Approaches to Homeschooling: Unschooling

Dear Reader,

The next educational philosophy I’d like to tackle is unschooling. In New England, where I am, there are a lot of unschoolers. A lot of what I have to say will be based upon what I have heard from them. Unschooling almost by definition is a broad movement with not necessarily a lot of agreement between those who practice it. There is a spectrum among those who call themselves unschoolers from what we might call merely interest-directed learning to the extreme end of the movement in which the parent imposes nothing on the child in education or in discipline. For our purposes I am not really interested in the parenting and discipline aspects but in how education is approached.

Unschooling rejects the use of a pre-set curriculum. It allows the child to choose what to learn and when to learn it. Of course some may use this approach as an excuse for laziness, but many of the unschooling moms I have met are among the most dedicated to their children. It can take quite a lot of effort on the parent’s part to follow the child’s lead and to really provide them with the materials they need when a new topic sparks their interest.

Here are a couple of statements of unschooling philosophy from the unschoolers themselves:

“The traditional curriculum is based on the assumption that children must be pursued by knowledge because they will never pursue it themselves. It was no doubt noticed that, when given a choice, most children prefer not to do school work. Since, in a school, knowledge is defined as schoolwork, it is easy for educators to conclude that children don’t like to acquire knowledge. Thus schooling came to be a method of controlling children and forcing them to do whatever educators decided was beneficial for them. Most children don’t like textbooks, workbooks, quizzes, rote memorization, subject schedules, and lengthy periods of physical inactivity.”    [What is Unschooling by Earl Stevens, 1994]

“Our primary purpose in unschooling is to keep alive the spark of curiosity and the natural love of learning with which all children are born. We want our children to accept learning as a natural part of living, and an ongoing process that continues throughout life. We want their learning to remain an integrated process in which all subjects are interrelated. We also want to allow them the time to pursue a subject as fully as they want, rather than imposing artificial time constraints on them. We believe these aspects of learning are limited by the traditional implementation of a curriculum, and we choose to homeschool as a way to circumvent those limitations.”    [Family Unschoolers Network]

The questions I said I would ask of each of these philosophies are:

1. What do they assume about how learning works?

2. How do they view children?

3. How do they view human nature?

4. What do they believe is the goal of education?

For unschooling, the first is the easiest to answer. Education should be natural and should flow out of the child’s innate love of learning. It is a process and is done throughout life rather than being confined to certain times and places. What is learned is dictated by the learner not by a teacher. The parent, in fact, is not really a teacher but a facilitator who helps the child learn what he wants to learn.

Turning to the fourth question, we ask what then is the goal of education? It is not, for unschoolers, to learn a certain body of knowledge. There is no set curriculum or body of knowledge that is required of them. I think how the goal of unschooling is phrased may depend quite a bit on the parent(s) and their values. I have heard one mother say her goal is for her children to be kind. This is what she values most highly for them. Another might say that she wants her children to know who they are or to follow their dreams. If you are an unschooler, I’d love to hear what you have to say on this. My supposition would be that for most unschoolers, the goal is something about who the child is. It is not very often going to be about material success or academic achievement.

So how do unschoolers view children? They believe that children are born with a natural desire to learn and to know and that this desire should be fostered and never hindered by the adults in their lives. With this much, I think Charlotte Mason would agree. But unschoolers also assume that the child will seek after the things he or she needs to know and the things that are good for them to know.

And here we touch on the issue of human nature. Unschoolers assume a basically good human nature. In contrast, Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, while it does seem to see that there is much good in children as made in the image of God, also recognizes that left to their own devices they will develop bad habits and often choose poor materials to read or study. Without a good diet placed before them, they will tend towards academic and spiritual junk food as it were. So, as a Christian, I would have to say that I find true unschooling unbiblical. It does not recognize the sinful nature present in each of us.

There is a lot of good thought and intention in unschooling. I like the positive view it has of children’s abilities. But it stumbles on this one (very important) point. My view would be that while children do have an inborn thirst for knowledge, they also need direction to keep them from veering onto bad paths.

Nebby