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What to expect when unschooling
by Beverley Paine, July 2023
Unschooling is exactly that - the un says everything.
You don't do schooling. You actively avoid everything schooly about education, in particular the coercive elements that we've been trained to believe are a part of learning and education, and some of those are subtle and hard to recognise at first.
Which is why unschoolers go on and on about de-schooling - learning how to think about learning and education in freedom, away from the shoulds and have tos that dogged our childhoods.
So how long each day do you unschool? All day, all night.
What do the kids learn, how and when. Everything, all day, all night, in whatever way works best for them.
Expect lots of mistakes, experimentation, investigations and explorations that get dropped mid-way.
Expect lots of conversations, weird and interesting and mundane and repetitive questions.
Expect bursts of energy and periods of moderate to intense boredom.
Expect to want to direct and feed and strew information and opportunities and activities in front of your child to nurture and growing their learning and thinking skills and expect most of it to be rejected.
Expect times of abundant activity and energy, pursuit of topics and interests that can flare intensely for moments or hours or weeks or years, and expect bumbling along doing whatever not really getting deeply involved in anything, a kind of general low key life.
Expect to get really worried your child doesn't have particular interests or hobbies, and expect to get exhausted by their passionate pursuit of whatever is grabbing them now.
It can be super hard to get used to not being in control of the direction, content and purpose of your child's learning, of stepping back and letting them do all that, while you offer whatever support and encouragement you can muster and afford (and I mean that in a non-financial sense - the emotional and intellectual effort of being an unschooling parent can be draining unless you practice appropriate and adequate self-care).
A lot of people confuse unschooling and homeschooling. If you still want to be in control of the direction, content and purpose of your child's education, you're probably thinking about homeschooling. Homeschooling is super cool too, well worth doing.
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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.
Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.
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Welcome to the World of Home Education
and Learning without School!
We began educating our children in 1985, when our eldest was five. In truth, we had helped them learn what they need to learn since they were born. I am a passionate advocate of allowing children to learn unhindered by unnecessary stress and competition, meeting developmental needs in ways that suit their individual learning styles and preferences. Ours was a homeschooling, unschooling and natural learning family! There are hundreds of articles on this site to help you build confidence as a home educating family. We hope that your home educating adventure is as satisfying as ours was! Beverley Paine
The information on this website is of a general nature only and is not intended as personal or professional advice. This site merges and incorporates 'Homeschool Australia' and 'Unschool Australia'.
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