Living Joyfully

Getting Started

This is an exciting stage! You are so full of questions, sometimes you think you'll burst. Other times your head is swimming with all the answers you find. For me this is immersion learning at it's best. While you're going through this process, use a part of your mind to sit back and watch objectively. It will help you understand the learning process itself and be open to seeing it in your kids - whether they're learning about reading, numbers, video games, or their favourite TV show. How are you learning about unschooling?

And take a moment to notice how it doesn't look like "school" at all. Where's your teacher? Are you reading this during the hours of 9am - 5pm exclusively? Can you go to the bathroom when you need to? Is anyone going to test you to make sure you understood it "properly"? And by whose definition of "properly"? Does this make your learning any less valuable? Any less "real"? Are you starting to get the picture?

Defining Unschooling

As you start learning about unschooling, one of the first questions that often comes to mind is "What exactly IS unschooling?" Such a seemingly innocent question, but it can be a challenge to answer, let alone to do so succinctly. My latest attempt was for the introduction of Free To Learn:

Unschooling is, at its most basic, about learning without a curriculum, without a teacher-centred environment, but sometimes the concept is easier to define by what it's not. It's not school-at-home, a re-creation of the school environment with a low student-teacher ratio around the kitchen table. And it's not about leaving your kids to fend for themselves, far from it. It is about creating a different kind of learning environment for your children. An environment based on the understanding that humans learn best when they are interested and engaged, and when they are personally involved and motivated. Creating an environment conducive to real learning is very difficult if someone else - parent, teacher, or curriculum developer - is dictating what a person should be learning at any given time. But drop that outside control over the child and learning truly comes naturally. As the late John Holt, educator and unschooling advocate, notes so succinctly, "Fish swim, birds fly; man thinks and learns."

In addition, once you experience unschooling, you realize that there is much more to it than just dropping curriculum. It becomes a learning lifestyle - one where parents and children together enjoy exploring their interests and passions, learning along the way; one that evolves to inform your outlook on just about any situation that arises. Some like to call it life learning because what you are doing is learning through living. It revitalizes your relationships with your children. You will come to see that learning is often handicapped when confined to a classroom and a curriculum, but exciting and ubiquitous when children are given the freedom to explore their world. And soon you begin to glimpse the true nature of unschooling unfolding: living joyfully and passionately as a family, and building lifelong relationships in an environment where your children are free to discover and to grow into the people they were born to be.

Unschooling is a unique process for each family, and for each child. That may be why explaining unschooling is so straightforward and so difficult at the same time; the implications of that simple phrase learning without a curriculum are profound and life changing.

That's a start. Does it whet your appetite to learn more? Let's look at few of the questions that commonly arise when people start digging into unschooling.

Teach vs Learn Is it just semantics? Actually, understanding the difference between these two words is a really important piece of the unschooling puzzle.

What Is Deschooling? If your kids have been to school, or you've have been doing a version of school-at-home, they are likely well-steeped in the idea that someone else should be telling them what to learn, and teaching it to them. It'll take some time for them, and you, to rediscover that learning is all around us, and rekindle that curiousity that will drive them to explore their world. In the meantime, what will they do all day?

Special Needs What about "special needs" kids? Will unschooling help or hurt? HINT: Help!!

More Info To help satisfy that seemingly insatiable desire to read and learn that permeates this stage!