Self-Ed 101: 5 Reasons Why You Should Unschool

Anna    Basics     101, 5, beginner, five, how to start, reasons, self-ed 101, self-education, should I unschool, starting out, unschooling, why, why unschool

It’s hard to say when exactly I chose unschooling. Looking back, it seems like unschooling always was my choice. I just didn’t know it. Most of my learning happened outside of school. Even when I was in elementary school I understood that. After a few years I started to question why I even needed to be in school at all.

Like a lot of families, I came to choose unschooling through a gradual process. In my first years at school, I enjoyed it. I loved the opportunity to learn. When the system started working against me, I started to question it. Why couldn’t I learn something the higher grades were learning? Why didn’t we read more than one chapter, if everyone was interested and concentrated on it? I didn’t know the world arbitrary then, but that’s what it felt like: a bunch of rules and regulations with no real connection to learning.

Then I discovered homeschooling. That made more sense to me. I already learned more at home than I did at school. A few years after my discovery of homeschooling, I discovered unschooling. That’s when I realized unschooling was what I had wanted all along.

So here I am.

There are a huge number of reasons to unschool. It’s likely there are as many reasons as there are unschoolers. My biggest reasons were not wanting to be stuck with my grade level subject matter. I wanted more.

Among everyone’s reasons to unschool, there are a few things we all agree on: read more

Self-Ed 101: Deschooling

Anna    Basics     Basics, beginner, change, deschooling, new, self-ed 101, start, starting out, unschooling, what it's like

The way you think in school can be applied to many things in life. It’s a kind of thinking people understand. Unschooling involves a different way of thinking. That’s why we have deschooling.

What is Deschooling?
Deschooling is the process of unlearning schooled thinking. It involves letting go of old habits and approaching learning in a new way. It means letting go of the thought that learning only happens in schools.

There are a lot of ideas and concepts to let go of: grades, schedules, curriculum, tests, teaching, diplomas, certifications, school years, and even (especially) the teacher/student relationship. Deschooling means letting go of the idea that learning is separate from life. When you take away school, its structure, its vocabulary and its ideas, you’re left with learning. read more

Self-Ed 101: A Brief History

Anna    Basics     Basics, history, how it all started, ivan illich, john holt, john taylor gatto, paul goodman, self-ed 101

… the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it. – John Holt

Self-education (i.e. autodidacticism/autodidactism, unschooling, self-directed learning, self-learning) is a concept new to many of today’s individuals. Despite the natural prominence of self-directed learning, modern schooling is widely accepted as being the best method of education. But before the wide-spread establishment of schools, it’s safe to say that self-education was the norm. That has changed.

Certain disciplines, such as the sciences and religion, have a long history of academic institutions, but modern schooling began 250 years ago. In the 18th century, Prussia declared education a responsibility of state. Within thirty years, all schools and universities in the Kingdom of Prussia were state institutions. Compulsory education spread across the world, and in 1918 Mississippi was the last state in the US to pass a compulsory attendance law.

In 1960, less than 50 years after Mississippi declared compulsory attendance, Paul Goodman published Growing Up Absurd, in which he criticized compulsory education. The book became the first among many during what is now called the deschooling movement.

Ten years later, Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society. Illich supported the idea of self-directed education, and he criticized the ineffectiveness of modern schools.  read more