by Karen Banes

Created on: May 15, 2008

Unschooling is a term often heard on the homeschooling circuit. It's a common method of home based education, although certainly not used by every family. At its most basic, it involves letting go of preconceived ideas about everything we have ever associated with school. School hours, schedules, lessons, drills, tests, and grading are all irrelevant concepts to an unschooled child.

Unschooling is a process by which children stop learning from being "schooled" or taught and start learning from real life. Many people are horrified to find out that some homeschooled children never experience anything resembling a school based lesson in their lives. This does not mean lessons are absent from their lives, far from it. They learn valuable lessons every day, just by living life. Like many other children, they learn by playing, singing, dancing, practicing skills, participating in sports, doing arts and crafts, reading books, doing projects and experiments, cooking dinner, and helping with household projects.

They don't follow a curriculum, or study subjects or topics in isolation, and they only study things that interest them. What is often surprising to parents of traditionally schooled children is what a broad range of topics seem to interest them and what an in-depth knowledge they have of them.

There are many advantages to this type of lifestyle, for both children and parents. Some big plus points to be considered are as follows:

Children feel very relaxed and free of pressure. Unschooled children are often well-behaved, free of stress and amazingly calm and even-tempered. Like other homeschooled kids they don't have to worry about grades, tests or being held back a year. They also don't have to be unhappy about being made to study things they don't understand or things that don't interest them.

Children learn a lot about the things that do interest them. If they're keen on science they study that, if they love literature they study that. If they love carpentry, or cooking, or art they study that. Since most people would ideally want to end up in a job that lets them work within a field that interests them these kids are often better prepared with in-depth knowledge than other kids who have had a "broad" (traditional) education.

Unschooled children tend to be well prepared for real life. Depending on their interests they may or may not have studied advanced physics and calculus but (I'm going to be honest here) how often do we use (or indeed remember) that stuff during

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