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Unschooling: Putting Trust in Our Kids

What comes to mind when you hear the term “unschooling”?

  • • Those crazy people who let their kids run wild and never try to teach them anything.
  • • Kids playing video games all day while their moms look at Facebook.
  • • High schoolers who can’t write an essay to save their lives and have absolutely no hope of ever going to college.

Sadly, I think this is what many people envision when they hear about an unschooling family. Ignorance. Zero education. A one-way ticket to a dead-end job. As any unschooler can tell you, though, nothing could be further from the truth!

What is Unschooling?

In a way, the term “unschooling” is a misnomer. Parents who choose unschooling don’t stop teaching, and kids who are unschooled never stop learning. For most families, the choice to unschool simply means no forced lessons. The parents let go of any idea that reading fluency must happen by age six, legible handwriting must be achieved by age eight, long division must be mastered by age ten, and biology must be covered in tenth grade followed by chemistry and physics.

Instead, unschooling parents introduce topics more naturally as real-life situations bring them into focus. For example, a nine-year-old may become interested in biology after finding tadpoles in a pond, or a 12-year-old may want to learn more about the Middle Ages after watching Robin Hood with his family. Neither topic must be learned at any particular age or grade level.

But what about reading? you ask. Or math?

Reading Oh yes, two of the most dreaded school subjects for students and teachers alike. I don’t think any other subjects get the “Isn’t she old enough to have already learned that?” treatment more often than reading and math. Parents feel judged, kids feel inadequate, and most of us end up reaching for first one curriculum and then another in a desperate effort to make sure our kids learn the basics before they’re too old.

I ask you, though – who has the ultimate insight and wisdom to say how old any child should be when he learns to read or subtract or multiply? Not me, that’s for sure!

Our government school system has no choice but to try teaching specific topics during specific grades. It would be impossible for them to tailor the lessons to each individual child, but – sadly – we homeschoolers often fall into the same trap. We fail to allow our kids to be the individual learners that they are.

Studies have shown that kids who learn “basic topics” later are just as intelligent as kids who learn them earlier. (Take a look at this article from Excellence in Education for an overview and at the Better Late Than Early website for more detail, if you’re interested.)

Once we learn about the individual timing of learning even foundational subjects, we can completely let go of that desperate need to make sure our kids are “on time.” We can wait until real life and their own natural inclinations lead them to those topics.

But wait! you may say, my kid is never going to want to learn math. He hates math! And I know he’s never going to want to practice good handwriting either. I can barely get him to put pencil to paper as it is. And what about grammar or creative writing? I just can’t believe he’d ever decide to pursue those subjects on his own.

Those are all valid concerns, and I had the same thoughts myself when I started seriously thinking about unschooling. This is where trust comes in. Unschoolers have to completely and unequivocally trust their children.

  • • Trust their innate human desire to learn
  • • Trust their ability to learn
  • • Trust them not to ignore “the important stuff” for their entire lives
  • • Trust that they really will learn to read, to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, to write legibly, to craft a coherent essay (and spell words correctly!) – all before the time comes to graduate high school

This is hard! I dare say this is the hardest part of choosing the unschooling lifestyle.

The beautiful part, though, is that it works.

When a child is given this trust, it’s amazing to watch her find her own way and fulfill her own destiny, so to speak. I’m relatively new to completely unschooling but have unschooled off and on for the last three years, and I’ve witnessed this self-initiated learning many times.

Most recently, I was questioning my decision to not actively teach my five-year-old handwriting. After all the handwriting struggles I’d been through with my older two sons, I couldn’t imagine Robert learning to write without . . . well, without forcing him to!

After just a few days of my fretting over this, however, Robert came to me one evening and asked me to show him how to make letters. He sat with me for quite a while, dutifully copied the letters that I made, and eagerly asked for more letters. I can honestly say that not a single handwriting lesson ever went so smoothly with my older two kids.

The difference? His interest, plain & simple.

The other subjects too, even algebra, will be delved into when the interest naturally arises. And the interest will arise – that I trust unequivocally.

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9 Comments

  1. Teaching virtue and biblical wisdom foster a child’s desire to learn. It channels their attitudes towards the good and helps them acquire the ability to learn and apply themselves.

  2. I am struggling with this right now. We are entering our fourth year of homeschooling and we have achieved the goals I set for my girls. I really want them to start taking the initiative and responsibility for their education…but it is scary to think…what if they can’t write a paper? How will they learn to write a research paper for college? I am so on the fence. One day, I think we will give unschooling a go…and a few days later I am researching curriculum! I guess this is where prayer comes in!

    1. I completely understand, Theresa! I think the key thing about unschooling is that it simply means (for most families) “no forced lessons” … not “no lessons at all.” My oldest son is going into 7th grade this year, and I just asked him yesterday to make a list of things he’d like to learn during his 7th grade year. I plan to have him use that list to formulate a plan of sorts on how he would like to learn those topics – what curriculum & resources he’d like to use. He’ll probably end up picking a combination of regular curricula, online & physical classes, and library books. (And he did pick a wide variety of things – 12 different topics that cover all the “expected subjects” and then some! 🙂 )

  3. Nice post, Cindy. 🙂
    I wish I could follow Fenced in Family via blogger or email!

    Theresa or anyone ~
    I like to write down what my kids did, then look back at it and see all the different areas that were involved. An easy example is going grocery shopping with me, that involves math ~budgeting/comparisons of cost, geography, culture, and science ~ where the food is from/ how it grows/how it’s delivered, language and reading ~ helping write the shopping list/ foods in the store/ ingredients in the food ~ and more.

    Even going to a baseball game is educational. (math, culture, language, history, socialization, to name a few.

    It’s amazing how daily events and conversations are full of learning opportunities.

    MyTwoRoadsInTheWoods.blogspot.com

    1. Hi, Kathy! Thanks for your comment. I have an email subscription option over on Fenced in Family – you should see the sign up box in the right sidebar.

      You’re so right about daily activities being full of learning opportunities! 🙂

      1. Can’t find it 🙁 All I can see is the Twitter, FB, Pinterest,Linkedin & RSS links. The RSS just gives me the codes & css’s, Pinterest I follow some & The others I don’t do. Other than that there’s adds & search the site box.
        Am I missing something?

  4. Thank you. This is just what I needed to see this morning to support my thoughts on learning. We will start our fourth year in September. I wouldn’t say I unschool, but am not forcing learning. I have eight year old twin boys and struggle with what they do or do not know at this point. One reads above age level and the other still struggles with reading. The same with handwriting. And both hate math! I just keep pressing on and pray they will get it.
    Although I do feel so responsible for their lack of knowing more.

  5. Being fairly new to homeschooling I wasn’t really sure what the term ‘Unschooling’ meant. However, knowing that at some time my children may have to go back into an ordered and structured environment for learning, I decided not to go this route. I do allow my kids to pick their electives and work with me on the curriculum chosen. We both review the curriculum materials and I ask them what they like most about it and what they don’t like. Then I select it. They must do their work but the school days and times are dictated by the family schedule. As far as how people decide to school their kids, I have to be honest and say not everyone who is homeschooled or public schooled are well taught or prepared for life after high school. Unschooling / homeschooling or public schooling is only as good as the teachers who facilitate it. If your child isn’t a motivated child and the teacher isn’t motivated, then the child has been failed. Just because a child doesn’t want to learn something doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. Heck there are adults that don’t want to work and if they want to survive – ‘they have to do it’ whether they want to or not. So if you raise a person up with the thought or perception that they can always do things there way, then when life gets hard what are they going to do? Just my 2 cents and something any parent should think about before deciding to put the education of a minor into the child’s hand. A child is just that, a small person who still needs guidance to adulthood.

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