12 Unschooling Misconceptions (and Why They're Wrong)

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about what unschooling is, how it works, what people mean when they use the term... So I wanted to do a post on the topic addressing some of the biggest misunderstandings that seem to crop up repeatedly.

Misconception #1: unschooling is just a synonym for homeschooling.

While unschooling falls under the homeschooling umbrella, it is its own unique approach, lifestyle, and understanding of how learning works and how children should be treated.

While "homeschooling" frequently means school-at-home, unschooling is delight-driven, interest-based, self-directed life learning. It's children owning their own education, learning what, where, when, how, and with whom they want (within reasonable constraints).

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Misconception #2: Unschooling is just educational neglect.

Unschooling does NOT mean abandoning children to their own devices. Adult carers take an active, involved role in the lives of unschooling children, acting as guides and partners in learning, finding resources, and creating environments that foster exploration,. Their role is just collaborative, instead of that of "teacher."

Misconception #3: Parents must just be sneakily "teaching" their kids, then.

Nope! As I said recently on Facebook:
“[That belief] seems to rest on the assumption that children directing their own learning is such an absurd idea that there MUST be a mastermind carefully crafting the process behind the scenes…

And while there is certainly a great deal of parental involvement, it's not through subterfuge.

Unschooling as a philosophy is about respecting children, not tricking them into learning. They WANT to learn, they just need the resources and support to do so.”

Unschooling requires a shift in understanding about what learning is and how children should be treated. Trusting and respecting children is central to unschooling, and trying to manipulate children into doing what the adults want would completely undermine that. 

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Misconception #4: You can unschool part time.

The assumption behind this claim is generally that weekends and summer break can be for "unschooling," after the REAL learning has taken place in school. But as I hope is becoming clear, unschooling is a lifestyle, it's a whole different way of approaching living and learning with children. It's not something you stuff into spare moments, and it can’t be done without challenging dominant ideas about schooling.

See Why Can't You Just Unschool Part Time? 

Misconception #5: Unschooling is just a way for parents to isolate their children from the wider world, to keep them away from the "wrong" sorts of people and influences.

I think it's hard to convey to those outside of the community just how wide a schism there is between religious and secular homeschooling/homeschoolers. The ideology is NOT the same.

Members of the fundamentalist and evangelical homeschooling movement often DO want to isolate their kids. Unschoolers, though, tend to fall heavily on the secular side of reasons-for-homeschooling (whatever their personal beliefs or religion are), and do not want their children isolated at all.

I tend to make the distinction between those who want kids to have MORE access to the world than school provides, vs those who want kids to have LESS access. Generally more = good, less = bad in terms of the experience kids have.

See Homeschooling the Right Way: More of the World, Not Less 

Misconception #6: Unschooling means you stay at home all the time.

I mean, right now most people are home all the time. But NORMALLY, and expanding on the above point, that is not at all the case.

Unschoolers usually see plenty of other people, have friends and activities, and spend lots of time out and about. At various points my sister and I had Sparks/Brownies/Girl Guides, nature club, homeschool co-op, Air Cadets, classes on a wide variety of different topics, lots of informal gatherings… Unschoolers are plenty "socialized."

See The Ultimate Unschooling Socialization Post 

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Misconception #7: Kids (and people in general) are inherently "lazy" and won't learn unless forced to. 

I feel like there are two components to address here. The first is "laziness" as a concept, which... I do not think exists. 

I also think that the fantastic article "Laziness Does Not Exist (but unseen barriers do)" by Devon Price is a must read on the topic. 

But the second part of the misconception is that kids, being "lazy", must be FORCED to learn, with the inherent assumption that learning must be hard, and that no one would willingly do it.

In reality, schooling is the unpleasant thing that many children resist, finding it stressful or boring or de-motivating. That's the part that kids don't like. Schooling and learning are not synonyms, and learning does not have to be that way.

Unschoolers know that living is learning, and that children just need supportive and resource filled environments in which to thrive. As long as their needs are met, they will learn enthusiastically, joyfully, fiercely.

Misconception #8: Children will never do hard things on their own.

Obviously similar to misconception #7, but I thought this one still deserved its own attention. Because obviously... Learning CAN be hard!

Learning new things is often difficult: sometimes it's joyful work, but frequently it’s also frustrating. The thing is though, that people--children included--will do hard things if they feel there's a good reason to do so. If they’re excited, or see how it will be useful in their lives, or they feel it contributes to an important goal of theirs, they will put in the work.

Certain things need to be in place to make hard things more manageable (a topic I’ve gone into more thoroughly in the past), but ultimately, it doesn't require force. It just requires support.

Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

Misconception #9: Kids will "rule" the household if adults aren't busy controlling their every move.

This one... Well, it seems to be coming from people who have a wildly different, very negative view of human nature in general and children in particular as compared to unschoolers.

If you see the world through a starkly hierarchical and authoritarian lens, if you think people need to be ruled, and that homes should be run like miniature dictatorships, unschooling might seem like it could never work (respect and trust children?? Surely not!).

The fact it DOES work, that there are lots of parents trying to undo their own authoritarian conditioning and create non-hierarchical models based on consent in their homes instead, which children then thrive in, shows that those doubters do not understand human nature as well as they think they do.

Unschoolers of all backgrounds (including those whose parents made the decision and those who left school themselves as teens) show that not only do parent-child relationships not have to be based on control, but teacher-student hierarchies can also be disrupted. 

People of all ages really are capable of cooperating, collaborating, and learning together in ways that aren't based on coercion and control.

Misconception #10: Unschooling means no teacher, textbooks, classes, or structure.

Here is where it's important to emphasize the self-directed aspect of unschooling.

The idea isn't to do away with any and all school-like trappings, it's to respect that the learner gets to call the shots in their own education. This means unschoolers are absolutely free to utilize a variety of resources, including classes and teachers, which many choose to do.

At various points I was in classes ranging from French, to history, to principles of aviation, to doll making. Structure is in no way incompatible with unschooling, as long as that structure is freely chosen by the learner.

This is probably a good time to point out that unschoolers can also choose to go to school! It's not at all uncommon for unschoolers to move in and out of the school system over the years, sometimes trying out school briefly, sometimes going and staying. The important part is self-direction/choice.

See No Classes, No Teachers, No Books? The Reality of Structure in Unschooling 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Misconception #11: Unschooling will only work for "motivated" children.

Honestly, I hate this one SO much. I hate the hierarchy, the division it creates between the supposedly "smarter" or "more motivated" and the supposedly... Less. As if there are some children who deserve more respect, trust, and freedom, and some who don't, which seems like such a profoundly broken way of looking at other people.

All children, if given the needed support--a safe environment, caring adults, access to a variety of resources--are capable of self-directed learning. There isn't some special type of kid who deserves to learn more freely than others.

Access is a whole different thing: because we live in a capitalist hellscape, most people don't have the financial means to unschool. Because our society does not value children, they are segregated from the rest of society instead of being a crucial, integral part of daily life.

But all children can and should be trusted and respected, and in any revolutionary vision of a different society the needs and rights of children should be considered of utmost importance.

I also think there are a lot of models (agile learning centers, homeschool co-ops, free schools, etc.) that provide inspiration for what could be, if they were fully publicly funded and accessible to all children who don't have the option of unschooling.

Misconception #12: Unschooling is elitist and incompatible with "social justice".

I feel like I started to address the issue of privilege in my previous point, and now I want to shift focus a bit and point out that schooling is incompatible with social justice. 

I don't personally see unschooling as any type of solution in a vacuum: I think the necessary changes to create a truly just society (societies?) are revolutionary. I don't think any tweaking of the current system will ever be enough.

However, I absolutely agree that unschoolers (along with everyone else) need to understand how power, privilege, and oppression function in order to start chipping away at their own oppressive views and actions, and take steps towards greater justice.

I just feel very strongly that treating children badly, in controlling and disrespectful ways, is, you know, bad. Ageism is an oppression that needs to be addressed, and I think unschooling can be a way to combat that.

I also think it's completely counterproductive to try to teach children to be anti-authoritarian and anti-oppression by treating them in authoritarian and oppressive ways.

I talk a lot more about my understanding of the ways unschooling and "social justice" relate in Yes There ARE Things Every Kid Should Know. 

Photo by Rachael Henning on Unsplash

Okay, I think that covers it! I hope this clarified some issues you may have been wondering about, and gave you a better understanding of what unschooling can be all about. It’s an approach to living and learning with children that I think can provide a lot of inspiration if people simply understood it better.

Homeschooling in the Age of COVID-19: Advice from Six Unschooling Parents

We are living in difficult times. Around the world, people’s lives have been upended as everyone struggles to deal with this crisis. And one of those changes has been that suddenly, countless people who never expected to be in such a position are doing some version of homeschooling.

Before I go any further, I’d like to make it clear that this is not what homeschooling normally looks like, not how it’s supposed to be. The “home” bit doesn’t mean that school-free families are used to being chained to their houses, as homeschoolers generally take full advantage of various classes, homeschool co-ops, organized sports, community centers, museums, parks, clubs… And you’d be hard pressed to find a group more broken up over library closures. It’s an isolating time for all of us, most definitely including those who normally don’t go to school.

Photo by David Clarke on Unsplash

But at the same time, there ARE aspects of our current reality that are more familiar to families who practice homeschooling of one sort or another. The no school bit is self-evident, but also spending a great deal of time together as a family, and plenty of unstructured time. 

With that in mind, I hoped it would be helpful to share some thoughts and advice from several different unschooling parents, people who practice self-directed life learning outside of school. There is overlap in what they have to say, but also some interesting divergences, and I hope at least some of their words will resonate with you, will give you ideas or comfort.

It’s a trying time, and I just hope we can all make it through it with as much kindness and calm as possible.

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One of the defining characteristics of our current western society is separation. So many families - whether out of choice or necessity - spend the better part of our days separated from each other.

Often, with separation comes disconnection.

This prescribed physical/social distancing has gifted us with togetherness. But togetherness, when we’re used to separation, isn’t always easy. So we need the other C - compassion, as we learn to be together, to find a common rhythm as we dance around and with each other.

So dance! Dance and delight in being with your children. Forget the online lessons and the infinite lists of activities that sustains continued separation and embrace connection instead.

These lists have value. As tools. Not goals.

Make your own lists. Lists of the different ways to build connection in your family.

There are as many ways to build connection as there are people. Connection looks like conversations, telling jokes, making favourite foods, sharing dreams and secrets, playing fantasy games, creating, sitting in silence, sitting in togetherness and sitting in solitude. Connection looks like finding the shared language for you all to advocate for you needs, for your mental and spiritual health. But mostly connection comes when we toss judgement out the front door and expectations out the back door and we just be with our children and embrace what emerges.

Zakiyya Ismail, parent of three unschooling kids aged 21, 20 and 13. You can find her on her website Growing Minds, on Twitter and on Instagram.

Photo by Johnny Wall on Unsplash

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1. Relax. I know it is tempting to replicate school at home, but I would suggest parents find their own rhythm and groove as a family. The coronavirus has put us in uncharted territory, and we honestly do not know what tomorrow will bring. This uncertainty gives us the opportunity to disconnect from the ways school does things and do things in the way that’s most beneficial to our individual children.

2. Enjoy them. What do you enjoy doing with your children? Making a special recipe? Playing video games? Having conversations? Drawing pictures? Reading together? Whatever you like doing with them, do more of it now. Your bonds will be strengthened through the time you spend with them. Play with them and let them play. Let them play more than you think they should. Children learn a vast amount through play. Make time to laugh with your kids. It won’t just help you feel more connected to each other, it will also help ease their anxiety during this confusing time.

3. Let them learn through life. Children are remarkably resilient, and they understand far more than adults usually give them credit for. Right now, they have a freedom they normally only have during summer vacation. Now is the chance to let them be curious and self-directed in their education.

Finally, my advice to unexpecting homeschool parents is to contemplate how you want this time to be remembered. Maya Angelou famously said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Your children will forget the content of the worksheet packets and virtual learning websites they had to do during their homeschooling experience, but they will not forget how it felt being home with their family during this time. They will remember how their parents responded to the situation because they are watching you and learning from you how to deal when things are unpredictable.

Tiersa McQueen, parent of four unschoolers aged 14, 12, and 9 year old twins. You can find her on Twitter.

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This pandemic is really a mirror showing us all the inequitable facets of our society, including this part where it has become acceptable for adults to wield control and power over children. It’s not a judgment on anyone as a person but an important social commentary I needed to give because if anything good should come from this, it’s that we can use this opportunity to reflect on all of the things this crisis is shining a light on. Only then can we start creating something new.

If you can sit with the discomfort you feel from all of that, here’s my unpopular advice:

Just let your kids play.

Yep, just let them play! It’s already a stressful time for all. Skip the strict Coronavirus schedule I see being shared left and right among parent groups. Please! Don’t replicate school at home.

Don’t squander this opportunity to give your kids unstructured time and space to just be.

Right now, your kids may not know what to do with all that freedom, especially the ones who have been institutionalized longer. Your kids are used to having a schedule and having someone else decide what they should spend their time doing.

So give them this gift of freedom.

Give your kids the gift to just play, to explore what they would do with this newfound spaciousness, discover a new hobby, find things you would truly want to do with them together. Let them direct their day. Let them be bored. Boredom is such a gift. It is amazing what emerges out of boredom.

If complete freedom to let kids just be gives you high anxiety, then create flexible and loose rhythms that feel good for everyone.

Do life with them.

Trust that your kids are learning all the time.

And here is the most radical idea of all: Let them CHOOSE.

Vina Joy Duran, parent of two unschooling kids aged 11 and 4. Vina kindly allowed me to share this excerpted/edited version of a longer post that she published on Facebook.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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These are uncertain times. A lot of people are scrambling trying to figure out childcare, or where their next paycheck is coming from. If you do find yourself with the opportunity to suddenly be at home with your kids, be thankful! It is an opportunity not available to many. While your child’s school may be sending home assignments, or switching over to virtual classes, your job is to just enjoy. Treat it like a vacation. Enjoy having your kids around. Enjoy getting to spend this one and one time with them. Enjoy having this brief moment of time that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. Take this time to connect with them. Watch them play their favorite video games (and ask lots of questions!), read with them, bake with them, play board games, do crafts, make a big batch of popcorn and watch a movie, play music together, let them teach you their favorite Tik Tok dances, make silly videos and take lots of selfies. Talk to them about their lives and their friends and their classes. Assuage any feelings of fear or uncertainty they may have. Remind them that they are safe. Get to know them on a whole new level. Meet them where they’re at. Shift your focus to one of gratitude rather than one of panic. This unexpected time with your kids is a blessing, not a penalty. Take this time to truly see your kids, to truly appreciate and enjoy them, and do not worry about what they may be “missing” in school. This is a strange and confusing time in their lives, and what they’ll be getting from you, the person they trust more than anyone in the world, is so much more valuable than anything they could be learning at school.

Jennifer Vogel McGrail, parent of four unschoolers aged 23, 19, 15, and 12, and author of the blog The Path Less Taken.

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Most of us have been conditioned to compartmentalize the lives of adults and children. Adults usually go off to do adultish things, children go off to do childish things, and never the twain shall meet except during the few hours of chaos before bedtime. Adults know how to control children, entertain children, “educate” children, and keep children occupied, but we really don’t know how to simply live life with children without doing things to them.

The situation with COVID-19 is scary and overwhelming, but it can also be an opportunity for us to practice being with children in ways that honor their agency, boundaries, individuality, interests, and needs…as well as our own.

Here are some thoughts about how we can begin practicing BEING WITH rather than DOING TO:

Connect. Don’t worry too much about academics. In these uncertain times, the last thing that matters is whether or not our child can add fractions! Instead, make relationship and connection our goal over “productivity.” Hold space for all the big emotions that may arise.

Respect their autonomy. Staying emotionally connected doesn’t mean we need to be attached at the hip. In fact, it can mean that we are more comfortable doing things independently because we trust each other. Instead of trying to micromanage and schedule every minute, give children the freedom to decide and self-direct their day. Support them if they need ideas or structure, but avoid coercion and ultimatums.

Communicate boundaries. Have a family meeting about how to keep everyone safe and how to get everyone’s needs met. Brainstorm together about win-win solutions so that kids and adults both feel valued and respected. How can the kids experiment with papier-mâché without making a huge mess that you’ll have to clean up? How can you have peace and quiet for your online meeting when the kids want to play Nerf tag in the house? When we as the adults are willing to compromise and listen to our kids, they’re usually willing to do the same.

It is a radical paradigm shift to learn how to have relationships with children that are based on collaboration and connection rather than coercion. Now is as good a time as any to begin practicing.

Iris Chen, parent of two unschooling children aged 12 and 10 and author of the blog Untigering.

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

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Besides the economic and practical adjustments that affect us all, the thing I'm seeing most schooling parents and carers worry about is their children being bored, or their children "falling behind" on schoolwork.

I see a lot of unschoolers responding with a version of, "don't worry, just chill out, take time to relax" and of course as lifelong unschoolers I know what is meant by that. My family has been “homebound” in that sense for almost twenty years - and we've never been "bored" nor fallen "behind"! But the fact is, schooling families are used to schooling concepts and attendant lifestyle and worldviews. Parents and children are experiencing a lot of anxiety right now and many adults won't be able to confidently switch to an unschooling mindset under this kind of strain.

Confidence is key, and confidence can be in short supply in times like this. My suggestion would be for parents to practice self-care, tune into the news for only short durations (then tune back out!), and employ whatever healthy behaviors best care for their bodies and soothe their anxiety. As a parent, it has benefitted me a great deal to care for myself with a dedicated fierceness so I wasn't constantly transmitting my anxiety to my children. We can leave our emotional processing needs for the most part to our safe grownup friends, our support groups, our therapists, and our spiritual mentors. Let's take care of ourselves so we can care for our children.

Most children are connected online and likely have some great communities and friendships to bolster them at this time. The things children and teens need most is a safe, nurturing, connected, and calm home. What can we do to move things in that direction? It's never too early, or too late, to make those kinds of changes.

Kelly Hogaboom, parent of two unschoolers aged 16 and 18, as well as clothier and designer at Bespoke Hogaboom.

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

Yes, There ARE Things Every Kid Should Know: Social Justice and Self-Direction

I’ve seen some interesting discussion from fellow leftists in and around the unschooling world in regards to social justice and the importance of children--all children--knowing certain things. The issue raised is this: if we can agree that there are important issues of power and oppression that all children should understand, how do you reconcile that with an approach which, on the surface, looks like children learning whatever they want, regardless of what anyone else thinks?

I agree that there is a baseline of knowledge and understanding necessary in order to be a thoughtful and kind person, and in order to engage in the work needed to dismantle structures of oppression. How are children to understand the current context if they don’t know the history of the Holocaust, of American slavery, of British colonialism, of Canadian residential schools? Children are generally taught about the ways in which they themselves are marginalized either by a hostile world which never lets them forget it, or by loved ones looking to prepare children for that world. But what about making sure all children, no matter their background, are equipped to challenge power and behave conscientiously towards those around them?

I believe the concern that these things won’t be learned if children just “do whatever they want” rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what unschooling is, or at least my understanding of it. I’ve often described unschooling as self-directed learning that is guided by the desires and needs of the learner and their communities. We exist in a world full of other people, and I would never disagree about the importance of living as morally and justly as we can, which requires being educated about important topics.

However, using oppressive and authoritarian methods to try and teach anti-oppression and anti-authoritarian politics is ridiculous and counter-productive. People learn what they live, and no matter how great the content being taught, if the structure or ways of relating reinforce hierarchies, dominance, and oppression--if children are learning that people who are bigger and older are entitled to control and dictate to those younger and weaker, they will not be learning the lessons we want them to. It’s simply unjust to use force and coercion to try to “make” children learn something, and the belief that the ends justify the means is just the type of attitude that sustains modern schooling, that continues a system built on the denial of children’s autonomy, and the enforcement of a colonialist Western model of education and social organization.

I think becoming educated on important topics can be achieved through unschooling. I further believe it’s imperative to try and nurture these qualities respectfully, and detrimental to try and do so any other way.

After all, people don’t tend to remember the things they’re taught against their will, when they don’t see the relevance or real world implications, when they’re somewhere they don’t want to be and are being taught by people they may not like. There’s a quote by Katrina Gutleben that goes “Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested, it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.” This is why I don’t believe a mandatory curriculum covering everything any of us might decide ALL children should learn would be any more effective than current curriculums, where most information that’s taught is never truly learned.

One of the things that’s always appealed to me about unschooling is the anti-authoritarianism baked into an ideology that treats education not as something done to children by learned adults, but as an organic, collaborative, community-rooted process. It embraces horizontal ways of relating to other people, across age divides, and invites us all to question the oppressive structures we’ve been told are just and necessary. It is one way to start creating a different world, to live as we wish things to be instead of recreating harm.

Do all unschoolers feel this way? Not remotely. There are unschoolers with politics I consider terrible, who have very different goals than mine when it comes to embracing self-directed education, and who are passing on a lot of harmful ideas about the world to their children.

Here is where I agree with the people who believe that some things just need to be learned in order to challenge injustice. Unschooling, on its own, is not enough. Respectful parenting alone is not a complete solution.

So what to do? Well, here is where I think the importance of family and community culture comes into play. Who is part of a child’s life? What are their perspectives, experiences, and values? If children are surrounded by people who talk about and embody different ways of existing and living outside of the dominant culture, who discuss inequalities and structural violence, important history and current events, who work to unlearn their own prejudices and fight for justice, who care and learn and struggle and include children in all of that--then that is what they will learn to do themselves.

While some disagree, I’ve never seen unschooling as a way to shelter children, or as a way to control what they learn. As I’ve discussed before, I see unschooling as a way to open up more of the world, not to restrict it. I’m also never going to argue against having firm boundaries about, say, not using slurs or derogatory language about marginalized people. I am not suggesting that unschooling is a free-for-all, but that there are far better, more authentic, more consensual ways for children to learn than an “anti-oppression curriculum.”

I also think it’s important to note that while children do not have all the knowledge and experience that adults generally have, and so of course it’s important for adults to be role models and help children gain those things, we must recognize that children, too, have valuable experience and perspectives that add to adults lives, and to social justice and liberatory movements themselves. There’s a great meme I’ve shared before on Facebook, that states in part “Children's innate tendency to question the status quo as well as their ability to imagine an ideal world without limits makes their active engagement in organizing efforts an invaluable resource as we move together towards ultimate liberation for all.”

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing children as empty vessels to be filled, as people in training instead of people now, when the reality is that everyone has things to both learn and share, everyone has something to add across the spectrum of ages. And if any movements are seeing children solely as almost-people in need of molding they’re both perpetuating oppression and missing out.

To bring it all back around, there is definitely knowledge that is important in attempts to challenge injustice and create better ways of living. However, the best way to acquire it is to live it, to be surrounded by people who care. Kind of the same way adults gain the knowledge and skills necessary to make positive change. Children, though their needs, their experiences, and their development may be different from adults, are still every bit as deserving of basic respect, to be included instead of condescended to, to have relationships with people who see their involvement as valuable.

If we really care about making things better, we can’t do so by recreating the same power structures that oppress us all. Instead, we need to recognize every person as a potential ally and partner in the struggle for justice… including kids.

On Seasons and Cycles: Unschooling and Nature

This post was originally published on my Patreon in February 2019. While most of my Patreon posts will remain exclusive to financial supporters, occasionally I share an older one over here as well.

You know winter is truly over when you hear the spring peepers. Even living in the suburbs, the wetlands, tucked discreetly behind houses with manicured lawns, would fill with with tiny frogs, their distinctive chorus echoing down streets and bouncing between buildings. A local zoo that focuses on fauna native to the Saint Lawrence River Valley would open up the gates at the back of their property when the peepers came out, allowing groups of people into areas generally reserved for zoologists and grad students, where we’d shine our flashlights around as darkness started to fall, trying to spot the small bodies clinging to stalks of grass. You could hear them before you even turned in to the parking lot, but as you made your way into the marshes the sound rose to deafening heights, exhilarating and consuming.

I can still hear the peepers from my house, when the snow has melted but the temperature still drops below zero some nights. The sound has grown fainter over the years as wetlands have been filled in for new housing developments, patches of forest whittled down, but they’re still there.

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Instead of heading closer to the city for activities, growing up we were more likely to head in the opposite direction, where suburbs faded into more rural surroundings. We’d go on hikes and on frog catching expeditions, learned to spot wood that had been gnawed on by a beaver and admired their dams, chewed on tart sumac berries and kept a lookout for poison ivy. We’d watch turkey vultures spiral high above us, and spot red-tailed hawks and downy woodpeckers.

There are children who are more nature literate than me and my sister were--quite a few of them and quite a bit more knowledgeable--but for children of the suburbs, we spent more time in wild spaces than most of the other kids we knew.

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When you grow up without school, you get to create your own structure, the what, where, how, when, and who of your choosing, which means that one of the “where’s” you can choose to focus on is outside. Without the segmentation of semesters and school vacation, you can allow other forces to guide you instead: the turning of seasons, the weather, when your favourite flowers bloom in the fields, that perfect stretch of time for hiking in the autumn when the leaves are at their brightest. You can fade into partial hibernation in the winter months, a fallow time for thinking and creating.

And, taking inspiration from the natural cycles, you can embrace the way learning itself follows its own patterns, periods of intensity and growth followed by stretches of absorption and rumination. 

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When I think of my childhood, I think of it in seasons.

Spring was peepers and fat tadpoles. It was burying peas in newly thawed ground, cold earth lodging under my fingernails. It was a carpet of white trilliums rolled out through the woods, ghostly on dusk walks, punctuated by occasional red ones, foul-smelling if you leaned too close. As spring grew into summer, we’d spend afternoons picking strawberries at the farm up the road, the sun hot on our backs.

Summer was for frog and grasshopper catching. It was fields filled with bright flowers. It was black raspberry picking, thorns sharp as they caught on purple-stained fingers, and fruit bright on my tongue. It was lying on soft-prickly grass and sunning on big, sun-heated stones like some warm-blooded lizard. For years when I was small we’d head northeast, following the Saint Lawrence all the way to Gaspe, right as summer started to fade into fall. I’d spend hours picking wild blueberries, running through un-mown fields and bushwacking my way through the woods to marvel at ancient, twisting crabapple trees. I’d walk along the beach, mesmerized by crashing waves, and sometimes seals would swim close to the shore, watching us with the same curiosity with which we’d watch them.

Autumn was leaves shading into yellow and orange, red and purple, and crunching most satisfyingly underfoot. It was ponds stilling and reeds browning, the scent of decomposition in chilled noses. It was carefully deliberating over the selection of decorative gourds at the farmstand, fingers tracing stripes and ridges. It was the excitement of halloween, clamoring over prickly straw bales, and trying to catch the first flakes of snow on our tongues.

Winter was chilled faces and sparkling fresh snow, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in the strangely quiet, creaking woods under the muffling blanket of a heavy snowfall. It was the bright red flash of cardinals against a white backdrop, tottering out in ice skates onto a frozen pond or rink, or sliding carefully along in boots, arms outstretched for balance. It was winter festivals and toes too long in the cold, bright pain burning as they thawed out near a warm fire, or merely the car heating vents.

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Kids who don’t go to school do not have a monopoly on outdoor exploration or seasonal traditions, not by any means. But what I want to highlight is the flexibility life learning provides in allowing families to choose where and how they spend all the hours of their days, instead of only being left with a handful of evenings and weekends to do with as they wish. I want to celebrate the way that seasons can take precedence over a school calendar in structuring life, how nature can be the primary force that shapes your days, instead of a schedule set up with the best interests of an institution in mind, not the best interest of children.

When you’re not in school, you simply have time. Time to be outside, time to lie in the grass, time to organize last-minute group hikes, time to stay up late watching bats, time to go on a trip when other kids are in school. Not going to school doesn't necessarily mean you’ll spend more time in nature. But it means that you have the time--boundless, limitless time--to do so.

When Learning is Like Breathing: On Awareness and Evaluation

One of the biggest revelations offered by people who live outside of schools and enforced curriculum is just how effortless, how ever-present, how natural learning can be. People sometimes ask me how I learned a specific thing, growing up, and I often have trouble answering. Both because, by now, my childhood was quite a while ago and my memories aren’t as clear, and also because, when you’re not using a curriculum, the exact mechanics of how learning happens are not always so easy to track.

This is definitely the case when it comes to writing. The short answer is that I just… started doing it, and got better over times as I gained more skill and experience.

Sometimes learning is as natural as breathing, and like breathing, when you become too aware of it, too conscious of lungs expanding and expelling, you can throw it off, start breathing too fast or unevenly, a natural process made complicated through hyperawareness. 

An author who was writing about self-directed learning once offered to pay me to document how I learned a new skill. At first, I agreed, but I quickly found that the act of scrutinizing the process irrevocably changed it, made it into something stilted and self-conscious. Even my own gaze could be turned into something that felt like evaluation, could be made somehow external and detached from self.

There’s a difference between that type of assessment and picking part of the process to offer for critique and observation. It’s a part of life to take a specific result--an essay or piece of art or demonstration--and present it to others for evaluation of some kind, and I have done that willingly, even cheerfully, many times over. It is not the same as intently watching and cataloguing each step, asking over and over is that learning? What about that? And, even worse, finding yourself judging which parts aren’t learning. To internalize that evaluative gaze is to self-police, to place yourself on a narrow track and administer scoldings when you stray too far into the bushes.

I think it’s important, for individual learners and those journeying with them, not to get too caught up in the details of what’s happening right now, if you can help it. It’s one of these things that forms a more complete picture only when looking backwards, when you can see how the different pieces of the landscape came together--a mountain dropping to valley below, that collection of happy little trees--to complete the whole.

I learned to write because I had something to say. Before I was capable of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard myself, I dictated to my mother, a child’s stories and thoughts laid out neatly in her clear print. Once I could read myself, writing seemed like a natural extension, and my stories and thoughts started to sprawl out far less neatly in scattered notebooks, and soon in Word documents and blogs. I did not consider whether I was writing at “grade level,” I was not compelled to write about what other people thought I should be turning my thoughts towards. I was not entirely free of what Carol Black refers to as “the evaluative gaze of school,” since as she further notes about parents who take their children out of school, “to their grief they may find that the gaze is inside them, and gets to their children through their eyes.” It is, I think, impossible to fully escape it. But I was cushioned from it. Protected, for the most part.

Learning can be as natural as breathing. But a gaze bent on recording and analysing learning, whether it comes from outside of us or is our own gaze turned inwards, has a weight to it, a heaviness that drags everything into its orbit, turns life into something that seemingly can’t function without scrutiny. If we want learning to happen as it should, to be a process owned wholly by the learner, then we must become aware of the evaluative gaze, and put our foot down, raise a shield: on this, you cannot gaze.

Unschoolers Aren't Products

Every now and then, someone talks about what type of people unschooling “produces.” They want to know about the products at the end of the line.

I flinch, a little, when I see that. I know the phrasing isn’t intentionally bad. Usually, people are genuinely curious and not in any way trying to be offensive.

But the thing is, I’m not a product.

Unschooling does not produce products, or even results. Life produces people, and all of our experiences, including education, shape us into who we are.

Sometimes I see unschooling being described as mere trickery. It’s a way to convince children to learn. You just sneak lessons into everyday activities, you see! With a wink and a nudge, one adult to another, they tell you that unschooling is just about making kids learn important things without the kids realizing what’s happening.

Thankfully, these erroneous definitions of unschooling generally come from people who are not, themselves, unschoolers. But they certainly leave me shaking my head in frustration and disappointment, to know that some people see trust and respect children as a mere euphemism for manipulate them into doing what you want them to, but in such a way that they can’t even tell they’re being manipulated.

I think that these two ideas go together: the belief in controlling children, and the idea that it’s possible to mold children into exactly the person someone else wants them to be. If you believe that, I suppose it’s natural to think that unschooling can have predictable results, can reliably create a certain type of product.

In an excellent, concise article on the topic of life learning success, Wendy Priesnitz had this to say:

“In our family, the foundations of life learning and parenting (which were interwoven) were respect and trust. And we didn’t raise our daughters with respect and trust because we had an idea about how we wanted them to turn out. In fact, I think having that sort of agenda would be counterproductive to trust and respect. We did it because treating them like we would any other human being was the right thing to do.”

What a relief that sentiment is, to me, seeing it laid out like that. I want children to be treated with trust and respect because I, too, believe it’s the right thing to do. While I offer my experiences, my writing, in the hopes it can contribute to more children being trusted and respected, doing so also opens up my life to a lot of outside scrutiny. “What do you do now? Can you support yourself? How is your social life? Did you ever go to college?”

I have, with my own actions and invitation, opened myself up to that, and I do not resent the people who ask such questions (as long as it’s done respectfully, and in the appropriate times and places). But at the same time, it feels like an immense weight, people hanging all these judgments on the experience of a single person, where my words can tilt people in one direction or another.

We are, each of us, made up of many things. Shaped by our genetics and the people who raise us, by where we live, what we like, who we make friends with, and where we spend our days. Unschooling undoubtedly has an impact on those who are raised with this philosophy, but it is just one part of a whole... and it’s also a way of approaching education that takes as many different forms as there are people living it.

It’s important to listen to grown unschoolers, I think. More than our parents, even, we have firsthand knowledge of what unschooling is like, what worked and did not in our own unique lives. Yet each of us, as individuals, is just that: a unique individual. Meeting an unschooler and hearing about how they lived and learned says more about them than it does about unschooling as a whole. It is neither rational nor fair to view individuals as products of unschooling, or to use us as the guidepost for whether you should really trust and respect children.

Children deserve trust and respect regardless of anything else. Regardless of perceived “results,” regardless of expectations met or not met.

Treat children well, today and every day, because of the inherent worth in all of us, because it’s the right thing to do. Everything else will work out as it will.