an unschooler’s defense
Today is rainy, rainy, rainy. No good pics to post, but in my brief online perusal this morning, I came across an interesting post you might like to read. It’s written by Idzie, a college age girl who was un-schooled since kindergarten.
Unschooling is a type of homeschooling, but more radical. You don’t necessarily work from books (only when you have an interest in a certain subject and you want to delve into it) and there are no lectures or lessons, but rather, you learn from life itself. Unschooling parents have to be pretty mindful and ready to go with whatever opportunity for learning presents itself. It’s not for uninvolved parents, to say the least.
The premise is that when you’re forced to learn, and learning becomes a drudgery, you simply don’t learn, or at least as well. It’s also based on the idea that we ought to learn about the world and about life through the world and through living experiences, not in the contrived world inside the school walls. By this kind of “natural learning” or “life-learning”, contend unschooling advocates, learning becomes just a part of life -an enjoyable part- and it continues far beyond the scope of graduation from high school/college and throughout the rest of your life.
There are all kinds of questions that come up when you first hear about unschooling. Believe me, I know- I thought it sounded absurd when I first got wind of it. I had to do a lot of research on it and find out what kind of people these unschooled kids have become. But I’m not going to go into all that, since Idzie covers several of the basic questions in her article as she responds to an email from a doubtful and concerned mom.
Suffice to say that in my opinion, unschooling gets a gold star. (Yeah, even unschoolers can get stars. They are one of my favorite memories from an almost unschooled childhood!)
