people define unschooling. The labels vary, depending on how far from mainstream methods a family has moved. Unschooling runs the gamut, from those who simply choose to let go of curriculum but keep more mainstream parenting methods, like bedtimes, chores, screen-time or content controls, all the way to people who have let go of all the traditional controls we’ve been told we must enforce to be responsible parents.

I’ve seen labels ranging from ‘academic unschooler’ to ‘radical unschoolers’ and, recently, even ‘rabid unschoolers‘ pop up in conversations about unschooling choices. My husband, Gary, has never liked the label radical unschooling, because for him the word radical connotes extremism, and he doesn’t feel we’re really extreme. When I use the word radical, I find myself feeling defensive about trying to explain why I’d want to be thought of as radical. So, over the years we’ve been unschooling I’ve looked for a phrase that better describes the way we live.

Although I’d prefer not to need a label for our methods, it seems we need some kind of phrase to explain it to those who ask. In recent months, I’ve begun to think of us as whole life unschoolers. I find it much more descriptive of who we are. What do I mean when I say we are whole life unschoolers? We don’t use a curriculum, have set bedtimes for our sons or assign chores. Our kids watch whatever they choose on tv, play video games of their choosing as often as they want, play whatever in-person games they wish, don’t have a curfew, eat what they want when they’re hungry.

What is it we DO? We trust, because we believe that it’s simply not possible to live even one day without learning something, that we will all learn all we need to live the life we want. Just as we trusted, and have seen happen, that our children would learn to read simply by living in a home where reading was natural and joyful, we know that they can also learn to sleep when their bodies need rest, to eat the foods their bodies need. Our boys learn how to be in relationship with others by sharing their lives with others, both in our home and in the larger world outside of it; we are their facilitators in finding their way, wherever we go. We answer questions on topics ranging from history, religion, health, science, nature, math and more. Sometimes the answer is “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” which leads to searching for answers, meandering conversations and sometimes unexpected discoveries. We also share our outlook on the world, and strive to provide good examples in the way we treat other people, including children.

It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when we had limits and controls. We enforced bedtimes to fit our oldest son’s school schedule. When he was young I tried to force the ‘right’ diet, I limited tv shows (no Simpsons!); I even assigned chores. At the time I felt I had no choice but to listen to those around me, telling me what I ‘must’ do, even though in my heart I could see that it wasn’t working for us. It wasn’t just that those methods didn’t work for our children, they didn’t work for us as parents either. Imposed limits and demands make people unhappy, so of course, the same limits and demands make children unhappy. Being controlled certainly didn’t add to their happiness, and I wanted happy children. I was heartbroken at what that did to our relationship with our kids. Not only that, it made me ask why I was treating them this way, especially since I wasn’t convinced it was necessary to limit and control them.

When I found unschooling, I also found parents who had managed to create the family life I wanted; parents who weren’t frustrated by trying to control their children. They had happy children, who were kind and capable, and they had this without fighting or punishment. As I started to let go of my fears about how our boys would turn out if I ‘broke the rules’ I found we were all happier. And happier is good.

In our culture, there’s a pervasive belief that happiness will be ours someday. We grow up being told that someday we’ll be happy, when we’re adults it will be ‘our turn’ to have things our way. Why wait for that elusive someday? Why not be happy today? How can we help our children be happy today? Is it fair or loving to tell children they must wait for their turn to be happy? Why wouldn’t a parent want their child to be happy; to feel, to know deep in his soul, that he’s loved and celebrated and supported and completely free to revel in what brings him joy?

When I’m asked “Why whole-life unschooling?” my answer is because, ultimately, we can’t imagine any other way of living. It’s only natural when something brings as much joy, freedom and wonder as unschooling does, that we would want to extend that to all areas of our life.

Written by Sylvia Toyama

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1) You address a lot of the day to day in your blog, but what are the biggest hurdles to starting unschooling?

For me, it was changing the way I view education, school and learning. Real learning…learning that truly means something to an individual. Learning has nothing to do with passing or failing, dividing the world up into subjects or taking a standardized test. That’s not learning.

Education is not telling students that it’s June 1 and today is the day you need to learn about dolphins. Also, when you’re done “learning”, you’re going to be tested to see if you can regurgitate all the facts back. And if you do, bingo!…you’ve learned!

For me, seeing the learning in everything and not dividing the world up into educational and not educational has been very helpful. In Guerrilla Learning, by Grace Llewellyn she says;

“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again. School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”

2) And what are the unexpected benefits you find along the way?

For my children, one of the unexpected benefits is how they (especially my youngest) are starting to question things more. They’re interested in knowing things. They’re curious. They’re starting to see that learning is not something you do just to pass a test. For me, an unexpected benefit was how much I would change through this journey.

3) How has homeschooling helped your children blossom?

Unschooling is allowing them to be free and they’re blossoming in that freedom. They’re starting to become more sure of themselves, which isn’t hard to do when you’re not in school. There’s nobody telling them that they’re failures so their confidence in themselves is soaring. They are starting to see that life is not sectioned into educational and not educational and that they’re interests take them places that school could never dream of.

**originally posted in 2007**

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Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world” so they organized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming. In fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school so nobody worried about that, except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running but had a nervous breakdown because of so much makeup work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of the treetop down. He also developed a “charlie horse” from overexertion and then got a C in climbing and D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely. In the climbing class, he beat all the others to the top of the tree but insisted on using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceeding well and also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

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My nine year old daughter wants to be an astronaut and she’s passionate about astronomy and space. I’ve learned more about the solar system from her than I ever did in in all my years in school.

A few months ago, she and my husband (I call them the two space cadets  -lol) were watching Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and there’s a scene where they were using math concepts to figure out how to bring the capsule back to Earth. Jacqueline asked Billy to pause the movie at a scene that showed the paper they were writing on so she could get a good look at it. She wanted to know what they were doing and what type of math that was.

This started an ongoing discussion about algebra and calculus and since then she’s been asking Billy to explain it to her. He told her that he would look around for a book because he needed to brush up on it himself before he could explain it to her.

That was a couple of months ago and because of other issues going on in our life, he hadn’t gotten around to buying the book yet.

Taking matters into her own hands, (my mother always said – when there’s a will, there’s a way) Jacqueline spotted an algebra text book in a used book store and bought it with her own money.

The other night she asked Billy to read her a bedtime story and when he walked into her room, there she was…all cozy in bed with Sally, the bear she created at Build-A-Bear. She handed Billy the book she had selected…yup, the algebra textbook. She also had a notebook so she could jot down notes.

I couldn’t resist a picture.

Have I mentioned how much I love unschooling recently?

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“Exactly what is unschooling? I thought it was another name for homeschooling”.

All poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles.
All unschooling is homeschooling, but all homeschooling isn’t unschooling.
Unschooling is legally a type of homeschooling.
Unschoolers don’t “school-at-home” nor do we gives tests or grades.
Unschooling accepts all learning as valid. Everything is connected. You never know when one thing will lead to or connect with another! Unschoolers know they *do* and will keep searching for those connections.
Unschooling is natural learning. Humans are hard-wired to learn-we crave it and seek it out. When you believe that, you’re half-way to understanding how it works.
Unschooling is understanding the difference between teaching and learning. That’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome before you can “get” unschooling. (I can *teach* you everything *I* know about unschooling, but unless you’re willing to *learn* it, I’m wasting my time and your time.)
All children can unschool.
Many parents can’t.
Unschooling requires a “paradigm shift” to make it work. And it works best when you (the parent) are an active learner. And curious and thoughtful and enthusiastic and interested and interesting.
It’s about trust and respect and patience.
It helps if you can step OUT of the box. If you’re OK going against the flow and standing up for yourself (or at least your child).

**originally posted in 2006** 

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