The Unschooling Revolution: Taking Education Into Our Own Hands

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Paige Burkes is an unschooling mom to three children. She works as a financial corporate executive, and keeps a blog Simple Mindfulness.

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”  – Plato

When you were young, were you completely psyched about going to school every day?  Were you chomping at the bit to learn more of what the schools were teaching you?  Unless you went to a very different kind of school, your experience was probably a lot like mine.

I was bored.  There were very few topics that I could get excited about.  In high school I remember drinking copious amounts of Coke and taking NoDoz (caffeine in a pill) to make it through the day.

Why Are Homeschooled Kids So Annoying?

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Dwija Borobia is a homeschool mom living in rural southwest Michigan. You can read more on her blog house unseen. life unscripted.

About a year ago, when I first started considering taking my kids out of public school, I wasn’t met with the kind of incredulous questioning that I expected after suggesting something so reckless and foolhardy.  For the most part people were excited and supportive and helpful.  Many thought we were already homeschooling, in fact.  What surprised me most though is that folks who were concerned about the prudence of such a decision weren’t worried that my children might not learn enough or the the right things.  They didn’t wonder how my kids would know how to be quiet when they were supposed to or to wait in lines when they have to.

No, the biggest concern among the concerned was: SOCIALIZATION.  Ahhhh!  Socialize those kids!  Learnin’, schmlearning- those kids need to be among herds of other kids their exact age in order to learn how to be normal.  In other words: homeschooled kids are annoying and weird, and you don’t want your kids to be annoying and weird, do you?

Annoying and weird.

Unschooling

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Written by Australian unschooling advocate Chaley Ann Scott. Chaley is an author, activist, sociologist and an unschooling mom to four children. Check out here website.

It’s 11:00 a.m. on a school day. My ten-year-old son and eleven-year old daughter have only been up for an hour and are respectively playing with Legos and making a necklace. They are focused and happy and I am trying not to interfere—because in our house this is education. For Jack and Molly, there is no early rising, no one telling them what to do, and no restrictions—just freedom to play and follow their interests, whilst I provide support and resources if required. It’s every child’s dream. Welcome to the world of "unschooling," an approach to education that lets children decide what, when and how they will learn each day. 

Unschooling is a popular method of homeschooling, a legal and fast-growing trend in many countries in the world including the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. In the US, over 1.5 million children were registered as homeschooled in 2007, reflecting a 74 per cent increase in eight years.

Parents cite numerous reasons for choosing to homeschool their children—from the wish to avoid bullying at school to the desire to prioritise instruction in the family’s religious beliefs. My reasons for choosing this path were reactionary—Molly had a huge thirst for knowledge but after a year of school that was all but gone. She was miserable, so in desperation we pulled her out of school and began our journey from homeschooling into unschooling.

How To Be A Successful Unschooling Parent

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Great video by an unschooling mom from Canada.

Save A Life, Drop Out: 'Bully' and the Case for Homeschooling

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Noah Berlatsky writes for The Washington Times. "Bully" is reference to this film.

You can laugh at nutty right-wingers who home-school their kids because they don’t want them to learn about evolution; you can sneer at dirty hippies who unschool their kids at home because they can’t be tied to the Man’s curriculum, man.

Laugh and sneer all you want, but those home-schooled and unschooled kids are not being hounded to death — literally, in a case documented on-screen in “Bully” — by their peers.

I have an 8-year-old child, and I can say that watching this documentary about bullying in schools was more viscerally disturbing than sitting through almost any horror movie I can think of.

"How Schools Are Killing Creativity" Written by a 14-Year-Old Homeschooler

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Line Dalile is a 14-year-old homeschooled student, blogger and a writer. She has spoken at TEDxAjman about education, and currently Line is writing articles on education reform and youth voices.

I speak about education from an unflattering point of view -- maybe because it is destroying our fascinating, curious minds.

Line Dalile, and her sister Boushra

I don't claim to be an expert in education. I am still a student and I speak for myself. I believe that students should have a voice in the education system today, because mainly they are the ones who are being educated. The control of education should be in the hands of students. They should be centered first and foremost.

Many people have written about ways to change education, but what good has it done if we are leaving out the voice of the students?

Years continue to pass, some students graduate, some fail out, some drop out and nothing really changes. The education system reminds me of a dictator that is unwilling to step down.
I'm aware that no education system is perfect, and I believe they are all the same across the world. We memorize, study for the test and forget, only to know 10 years later what an atrocious world we have been constructing.

I strongly feel that our methodologies in schools are demolishing creativity. Students have lost their capacity of creation simply because our teaching methods don't stimulate innovation and creativity.

Land Your Dream Job: Ditch School & Get a Library Card

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Leo Babauta is the creator of zenhabits. He is a successful writer of numerous books, is a vegan and an unschooling dad.

What if you could do what you love for a living and make a great income at it? On top of that, what if you didn’t have to go to school, spend hundreds of hours in a classroom and end up with a mountain of debt when you finally earn your degree? Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

It’s true that the average college graduate earns more than someone without a bachelor’s degree. However, a good chunk of the biggest innovators and multimillionaires in the world were either high school or college drop outs. (See: Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Johnny Depp, Bill Gates and Quinten Tarantino.)

So how did they do it?

Is it really possible to make as good of a living being self-taught, as someone with an expensive degree? Each path has their unique benefits and drawbacks, and I’m not trying to convince you one way or another. I’m just pointing out that the playing field has changed a lot in the past decade, and it’s more possible than ever to trail blaze your own path. The biggest point is to determine what works best for you.

A lot of people don’t know this, but I never graduated from high school. At the beginning of my sophomore year I just stopped having an interest in going to class. The work was too easy for me and I felt I was being forced to learn about things that I had no interest in. I felt like I had no participation in my own education. So I stopped going.

Top 10: Essentials For Homeschooling Successfully

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Lisa Cottrell-Bentley is an unschooling mom to two children. She is a writer, she and her family have been on TV promoting unschooling, and she maintains a blog called Do Life Right. This original article can be found here.

I was recently asked in a round about way what items I felt were essential for homeschooling success.

The Cottrell-Bentley unschooling family

This is the IN ORDER list of tangible purchases my family couldn’t live without in the '00's and still be a successful homeschooling family:

1. High speed internet and at least one household computer that all members of the family are equally entitled to use–each member of my family has their own computer, plus we have several more. This is vital for researching, and much more!
2. Organization products–shelving, baskets, bins, and more.  Homeschoolers tend to own many supplies for their kids, so keeping track of them all in an easy to find (and organized) way is essential. We have several walls and closets with floor to ceiling shelving, yet it’s barely enough. All the successful homeschooling families we know have similar layouts.
3. Seemingly endless supply of consumables–paper, pens, pencils, markers, glue, tape, wire, stickers, etc. I’d also put white board (or chalk board or other type of LARGE writing surface) in this category since we use ours nearly daily for working out problems, making lists, and drawing pictures. What else could we write on to have the whole family participate in a group discussion?

Unschooling Is The Open Source Way

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"The open source way is a way of thinking about how people collaborate within a community to achieve common goals and interests. In the end it is enabling people to further their own interests while contributing those interests back to a common good." [source] Check out the Wikipedia page here. 

Carolyn Fox is a mother and librarian. She is a former public high school teacher, college adjunct history instructor, and airline employee. She holds a MA in History and a MLIS. She has resided in Massachusetts, New York City, London and presently lives north of Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and son. You can read this original article here.

The words unschooling and open source often make people take a step back. But if there is any mode of learning that fully embraces the philosophy of the open source way, it is unschooling. Some even use the phrase open source learning to describe unschooling. Both unschooling and open source are revolutionary concepts based on freedom of choice. They encourage us to rethink and reassess what, when, where, how, and why we learn.

Unschooling is an approach to education that follows a child’s innate curiosity and desire to learn. It is not based on the direction of a teacher or a set curriculum. It is self-directed learning.
Unschoolers take a hands-on, community-based, real-world approach to education--everything and everywhere is a learning possibility. Unschoolers may use an open source textbook like those found at CK-12 Flexbooks, take classes online through a program like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning, or continue on to in-person coursework at a local college.

Stella, An Unschooler, Talks About Going To College At 16

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Stella, unschooled since she left preschool, writes about her experience beginning college at 16. She is currently eighteen years old and is a full time pre-med student double majoring in Humanities and Japanese.

When I was four years old, I was kicked out of preschool.

This is significant to me because it was the event that began my unschooling, the event that freed me from the school system, the event that allowed me to be who I was for the rest of my childhood. My parents had planned on sending me to regular public school from K-12th grade, just like everyone else, but after the preschool incident they re-thought their plans.

Now here I am, at age seventeen. After being unschooled my entire life and gaining a wealth of information and experiences simply by being free from the school system, I am now back to the very administration that started off this crazy experience. No, not preschool, but school. University.

Why You DON'T Need A Cirriculum For Learning

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By Linda Dobson who owns and maintains the website Parent at the Helm, and is the author of many homeschool books.

A curriculum is a course of study. It might help if you think of it as a highly planned tour through learning. If, in your exploration of do-it-yourself education reform, you feel more comfortable using such a tour guide, then by all means use a tour guide! There are many sources of lists and general outlines of what someone somewhere has deemed that children should know and in what order they should learn these things. You can use the information to see where your child is and where your child will go.

Traveling the Learning Path Independently

But what if, in your learning journey, you begin with no particular place to go? What if, instead of being a professionally planned excursion complete with an itinerary some travel agency thought would be worthwhile, your family’s trip becomes more like a jaunt on a beautiful spring afternoon, taken not to get anywhere in particular but only to enjoy being free to enjoy? Instead of getting on a bus with forty strangers, you might decide to walk, or ride a bike, horse, or four-wheeler, or drive around in circles stopping at inviting places along the way.