Life with Nin

So What is this Thing called Unschooling?

Many of you are new to homeschooling.  Or, maybe you’ve been doing it for a while but things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d like.  You hear all these terms floating around homeschooling circles – unit studies, portfolio reviews, unschooling, socialization.  Hey, wait a minute.  What was that?  Unschooling?  Now what in the world is that?

Well, unschooling is something we’ve been doing in my house for years.  We didn’t really start there, but when we started almost ten years ago my husband had just gotten through graduate school and we didn’t have a lot of money to spend on all this “curriculum” stuff.  So we went to the library – a lot – and cobbled things together from here and there and after a few years I began to hear this term unschooling and I came to realize that was what we were doing.

Good, you think, now we’re getting somewhere.  Here’s someone who can tell me how to DO unschooling.

Oops.  Sorry.  I can’t do that.  You see unschooling isn’t about a technique.  It isn’t about the tools you use to do it.  It isn’t about doing this or not doing that and not using textbooks.  It IS an attitude.  It is a frame of reference.  It is a belief that people, including little people, have an inborn drive to learn and really do know what they need and when they need it.  It’s about trust – trusting yourself and trusting your children.  It’s about not relying on “authorities” to tell you what you or your children should learn and when and how and in what order.  It’s about learning all the time, both parents and children.  Recognizing that all of life is there for us to learn from.  Going with the ebb and flow of the seasons in nature and the seasons of your own soul.

I asked Chase to read this and she said, “Mom, you can’t leave them here.  You’ve got to give them SOME idea of what we do.”  So I’ll try.

If I had to pick one thing that makes what we do different from what those following some other styles of homeschooling do, I think I would have to say it’s a question I ask of the kids at least once a day.  On most days it goes something like this.  We’ll be sitting at breakfast and I’ll look at Donald (Chase will still be sleeping since she was up until 1 or 2 AM doing her own thing, from working on her brother’s Christmas present to writing or doing Latin) and say “What are your goals for today?  What’s the most important thing that we should get to?”  That sort of sets the tone of our unschooling and of our day.  What we do each day comes from the children as much as possible.  Of course, some days things are structured by outside events, dental appointments, activities, 4-H due dates, homeschooling functions.  And some days I preface that question with things that I have to get to that day as well, such as “I have a meeting at ___” or “the bread has to get made this morning since we have fencing this evening.”  Then, of course, there are those days which we have to take moment by moment, when someone is sick, for instance.  But in general that question sums up our philosophy.  What the kids want to do is the point from which we start.  This also carries over to a respect for what they are doing, which means not  interrupting them while they are doing it if that is at all possible.

But that could be the subject for another article in itself, so I’ll leave it here for now.

copyright 1997  Carol Burris  Originally published in my local homeschooling group HELPS newsletter, February 1998