Unschooling is a child-led approach to education. It differs from homeschooling in that it is not a curriculum-based school-at-home. It is hands-on, experience driven, and incorporates learning from all different subjects and styles.
As unschooling parents, we provide our children with a variety of materials to choose from so they can create, learn, and explore. We guide and teach through experiences and travel, also known as worldschooling, and we learn from life and the world around us.
We facilitate the exploration of our children's unique passions, from horseback riding and history to medieval weaponry and astronomy. The world is their classroom.
I have been unschooling my kids since day one.
My oldest is 13. Over a decade of allowing my children to follow their passions, to direct themselves in their learning, to get out of bed when they feel rested and not know what it feels like to wake up to an alarm clock (except on early morning travel days!).
During that time, we’ve tried other types of education.
My older two kids attended a self-directed school in the Mexican jungle where they swam in a cenote on breaks, wandered over 50 acres, and learned in an off-grid one-room schoolhouse full of light and the cacophony of voices of kids ranging from five to 17.
They tried a Waldorf school and an Agile Learning Center, also in Mexico. The former on a beautiful sprawling campus under a canopy of trees with little hobbit-like cottages peppered about as classrooms, and the former in a small house situated in a working class neighborhood with a pool in the backyard.
They even tried a public school in Austin, TX for a few weeks one year. Each of these schools offered some things that we liked, but they all fell short at the same time.
As did all the schools I attended as a child and young adult.
I went to a protestant pre-school, a Catholic elementary school, a public charter middle school, a magnet middle school, a preforming arts high school, a half-day college prep high school, a self-paced high school, a community college, and two public state universities in my tenure as a student.
I’ve seen MANY different kinds of education.
Most of my educational career, I was bored. School came easily, so easily, in fact, that I stopped attending for part of my sophomore year of high school because the boredom of sitting at my desk was torture for my ADHD brain.
I went on to another, smaller, school that offered more flexibility and direct connection to my teachers, and that served me well until I switched again in favor of a fully self-paced high school to wrap up my senior year.
When I finally decided it was time to be done with that chapter of my life, I buckled down at my third and final high school, and completed two and a half years of required math classes in a few months, receiveing all As. I passed, I finished, I graduated. It was a task I had to complete, but not one I enjoyed.
Even then, I was still convinced that traditional schooling was the only way to go. Even though my experience was so dissatisfying. At the time, I just thought maybe it was problem with me. That I was broken, not the system.
When the father of my two older children first suggesting homeschooling, I balked.
I thought that kids who didn’t go to school were unsocialized ultra-religious weirdos. That was the image I had been presented with when I was a child, and even though I was bored to tears in school myself, I thought it was the only option.
But then I looked at it from a different angle, and it all clicked. I was already a Libertarian by this time, and my ideals were steeped in the principal of non-agression and individual freedom. I had already realized that our government wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and I recognized that school, like most organized religions, was indoctrination.
When I became a mother, I knew instinctively that I wanted something different for my children.
Youth is so fleeting, I didn’t want them to waste it on something they didn’t love. I also didn’t want someone else to raise my kids while I worked a 9 to 5, so I just din't do it. I didn't buy in to the system.
I did all kinds of side hustles and mom hacks in order to afford to stay home with my kids with no help from their father. I was a solo parent and an unschooling mom.
I wanted my children to learn to ask questions, to think logically and critically.
I wanted them to discover their own answers, rather than wait for them to be handed down from authority figures. For them to be their own authority, and to listen to their instinctive voice of reason.
One of the central tenants to unschooling is teaching children how to learn, how to gather information, and how to evaluate it themselves. If they can do this, they can learn anything at any time.
I wanted them to experience life, and not just read about it.
In our time unschooling and worldschooling, we have traveled to battlefields, historic monuments, geological and architectural wonders. We have cruised across the Atlantic in the same route as our ancestors, climbed ruins in the Yucatán peninsula, eaten food from street carts in Latin America, and dreamed big dreams.
We have lived in different coutries, traveled by boat, car, and train. We've run our homestead in the Rocky Mountains and skied at world class resorts. We've cooked complex dishes, sewn dresses and dolls, built forts and backpacked in the Cascades.
We've camped for weeks at a time, read books and told stories under the stars, practiced cold therapy in the snow, built websites and edited videos. Every day is a new learning opportunity. Unschooling allows us to learn and take part in the adventure together.
My kids have learned about things that interested them.
And they have retained that knowledge. This is the big difference between unschooling and traditional schooling. I was taught so many things in school and what I remember most are the things I was interested in.
I can tell you the names of my second grade teacher’s chinchillas or all about her obsession with Australia. I can talk about sitting in church for hours on Wednesdays, Sundays, and after school most days.
I can go on and on about camping trips and “playing hookey from school” with my dad to explore Enchanted Rock or little towns in the Texas Hill Coutry. I can detail Civil War battles and the ways our ancestors lived all over the globe. I can still recite Arbole, Arbole by Federico Garcia Lorca and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
The vast majority of these were not lessons I learned in school.
They were things I learned from my history buff dad and his vivid storytelling, or from getting to know my favorite teachers, or from reading in my spare time, or experiences I had over summer vacations.
The fact is, most of us retain very little information we were taught in school. What we do retain are the things we are actually passionate about. Why not spend all of our time, as children, learning about the things we are interested in and simply let the other concepts fall into place?
Children are natural-born scientists. When left to their own devices, they question, they learn, they grow.
We are led to believe that learning can only be done in the classroom.
That is blatantly untrue. Life is full of opportunities for development and growth. We just have to seize them.
I get so many questions on how our family makes it work from parents new to unschooling or just getting curious, so I wrote a whole post on it in which I answer frequently asked questions on how unschooling works.
It is natural to fear the unknown, and so many of us were told that traditional schooling was the only viable way to prepare children for the world, but it’s just not.
I was drawn to unschooling for so many reasons.
My children are given the time and freedom to spread their wings and discover their passions, I am able to connect with them every day, we make travel a way of life. We all learn together, constantly expanding our horizons.
I wake up early to work on my own passions, hours before the kids do, and then, after they wake up, we spend our days connecting, experiencing life, and learning from the world around us. We are not sectioned off into the socially-approved subgroups of kids, adults, and elderly.
We interact with people of all ages and walks of life on a daily basis.
My children are regularly exposed to people of all ages, not just those within a year of themselves. They can comfortably converse with adults, live with elderly grandparents, and play with kids of all ages and abilities.
There is a saying in the multi-age learning community that younger children learn mastery from older children, and older children learn empathy from younger children. We all learn as we interact with others.
We have a strong family bond and prioritize our time together.
When my brother and I were little, we played together all the time, we also fought – as siblings often do – but as we grew older, our interactions became fewer and further between to the point in which we hardly know each other anymore.
The longer we were in school, the more we developed lives away from each other and our parents, the more we pulled away from our family, and the more school and friends were the center of our lives rather than home and family.
Now, as an unschooling mom, I am able to help my children grow and cultivate their relationships with one another to hopefully carry into adulthood. Our family motto is “family first always” and we live it every day.
We socialize and grow deep friendships while unschooling.
People often say that kids who are homeschooled or unschooled do not get socialization. With groups and events popping up all the time, we have to pick and choose what to attend because it could actually be too much friend time if we were not judicious.
When we get together with our unschooling friends, the children are free to play, move, and explore as they choose, within safe limits, teaching them responsibility, movement, critical thinning, creative expression, communication and social skills.
Our friendships grow so close, because the kids spend hours exploring the world together rather than a 25-minute recess after lunch, that friends almost become an extension of the family, more like cousins. The parents of those freinds become like aunts or uncles to our children.
I am not going to sit here and tell you it’s perfect all the time, because nothing is. But, we are happy with the life we’ve chosen, the community we have built to help us raise our children, and the freedoms we have protected for them to discover themselves without fear of judgement or ridicule.
In some ways, it was not easy to make the decision to guide and facilitate the education of my own children.
In other ways, it was the easiest choice I ever made.
I don't think anyone who really knows this life would ever say unschooling is inherently easy. I had to work my butt off to come up with creative ways to feed, clothe and house us while still spending the majority of my time interacting with and guiding my children.
That was the hard part.
The unfettered joys of unschooling, staying home, being involved in every step of their journeys, that was the easy part.
And that is what has made it all worth it.