by Sharon Meyer

Created on: March 20, 2009

When people first hear the term "unschooling" used they tend to automatically equate the meaning to be non-schooling. This is not the case at all. Unschooling is more a philosophy of learning than a method of teaching.

Unschooling does not mean not learning .It simply means learning without the trappings of formal schooling. It is not unlearning or uneducating. A better terminology to understand what unschooling entails would be "natural learning."

If one chooses the unschooling approach to learning then they are trusting in a child's natural curiosity to learn what they need to know and when they need to know it. The parent is always there to answer questions, talk and help inspire the child's own curiosity about the world around them. It allows the child to learn from a wide variety of resources instead of just book knowledge or testing criteria.

I think the following quotes by John Holt, who was an American author and educator and one of the best known proponents of unschooling sums it up best :

"Of course, a child may not know what he may need to know in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build on it. If we try to make him learn something else, that we think is more important, the chances are that he won't learn it, or will learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he learned, and what is worst of all, will before long lose most of his appetite for learning anything."

"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out."

"It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives."

In order to understand and accept unshooling for what it is then one must truly believe in the fact that just as fish know how to swim and birds know how to fly so too do humans know how to learn.

Our own family has used the unschooling approach to learning now for over twenty years. The outcome for us has been wonderful as those children have not only gone off to college but their grade point averages in college were near perfect and they are now not only good citizens but, teachers and business owners.

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