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Episode 18: What is Unschooling and How Does it Work?
We are talking about unschooling in this episode, something that is often misunderstood in both wording and practice. Our conversation twists and turns into all kinds of interesting places, but at the core of things, we seem to keep coming back to the ideas of respect, trust and curiosity. Unschooling is not the easiest thing to define or understand – there’s no official definition to adhere to – and we loved how the conversation built on itself as we each learned from each other’s perspectives and experiences. Please join us as we talk it through!
We Discuss:
The origin of the term “unschooling” as we understand it
Different paths to unschooling – our own experiences
The assumption of school as the default
Respectful/Attachment parenting as a pipeline to unschooling
Whether we use the term unschooling to describe what we’re doing
Whether home education culture has moved more toward labels
Respecting children as whole people and the difficulties that can come up in school settings
Radical Unschooling – duh, duh, duh 😁
Freedom for children and arbitrary requirements
The nice thing about being on the other end of parenting and observing how things play out
That challenges and failings of systems don’t necessarily reflect the teachers and assistants who work there
How learning happens naturally all the time and we couldn’t stop it if we tried (looking at the world’s inventions and discoveries show us this)
Failing as an important part of learning and how one person’s discovery is often built upon another person’s previous one
Living, learning and exploring naturally have been common to all cultures and times – it just happened to be coined by John Holt to explain the way we understand it after years of standardized schooled assumptions
Whether learning needs to be painful and the ways our views have changed about that over time
The fear that children won’t learn and how learning actually happens as a by-product of life rather than learning being for learning’s sake
That learning isn’t always about utility but we never know where a thread is going to lead
How coercion creates resistance and the differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
The goal doesn’t need to be to learn ‘it all.’ We don’t need to stuff learning in.
That gaps in learning are not only by normal, but opportunities for growth. We don’t want a standardized world – variances are needed.
The often random and changing standards of school
How this way of living really keeps us in our toes and imagining things from our kids’ perspectives
The ways autonomy leads to deep learning
An experience with a young adult identifying their own gaps and what their reaction has been. What is our responsibility as a parent?
Resources:
Taking a Kinder Path (for ourselves, our children and the world)