What if there was a way for parents to find out what their kids are truly passionate about and then allow them to go deeper? There is. It’s known as unschooling. In this post, we’ll go over the basics, benefits, and how to get started with unschooling and online home education programs today.
What Is Unschooling?
Unschooling is a learning method intended to replace formal teaching with individualised learning via curiosity-driven experiences.
The idea behind unschooling is that humans are innately curious starting from birth and should therefore be given the freedom to learn what they want at their own pace without formal education and its rigid structure.
Instead of having a set curriculum to follow, unschooled students are given a supportive setting that allows their natural curiosity to bloom. Proponents of unschooling say this curiosity develops into formal learning without formal schooling.
There are no tests, grades, or deadlines for measuring competency with unschooling. All goals are personal, decided on by the student and worked toward at their own pace. Unschooling students continue to learn naturally through interactions in their daily lives.
Why Unschooling?
- Unschooling is how entrepreneurs learn — just look at Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, who both dropped out of college in pursuit of their own paths that led to great success. Where schools prepare students to follow instructions, as all good employees should, entrepreneurs take charge of what they need to learn and make the decisions on how to get there by themselves.
- Unschooling is natural — At some point, we go from young children who can name every dinosaur and details of their diet and habitat or kids that spend hours after school painting and drawing to school-hating, test-failing pre-teens, teens, and adults. Why does this happen? Why do we stop being so curious about the world and unrelentingly pursuing answers to our questions? With unschooling, children never have to lose that curiosity and voracious appetite for learning more and more about things they’re passionate about.
- Unschooling = freedom — For people who enjoy having decisions being made for them, the structure of the traditional school is great. But, for those who like to make their own decisions, the freedom of unschooling is unparalleled.
- Parents learn with the kiddos — In traditional school settings, parents are removed to at least some degree during their child’s learning process — yes, this is why it’s so hard to remember what the Pythagorean theorem is when your kid is [also] stumped on their homework. Unschooling allows parents to learn with their kids.
- Unschooled learning is unlimited — At school, learning is generally limited to in-school hours and homework time. Once the homework is done, kids are free to stop with the “boring learning” that they’re forced to do all day long. Unschoolers, on the other hand, learn that learning happens everywhere, all day — no matter what they’re doing. Unschoolers get to learn from travelling, playing games, getting out in nature, talking to strangers, fixing things around the house, cooking dinner, and more. Learning is all around them — and it’s fun.
How Home Educating Families Can Benefit from Unschooling
Estimates show about 13 percent of home educated students practise unschooling. These students — and their families —experience the following benefits of child-led learning:
- A safer learning environment where students are free to be themselves.
- Improved learning outcomes with teaching methods that are much more effective.
- Children are taught in a manner that aligns with their family’s values.
- A customised, tailored approach specific to each child.
- Improved family closeness.
- A flexible schedule, which leads to a family-centred lifestyle.
- Increased passion and eagerness for learning.
These benefits have a bigger impact than you may realise. Research has found that up to 40 percent of students experience test anxiety. This enhanced academic stress can cause depression, sleep disturbances and even substance abuse. With the freedom not to worry about formal tests in unschooling, students are far less likely to experience these troubling effects.
Getting Started With Unschooling
If you’re ready to leap into the freedom of unschooling, you’re likely wondering where to start. The way kids learn is largely determined by their learning styles and personality types. In a conventional classroom setting, personality, and learning type aren’t usually considered when the instructor is teaching to 20 or 30+ kids at once.
Unschooling facilitates individualised learning by giving students the freedom to make their own choices about what they learn and how. As a parent, your only role is to provide your kids with an environment that encourages their natural curiosity and nurtures their learning style.
Since unschooling does not use traditional textbooks — unless the child requests one — learners can choose from any of the following methods to discover new information:
- Books they have chosen to read
- People they have chosen to speak to, including parents, friends and other family members
- Places they choose to visit, such as museums or job shadowing in formal work settings
- Interactions with nature
- Interactions with the world around them
To help your kids get started on their unschooling journey, there are some things you can do:
- Expose them to a broad spectrum of stimuli, from books lying around the house to watching documentaries, the news, and so on; play old board games; explore your city, state, and country; and find things together on the Internet. The exposure helps them find new interests and explore them further.
- Be patient. Remember, this is an entire process of unlearning traditional educational norms and giving the kids free rein to take over. So, don’t expect your kids to be loving school or spewing facts as fast as Einstein after the first few weeks — or even months.
- Trust. As hard as it is, especially in the beginning, you must trust the process of unschooling as well as your children. Trust that they are capable of learning on their own with minimal oversight and guidance. Trust that when they’re interested in something, they’ll take it upon themselves to learn more.
How Outschool Can Help
Outschool is your go-to resource for unschooling and online home education programs. Whether your child is passionate about foreign languages or computer coding and anime, we’ve got a course for them. Outschool makes it easy with more than 140,000 affordable online classes to supplement your Unschooling home education program. Your kids can dig into a variety of subjects including Anime, Roblox, Dance, Creative Writing, Acting, Music, Drawing, Science, Nature, Video Game Design and thousands more!
