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:

• Flexibility

No matter your lifestyle, budget, schedule, or interest, unschooling can work for you. The minimal necessities to a rich unschooling experience are a library card, internet access, and loving parents. Good friends, good experiences, and learning will follow.

The flexibility of unschooling can have a lot of small bonuses, too. Shopping can be done during a quiet hour. It’s easier to travel when tickets are cheap. If plans change, it’s not that big a deal. You can have a family vacation whenever it suits you. It makes a lot of things easier!

• It’s About the Learner

Schools have a lot of kids, teachers, and parents to focus their time on. Unschooling lets the experience focus on the learner and their needs. This puts the learner in a more comfortable and more secure environment. Feeling comfortable  enough to seek information, ask questions, try new things, and share experiences is very important to learning. Unschooling does just that.

Knowing that what they need is freely available (entertainment, comfort, food, sleep, etc) lets children be comfortable enough not to hoard those things. Having the freedom to choose early on helps children establish security in the world around them, and make better choices with the experience they get.

Maturity doesn’t come with age. It comes with experience.

• Real-world Experience

Speaking of experience! Instead of just focusing on theory, unschooling gives kids real, hands-on experience. There’s nothing arbitrary about any of their experiences. The things unschoolers learn are put into context (this is important – why do you think schools try to give students stories for math problems?). Their learning is a more complete experience, and is more memorable because of that.

It’s more than just academic knowledge, too. Responsibility and respect are things you learn from experience, and they can’t be forced. Unschooling helps kids learn (and experience) both, without instilling fear (like schools do with punishment, bad grades, and other assessments).

• Families Are Closer

Many parents of schooled children don’t know their children very well, and don’t spend much time with them. On top of work, school, homework, errands, and free time with friends, there’s very little time to sit down and spend time together as a family.

This heart-rending article puts it in perspective: working parents on average spend less than 30 minutes of active time with their children. Unschoolers don’t have that problem.

• It’s Fun!

Unschoolers have the biggest playground of all: the world. Unschooling encourages families to focus on making fun, entertaining lives, because that’s the best way to learn. No matter your age!

Why did your family choose unschooling? Share your story in the comments!

• Be sure not to miss the other parts of the Self-Ed 101 series:
  Self-Ed 101: A Brief History
  Self-Ed 101: 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.

The Role of the Parent
Unschooling is often the choice of the parents. Even then, parents need to deschool, too.

The most important thing to do is encourage learning. Learning can be found everywhere: in books, good conversations, movies, the internet, the outdoors, or even a hands on activity. The idea is to make learning opportunities easier to find.

Leave books out to be found, have movie nights, read aloud to each other, encourage questions, and engage yourself in the activities your children enjoy. There’s an endless list of things you can do to make your environment learning friendly.

Let yourself see your children learning, away from the conventional rules and structure of school. Be open minded.

Sandra Dodd has a great resource for parents in the process of deschooling.

• Have fun. Just go with it! Enjoy the ride.
• Don’t teach. Helping is great, but don’t help when you’re not welcome to. Make it clear that you’re available to help with things. Let them come to you.
• Let learning be natural. School gives the impression that learning happens at an even pace, but it doesn’t. Learning happens when it happens.
• Explore interests as far as they go. If your child expresses interest in chess, buy a chessboard. Get a book on strategies. Go as far as the child wants. Pay attention to what your children want to learn.
• Learn together. Learning something new together can be a great way to support each other and have fun. Having a learning experience without the same expectations as school can be eye opening for everyone.

The Role of the Learner
Many unschooling families unschool from the start, but sometimes families decide to unschool when the kids are older. When this happens, deschooling plays an especially important role. Deschooling eases doubt (“Am I learning?”), clears grudges (“History sucks.”), and encourages healthy self-assessment.

Deschooling as the learner is different from deschooling as a parent. For the learner, deschooling can be a very strong, detoxifying experience. Parents usually experience a gradual change, whereas the learner experiences a more immediate one.

The important part is to let yourself go. School has given you a lot of rules and ideas you were forced to live by, but now you have a choice. You can read what books you want. You can watch what movies you want. You can play games from breakfast to dinner. You are no longer under the rules you were when you were in school. You’re now experiencing the freedom of choice.

What you choose to do now will be much different from the things you’re choosing to do months from now. My year of deschooling involved little more than playing video games and exploring odd sleeping schedules. Now, I’m choosing to learn about a huge variety of things, from business to world history to photography.

My deschooling experience felt a lot like rebelling. Today, I feel comfortable with the freedom to choose. I’m no longer desperate to fill my time with the things that I felt restricted in. That’s what deschooling does.

• Don’t restrict yourself. Remember how school tells you video games rot your brain and television is just as bad? Forget that. Make your own opinions. Let yourself experience things away from school.
• Try new things. Trying something new is especially fun to do when you’re not restricted by school. Having a schedule you can’t control gets in the way of a lot of things, and you’re no longer under that kind of pressure.
• Be gentle. It can be difficult adjusting to an environment without clear expectations. Sometimes you’ll wonder if you’re even learning at all. It’s important to be kind with yourself and realize what you’re going through is a healing process.

Deschooling is an important stage for any homeschooler to go through. That’s especially true for unschoolers. What’s your story?

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.  He wrote that school confuses teaching with learning, diplomas with competence, and processes with substance. He also argued that schools prevent students from realizing their natural curiosity and instead make students focus on delivering what the teacher wants. One of his main points was that creative and exploratory learning can’t be forced, and requires an individual’s own initiative. Much of his writing can be found online, along with Deschooling Society.

John Caldwell Holt, an educator and prominent critic of compulsory schooling, said that compulsory education violates every individual’s right to freedom of thought. His first book, How Children Fail, was published in 1964, and was based off his first decade of teaching. His radical assertion that children failed not despite of schools, but because of them, brought him to public attention. After publishing Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976), Holt came into contact with families educating their children at home, and became an advocate for homeschooling. Holt was clear that as a whole, he felt schools were fundamentally flawed. He was of the opinion that coercion was not required in education, and that children will learn if given the freedom and the resources. His line of thought is now known as unschooling.

Another educator, John Taylor Gatto, was a teacher for nearly 30 years and appointed New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 before he retired. Gatto argued that schools are designed to provide an obedient, working population. He claims that real education in not school’s purpose, since a well-educated population would be difficult to maintain. Gatto has published a thorough analysis of the American school system and its history in the book The Underground History of American Education. The book can be found online.

Today’s rising interest in self-education is supported by the evidence brought forward by dozens of critics of modern schooling. The growing number of critics and lack of success in schools have opened up the opportunity for people to discover an alternative to compulsory education. Many critics have the same solution: people can learn on their own, without instructors.

Each of us have a personal history that brought us to the decision to unschool. What’s your story?