Enjoy and Bless

I’m here to shine light on the idea that school is not the only path to education. 

When I say school, I mean the compulsory, standardized model most of us grew up with. Unschooling is a word that was created to emphasize the process of taking school out of one’s education – because in modern society, mandatory school has been so deeply entwined with our concept of education. 

Learning happens everywhere. And often, the most deep and enduring learning happens beyond classrooms, teachers, or grades. We learn through everyday problem solving, curiosity driven exploration, and lived experience. 

Being educated is not the same as having been taught. 

Someone can attend school, be taught, and yet remain passive, dependent, and fragmented in their understanding. Someone can also develop strong understanding, knowledge, and adaptability without formal instruction. Schools, classes, and curriculum are just one of many pathways to education. 

My previous episode, “What is unschooling?” focused on how unschooling contrasts with schooling. I highlighted three specific characteristics: No prescribed curriculum, no fixed hours, no designated teacher. Today, I’d like to talk about what unschooling is instead of what it isn’t. 

There are some basic principles that most unschoolers believe that naturally lead to an unschooling path. These are the core convictions that both raise questions about conventional schooling, and bolster confidence in self directed education. I don’t want to presume to speak for others, but these principles regularly surface in unschooling conversation and resources. 

Principle number one: We are designed to learn. We don’t need to be forced. We were born with a strong, innate drive to learn. Anyone who’s had a baby has witnessed this. We don’t need classes for learning how to walk and talk. 

Principle number two: Learning is always happening. We don’t need to separate education from everyday living. In fact, education becomes more meaningful when it is connected to daily life. 

And principle number three: We are all unique. We have different gifts and strengths to lean into and offer the world. We don’t all need to be good at the same things, and we don’t need to learn at the same speed or in the same way. Reading age is a common example I’ve heard in home educated families. People will share that some of their children learned to read at the age of three or four. While others, it took longer, until they were 11 or 12 even. 

Confidence in these three realities inspires us to trust the learner to direct their own education, to prioritize everyday life learning through real world experiences, and to partner with them in pursuing their unique interests and curiosity. Unschooling parents are motivated to protect the learner’s freedom and autonomy, to choose what and how they learn, while also providing resources and opportunities to support their learning journey. 

So here’s what this looks like in our home:

My oldest came into the world with a natural gift for language. She learned to speak and read at an early age without any plan or intention on my part beyond talking with her and reading books together. Now at age 12, she’s been using Duolingo to learn Spanish, and regularly sits down to read our children’s dictionary, just because she wants to. 

Our middle child came into the world with great curiosity about how things work. At age 10, she is regularly researching different topics as they come to mind. At the moment, she has a desire to make her own flour. So she used the internet and AI to learn about growing, harvesting, and milling wheat. I can promise you this was never in my educational plan for our family. 

And then our youngest came into the world with a sincere love for vehicles. At age 7, a couple weeks ago, he asked me to find a computer racing game that he had seen another child playing at the library. We looked up several racing and monster truck computer games and had fun together trying the different games and seeing how to make the trucks navigate obstacles. He experiments with the same physics concepts at home with his remote control monster trucks. And to be clear, when I say he experiments, this simply looks like a boy playing with a remote control toy. But because of my conviction that learning is always happening, I see that he is learning how the world works through this type of play. 

This all makes me think of Isaac Newton and how the observation of an apple falling, and the curiosity that followed – Why do things always fall down? – prompted a 20 year long process of sustained inquiry, study, and reasoning about gravity. These are the kind of educational pursuits I want to provide my children. Instead of filling their time and heads with only what is already known, and what I or someone else thinks they should focus on, I want to give them freedom and autonomy to wonder, discover, and innovate down a path unique to who God made them to be. 

What about you? Do you believe these 3 principles? 

In a future episode, I want to wrestle with a question underneath all of this. Are curiosity and autonomy enough for education to reliably emerge? Or are there important environmental factors that also play a role? 

I hope these reflections have been helpful. Thank you for reading!