When we got married, I knew Ben had been homeschooled almost all the way through high school. I knew he wanted our children to be homeschooled, and I agreed. We’d discussed his experiences with curriculum and learning and entering college at age 16, and felt that our kids would do best if we taught them at home and allowed them to work at their own pace, at least when they were young. We agreed that at high school age, they would be offered a choice to go to “real” school if they wanted (Ben was offered that choice and turned it down).
That was really as far as the conversation got at that point. But after Bekah was born, I started to research homeschooling more, and came upon a theory called “unschooling.”
The theory is generally that if you allow a child to simply explore his/her interests without any set curriculum, he/she will learn everything he/she needs to know. There is no curriculum, there are no lessons, there is no bookwork, tests, or papers. It is completely unstructured.
Early studies show that children who learn through this approach, especially in the elementary years, ultimately score far higher on tests because different learning aspects and approaches are favored, such as creativity and self-starting. Children are allowed to follow their interests and work on projects as they choose.
This approach is actually a lot of work for parents, but in a different way. They don’t have to seek out good curriculums, match them to their children’s needs, assign and oversee lessons, etc. Instead, though, they have to pay close attention to each child’s interests in order to draw them out and see how they could learn from them, and then provide them with the tools and experiences they need to keep learning.
For example, one unschooling mom once asked, “My son’s only interest right now seems to be video games. Should I let him play them all day? What can I do?” The answers were great: find him a game designer to learn how to program them. Find a musician to teach him how to compose game music. Help him to write his own small games. Get him games that are puzzles and require critical thinking skills to solve. Video games could open up lots of worlds for him!
Here are the reasons we are attracted to this method of homeschooling:
*No need to choose curriculum
When I was a music teacher, I had the hardest time picking a set of books to teach my students from. I didn’t really like any approach. Some were better than others, but I ultimately always ended up writing some of my own material and picking and choosing from different books, and it was a lot of work. I don’t anticipate that homeschooling would be any different, if I had to choose. I don’t think I’d find it easy to choose one curriculum in any subject that would really meet our needs, and if I found one, it wouldn’t work for the next kid. I could spend a ton of time and money on trying to find the “perfect” curriculum, or trying to create one, but it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.
*Children can truly work at their own pace
Some children who unschool don’t learn to read until they’re nearly teenagers. Some learn when they’re 3. But either way, they all eventually learn to read (and do math, etc.). There is no pressure to have to learn a particular skill at the same time and pace as everyone else. There’s nothing that says 6-year-olds learn to ready, 8-year-olds learn to multiply, etc. Every child is different, developmentally, and every child can work on each skill as they are ready and interested (by the way, one girl who didn’t learn to read until age 11 went on to write professionally and publish a book by the time she was 14!).
*Plenty of time for “non-basic” interests
Sometimes, homeschoolers can get caught up in having to do all the reading, writing, math, etc. that they don’t have as much time as they would like for “outside” interests, like art, music, robotics, programming, etc. With unschooling, everything is centered around those interests. They are the focus, not the afterthought.
*Integrative learning
This is “all the rage” these days in schools, but is hard to do when the focus has to be reading, writing, math and standardized testing. But at home, in unschooling, the child picks and interest and can start a project based on that interest. Perhaps the child wants to learn to build a robot. So the family visits museums to look at robots, talks to engineers who currently build them, reads about how to build them, studies designs and plans about building them, carefully selects parts to build them, then actually builds one. This involves reading, writing, math, communication, science, and all sorts of other skills. And it’s a real world application, so the lessons are much more likely to stick.
*Fosters creativity
When children are allowed to come up with their own projects, they can feel free to think of anything. Maybe a child wants to be a chef, so they are allowed to work in the kitchen, creating recipes and writing a cookbook. (Which, by the way, involves reading recipes to learn how food goes together, writing recipes, doing math to see exactly how much of what should go in to make the recipe work, chemistry to see how foods will react, etc.) Perhaps another child wants to write a symphony. Or another, a collection of poetry. Or another, starting a business! The options are endless.
*No busy work
This was one of Ben’s biggest complaints about homeschool, and mine about public school. So many things rely on busy work. That is, “now that you’ve learned to add, do these 30 problems to practice!” It may be that some people enjoy practicing this way, but it’s not a “real world” application, and most people don’t need that many problems to understand the skill. Children don’t need to read prescribed passages in a reader to learn to read; books that interest them work just fine. Busy work is just wasting a child’s time, and yours (for having to check it).
*No testing
When you are at home with your children and working closely with them on a day-to-day basis, you know whether they understand something or not. You don’t need a test to tell you. A child who is excited about building a robot will tell you ALL about it (whether you want to hear it or not 
), and clearly understands it. Another child will show you how to count by helping you decide how many apples to buy in the store. There are plenty of real-life examples to know how much your children really understands (by the way, many schools are attempting to do this now — it’s called “authentic assessment” and they rely on portfolios and samples of the child’s work because they can’t have a lot of 1:1 interaction with 30 kids and 1 teacher in the classroom). I know Bekah knows colors because I can ask her to bring me “the red lid” for a container, or that she can sort because she puts the silverware away properly. I don’t need special toys or worksheets or tests to tell me.
*Free schedule
This might bother some people, but not us. I like a general routine but I can’t stand schedules. I feel trapped after awhile. I want to know that maybe one day we’ll stay at home and work on some projects, and another day we’ll go to the zoo and identify animals. We don’t have to do the same things everyday, and yet we can always still be learning.
We are lucky because we live in a major area, and we have a great zoo, COSI (a hands-on science center for kids), AHA! Children’s museum (another hands-on science museum), lots of parks, many homeschool groups, youth orchestras, bands and choirs, church youth group, story times at many libraries, summer camps for kids as young as 2, and lots more. We have so many opportunities that our kids will never be lacking for ways to learn, nor friends to learn with.
I am very excited about our unschooling journey! And because it’s so non-structured, we have really been “unschooling” since birth. Bekah and I work on colors all the time, numbers (“Bring me 3 lemons to make lemonade”), animals, and lots more. And the older she gets the more we’ll be able to do!
Here are a few challenges of unschooling:
*Motivating some children to take on projects
Some children go through unmotivated stages (more than others). They just want to play outside, or play video games, and they don’t want to start projects or do work. It can be hard to motivate them to do something new, especially when there’s nothing really driving the projects other than themselves, and they know it.
*”Knowing” what your child really understands
Sometimes you might feel bad because you aren’t testing your child, wondering “Does s/he really get it?” Sometimes I see my friends with their toddlers, who are naming colors and counting and saying words Bekah doesn’t, and I worry that she is behind or doesn’t understand. But you have to remember that you see examples everyday of what they do and don’t know, and they probably know more than you think. Perhaps Bekah doesn’t say “red,” but she can bring me the red lid if I ask, so she clearly understands what “red” is. She doesn’t have to do flashcards and worksheets that teach “red” to get it. If it makes you feel better, though, you can keep a file (quietly) of major skills and check them off when you’ve seen your child demonstrate them. Then go look at it when you forget how much they know.
*Criticism from those who don’t get it
Some people think homeschooling in general is bad. And even some homeschoolers think that unschooling is crazy. People think that if you’re not sitting down with a curriculum in hand and specifically teaching a lesson, your child must not be learning. It can be hard to hear that all the time from generally well-meaning people. Your best defense is to ignore them and allow your children to keep learning, then show up at science fairs and recitals doing an awesome job.
*Finding sources for your child’s projects
Depending on where you live, it may not be easy to find the experts or materials for your child to work on the project he is really interested in. And it takes a lot of time for you to find those experts or materials, sometimes. It can also take a lot of time if you have to travel to see different experts or go to different events, yet you HAVE to because it’s your child’s “school.”
Unschooling isn’t for everyone, but it is a valid and awesome method for some families.
Do you homeschool, or will you? If so, have you ever considered unschooling?
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TESTING!
You’re right, even though I was homeschooled for grades 1-7, I think some of unschooling is crazy. Looking back, I see that my mom did some of the tenets of unschooling with our homeschooling curriculum that made it work, and still got us ahead of our grade level every time our state required we be tested (IOWA Test anybody?). I’d look into required state tests before choosing unschooling for you, just to be sure.
Also, I’d like to give you a few words of caution that I’m rather afraid of:
1. You only have 2 kids now, so teaching them or any of the other kids the basics is easy. Now try teaching older kids calculus without a curriculum and younger kids basic reading/writing math/colors/whatever simultaneously.
2. I was a fairly hard studier, and I loved learning. But I probably would have never gone beyond basic arithmetic if I hadn’t had a curriculum to study from. I was homeschooled with mostly the A Beka books, and honestly, they were awesome. But without a book to show me what I didn’t know yet, I probably wouldn’t have moved beyond adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing in math, and I liked math.
3. Homeschooling doesn’t have to be about busywork! That’s why it’s awesome! My mom would give us our assignments in the morning (written down on a notepad) and we’d do them. But, let’s say, for math, she’d assign us maybe 5 problems max in the topic being covered. Those questions would cover all the variations presented in the curriculum, and if we got them right, that’s all we had to do in that subject. Say, for instance, I was learning subtraction. There’d be one or two single digit subtractions, one or two double digit subtractions, and one or two "other" like "4x-2x=?" type questions. When we finished a book for the year, we’d have occasional reviews of it, but that was it. If we missed questions even on a test, we’d have to do the problem again until we got it right…which was the most valuable lesson I learned.
4. Testing your kids is a good thing. Even if some elementary schools have moved away from traditional tests, believe me, colleges haven’t. Test anxiety is a hard thing for kids who aren’t used to taking tests, and the only way they’ll get over it is by doing the unthinkable…taking tests.
5. It’s great to let your kids pick the projects, trust me, I think it’s awesome. We did that and used a curriculum. When we were kids and learning about different types of graphs, mom had my sister and I walk to the lake and count how many boats were on the water and how many were docked that day, and we later made graphs of two months’ worth of boats. It was fun, got us out of the house, but it worked in with what we were learning in the books.
6. Some stuff just has to be learned for later education. I know that the example of the girl who didn’t learn to read until 11 is a great story, but I actually know multiple people who didn’t learn to read until not quite that late who still can barely read. Listening to them read out loud is like nails on a chalkboard…like watching a train wreck and not be able to do anything about it. How are you going to pass your SAT if you don’t know advanced math? How are you going to learn advanced math without a curriculum? How are you going to learn the parts of speech without sitting down (even if you don’t want to) and just doing it? There goes the verbal section of your SAT, or ACT, and colleges still very much require them.
Those are my biggest issues…but then again, I know that they’re your children. But there was a girl who lived in my neighborhood whose mom prescribed to an unschooling like method of homeschooling…the oldest girl now has a child out of wedlock and has been arrested multiple times for drug related offenses. When she got to high school she could barely read. None of the rest of her siblings are much better either. I think when choosing a method of instruction for you and your family, you have to pay attention to the bad stories along with the good ones. After all, stories can be misleading…the average salary for Michael Jordan’s graduating class in geography was $300,000…Michael with $3,000,000 and everyone else with $20,000. I’m not sure where I was going with that…but sue me…I just got home from a long day at work for dinner and am about to head out to work again for another 2 hours.
Emma,
Many kids who unschool start out using no curriculum…then, when they are older, choose to use one to learn subjects that specifically interest them, like math. It is difficult to learn math without a curriculum but you don’t need one to learn to add, subtract, tell time, etc. — all those typical elementary school topics. Primarily we will be avoiding curriculums at that age — doing the basics.
There was a set of schools in urban areas that were converted to "unschools." Children through 6th grade were not given any curriculum, but were allowed to learn freely. When tested in math at 6th grade age, they scored lower than most (as expected). Then they began a formal math curriculum for one year, at 7th grade, and were tested again after. At that point they scored far HIGHER than most. Not having a curriculum while learning the basics improved their outcome.
With testing, there is no reason to test small children. It is possible to tell what they know without testing. When they are older, they can take the tests for fun initially, and later study to take them well. Many unschooled children do extremely well on college standardized tests because they haven’t had the yearly test anxiety and performance-driven issues that public school children have had. I’m not saying they will NEVER take these tests or that they shouldn’t, but it’s something for when they’re older. Young children do not need that sort of pressure. They also should not spend most of their time learning how to take tests, and learning material that is on a test, rather than actual, natural learning. Bloom’s taxonomy has creativity at the top, and rote learning very far down.
As far as good AND bad stories, you will find those no matter what method of schooling or child rearing you choose. You can find kids raised in the church who are awesome and those who’ve gotten pregnant in high school. Same with public school, private school, other types of homeschool…. There really is no reason to discount ANY of those methods because some people did it wrong. It really comes back to parenting: is what you are choosing right for YOUR child? Are you properly disciplining your child? Are you meeting your child’s needs? You can learn from those stories what NOT to do, and hopefully then make your approach successful. But I would not consider a few bad stories as a reason to abandon any approach.
I hope that clears it up a little bit!
I was homeschooled growing up and we plan to homeschool our kids. I don’t think complete unschooling all the way is a choice I would make though. I do like the idea of a more lax approach with young children, just work on reading and getting basic math from life. I remember Marilla in the Anne of Green Gables series insisting that the two younger kids stay out of school until they were 7 since school was no place for little ones!
But at a certain age I think a more formal approach is best. But one of the great things about homeschooling, without mindless filler work to keep kids quiet and time lost going between classes, waiting in line, etc is that you have so much more free time. Even in middle school and high school, my "homework" took probably half the time I would have spent in a school so I did have plenty of time to explore my other interests and work on fun projects (although I’m not sure how many other kids would think translating Harry Potter from french to english was fun, I did!)
On a side note, most small kids actually seem to find rote memorization fun. Just because we adults tend to think of it as mind numbing, doesn’t mean they do. I don’t think we should force them to learn lists of unimportant facts but if done in a fun, non stressful way, having certain things memorized can be a benefit down the line.
I homeschool my daughter now, and I must say, I tried to have the scheduled curriculum and workbooks to teach her. That lasted all of two weeks. She would get so frustrated and I would get angry when she wanted to play. I realized this was not helping her learn and I was no better than the public school trying to force her to learn things she had no interest in. We have recently turned to unschooling and have found out she is more interested in science (dinosaurs, astrology, weather) than the normal reading, writing, and math. Which is fine with us. She may not understand sentence structure at the age of 5, but she can tell you the different names of constellations! I think that in itself is amazing. Im not saying we may never do a structured cirriculum again, just that for right now, we have to do what works!
ok, this whole thing totally fascinates me! i have a 15 month old daughter and am hoping to have several more kids. i’ve been praying for a long time that God would make it clear we’re meant to homeschool {my husband wants to follow God’s direction for our kids, no matter what form of education that ends up being, but God def knows the desires of my heart!} we go to a church with many homeschooling families and somehow i have never heard of unschooling! i have so many questions! the biggest one though – do you have some sort of official basic criteria from the state on what they need to learn? i know you’re saying they can learn at their own pace, but i think i would need a checklist or chart just to give me some kind of focus on how to direct their learning…like if they’re wanting to write recipes and i know they need work on fractions, making sure they incorporate that into their recipe. does that make since? when you say you keep a portfolio of their work, is that the only thing you do to show the state they’re being educated {i’m not even super familiar with the details on homeschooling, so i dont know what homeschooling moms have to do to prove their kid’s education either} In your charts you make yourself, do you just mark down, something like “sorts objects – 8.2.2012; reads ‘bear, table, apple, and frog’ 8.15.2012′”?? i’m sure i’ll think of more questions! thanks for sharing
I have a newer post in here where I actually link the sheet of skills that I use. Once they have consistently demonstrated an overarching skill (i.e. “counts to 20″) then I would check that off on my list. That’s how I know what they know. I use this chart, which is based on curricula I have researched/general skills as well as their specific interests. We’re working on knowing the names of several local plants and whether or not they’re safe to eat. They certainly don’t “need” to know this (my oldest kids are 3 and 4) but they are interested in it and it serves our family well. I’m not overly concerned with what the state thinks they need to know, because my standards and their own curiosity will generally lead them to skills and knowledge above and beyond what is “typical” for their ages anyway, which is usually the case with homeschooling.
Great article! We too plan on/have been unschooling. My oldest is almost 5. Like you said, I don’t put too much stock into state requirements. I follow his lead. He’s been in a dinosaur phase and it’s amazing how much comes up just from learning about dinosaurs- identification, why we eat what we eat, plant-eating/vegetarianism, dietary choices, development of certain characteristics for furthering of the species, theories on why they died out, the science behind natural disasters, spirituality, evolution, so much more that I’m sure I have forgotten. He is also interested in letters/phonetics and often asks me to sound out words. Most unschooling parents look forward to learning/relearning with their children, and open to the idea that workbooks and formal texts will probably be necessary at some point. I think that people often forget that the main reason most people homeschool is to give their children the opportunity to pursue their own interests, so that as adults they are in control of their path. I also think that by the time our children are ready for college, the world will be a very different place. The idea that college is necessary is just simply not true. There are so many other opportunities out there for kids- traveling, apprenticing, WWOOFing, starting a business. I will not encourage or discourage college, it is completely up to them. Unschooling is based on trusting our children, which can be very hard in a society where the majority believes that kids won’t learn unless forced to. I am excited for the journey, although I know it may not be easy at times. Thanks for the article!