Published by
Joanne on
May 19, 2009
‘Unschooling‘ popularity grows: Children pursue what interests them
As other children are waking up and heading toward the school bus on a Tuesday morning, Adele Schiessle asks her children if they want to spend the day playing on a 6,000-square-foot indoor inflatable play area.
Collin, 6, and Amber, 7, agree that would be a pleasant way to start the morning. After they play on the bouncy furniture, they head back to their home in St. John, where they spend the rest of the day watching TV, navigating XBox, working on art projects and playing games.
It is just another day in the Schiessle household, where the children learn through a branch of homeschooling called unschooling.
While the definition of unschooling varies, it generally reflects a concept of child-led learning.
For Carol Pozos’ oldest child, it meant self-taught reading at age 4.
For 18-year-old Abby Stewart of Chicago, it meant the recent news that she had won early admission to Princeton.
“It’s an awareness that learning is always happening because it’s part of living,” said Jane Van Stelle Haded of Hobart, who unschools her two children. “It’s almost trying to capitalize on whatever your children are interested in.”
Unschooled children don’t go to school, but unlike other homeschoolers they don’t necessarily learn through workbooks, educational guides or study sources. Instead, the children pursue what interests them. The unschooling concept has been around for decades, but it’s been slow to catch on, as initially most parents shy away from letting their children have such control over their own education.
“I’m trying to get rid of the idea that learning happens at a certain time in a certain place,” Van Stelle Haded said.
There aren’t any statistics on unschoolers yet, but the popularity of unschooling is reflected in the number of message boards on the Internet, in the abundance of unschooling clubs, in the frequency of unschooling conferences and in the slow but steady movement of unschooling into the vocabulary of educators.
Part of the increased attention on alternative education may be the rebellion against educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. It was one of the reasons Janna Odenthal of Chesterton embraced unschooling for her child. “The testing doesn’t do any good,” she said.
In a 2003 survey by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of children educated at home nationally was 1.1 million, an increase of 29 percent from the previous study in 1999.
Seth Odenthal, 10, has been unschooled since he was about 5.
“I went ahead and gave it a try, and I fell in love with the things we could do together, the flexibility in our schedule,” his mother said. When Seth took an early interest in cooking and baking, Odenthal embraced his curiosity, and the two of them cook together. She even signed him up for a local cooking class. Seth never formally learned math, but Odenthal said he excels at it because it’s a natural progression from his cooking interests.
Indiana doesn’t require the unschoolers to take standardized tests, and parents are allowed to give their unschooled children high school diplomas when the parents believe the children are ready to graduate.
Since education laws in Indiana are loose, parents of unschoolers can take different approaches to learning. But most tend to have a few common practices. Students don’t sit at desks to learn, as parents believe learning happens all the time. And while they aren’t taught how to read or write or do science, the children usually ask their parents enough questions that they eventually learn on their own.
“My oldest was reading on her own without being taught before she turned 5,” said Carol Pozos, who unschools her three children in her Michigan City home. “I did not do anything except read to her, and she soaked it up and was reading full sentences. I thought to myself, ‘Obviously, this works.’ ” Pozos, who has a degree in elementary education, enrolled one of her children in preschool because the child had been begging her to go to school since she was 3. But when her daughter refused to return to school halfway through the year, Pozos decided to try teaching her children herself. Her children are 8, 7 and 4, and other than a half-year of preschool, all three have been learning at home their entire lives. They also have chores they’re required to do every morning.
And once they finish their chores? “We do whatever we want,” said 8-year-old Isabel, who spent a recent afternoon on the floor of her living room flipping through a picture book with her 4-year-old brother. On Thursday mornings the children attend an art class filled with unschoolers and their parents. “Books are out, and if they want to draw they can draw,” Pozos said of the class. “If they don’t want to participate, they can go off in the corner and play.”
To prepare for the SAT college admission tests, 18-year-old unschooler Abby Stewart bought some test prep books and took some old subject matter tests. She posted an overall SAT score of 2,350 out of a possible 2,400.
Pozos said she’d be happy if her children went to college, as long as they are happy with their decision. “I’m not one of those people who says, ‘I want my son to be a doctor and my daughter to be an attorney.’ I just want them to be happy. If Armand wants to be a stay-at-home dad and Isabel wants to be a marine biologist, that’s just fine.”
**originally posted in 2007**
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Published by
Joanne on
March 22, 2009
**This was originally posted on 4/8/06**
I re-read a bit more of Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn this morning. (You can pick up a copy in our amazon store). She writes about what she considers to be the five “keys” of Guerilla Learning. The first one is opportunity and this is what she has to say.
“Read. Write. Talk. Play music. See dance and theater and paintings. Read poetry, write poetry, get poetry refrigerator magnets. Spend time in nature. Build things. Go to museums-and not as a “class trip”, but for the love of things you find there. If you’re not already doing these things, it’s only because you’ve arranged your life so you don’t have time and you’ve begun to believe that learning is something that happens not in life, but in school.”
I create lots of opportunities for my youngest daughter to explore her interest in space and astronomy. She borrows videos and books from the library. I find interesting web sites for her to browse. I buy space books (I buy good quality and up to date ones and older ones at thrift stores) that she reads over and over again. She and Billy made a planet mobile for her room. We’re planning a day trip to the Kennedy Space Center. She watches astronomy shows on TV.
I think that the other side of this is creating opportunities even when a specific interest is not there. I like to buy computer software and books on a very wide variety of topics and put them on the shelves or in a basket and let the kids know it’s there. One that I bought was software on the Civil War….which they were really interested in.
Later on in that chapter, Grace Llewellyn goes on to say;
“We want our kids to learn not what to think, but how to think. One way to increase your children’s chances of developing this skill is to give them real projects, (not academic exercises) where an outcome in the real world is intended and where the result, (not the assessment of an authority) is the ultimate judge of the projects success.”
And then towards the end of the chapter;
“At the heart of Opportunity is Engagement. Stay passionate, involved and interested in life and in learning. Your enthusiasm will transfer to your kids.”
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Published by
Joanne on
March 18, 2009
This is one of those “day in the life of an unschooler” posts. People that don’t know us well, sometimes ask what we do during the day without school. On this particular day, we visited the Florida Museum of Natural History. These pictures were from a day spent there last year. I realized I never got around to sharing them.
Jacqueline likes to take notes when we visit places like this. 
These next few pictures were from inside the Butterfly Rainforest. When my mother passed away, we had some of her ashes placed inside a smaller replica of her urn so we could take it with us when we go places she would have enjoyed. We call it travel size mom. I decided to take a picture of her urn and a butterfly landed right next to it.
We left some of her ashes there also. This is a picture of Billy sprinkling some in the garden.
A butterfly landed on Billy’s shoulder.
This butterfly stayed on Shawna’s finger for about 15 minutes while she walked around.
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