John Caldwell Holt is often referred to as the “Father of Unschooling”. He was an educator in the 1950s who documented the glaring issues he saw in the school system through a total of eleven books. His ideas led him to be a consultant for many schools. But he then became an early proponent of homeschooling (in the 1970s). And soon advocated for what we now call unschooling.
The philosophy of unschooling is that true learning happens when we are motivated to do it. And we master skills that we are passionate about. When you wish to learn something as an adult, you research, teach yourself, practice, etc. Essentially, you are unschooling. This philosophy argues that we are natural learners and the tendency to learn is only squashed by forced or irrelevant education.
A few other aspects of unschooling:
• Goals/subject matter are decided by the student and supervised by the teacher/parent (or the teacher/parent actively learns alongside).
• One learns through interests that may cross many subjects.
• Learning is believed to be happening constantly. There are not set hours for education.
• There is typically no formal curriculum. Learning happens through life experiences, books, conversations with others, internet, museums, etc.
Here are some of the questions we received in our homeschool chat and the replies submitted by other homeschooling parents:
“How do you cultivate this environment? Or maintain it?”
Parent reply: “We decided to do some unschooling for half of last year. It’s listening to what your child wants to learn. Lots of library books. Music. Museums. Art. Culture. Food. Cooking. It’s learning but sometimes it’s learning life, like where food comes from or how your body works. How to fix an appliance or sew a button. It’s easier to maintain if the parent just keeps learning right along with them. I taught myself to use a sewing machine. It’s like family learning.”
Parent reply: “Have the time and space in your schedule for dwelling. Learning can happen outside of set school hours.”
Parent reply: “Look for opportunities within your community that are in your kid’s interests. Ignore age limits.”
Parent reply: “Watch what makes your kids come alive and press into it.”
“How much is group learning vs individual, since it is interest led?”
My reply: “I believe this to be one of the more individualized styles. It is very much directed by individual interests and self led. They do plenty of solo research, etc. But that doesn’t mean they always learn alone. Quite the contrary, unschoolers tend to spend a lot of time learning from and alongside others with shared interests.”
“If the child shows no interest in reading, do you just not ever push it?”
My reply: “Generally the theory here is that children are naturally inclined to learn. They can’t help but learn. It is their most natural tendency. They learn when they are motivated to do so. Therefore a child would eventually be motivated to read by it being necessary for them to follow their other interests. Unschooling seeks to so allow the desire to learn to thrive that children eagerly pursue learning without any push at all. They never equate learning to being a bore or undesirable in the first place. Their natural curiosity just takes over. So that looks different than sitting down to teach a five year old sight words. There is also the view that reading comes about naturally in life. They pick it up on menus, movie subtitles, following a parents read aloud, street signs, etc. Much the way that many learn another language without being formally taught. There are also unschooling families that teach reading by traditional means but allow them to read what interests them rather than required reading. I’ll say this – I don’t know any older unschooled kids who never learned to read. On the contrary, they are all absolutely voracious readers. Another good reminder here might be that the average age a child learns to read is seven.”
If you wish to learn more about unschooling I would first recommend reading some of Holt’s writings. “How Children Fail”, “How Children Learn”, and “Teach Your Own” are a good start.
Emmy Goulet 