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Unschooling: Letting kids teach themselves

©iStockphoto.com / Ana Abejon

At nine o'clock on a Monday morning, while most other children are beginning their week of school, ten-year-old Belinda Taylor and her eight-year-old brother, James, are sitting in the living room at their home in Vancouver, Canada. Belinda is making a scrapbook about dinosaurs and James is making a model aeroplane out of ice lolly sticks. Their parents, Todd and Mary Taylor, know their children are not at school. In fact, they deliberately keep them at home in order to follow a style of relaxed, child-directed home schooling, known as 'unschooling'.

Unschooling is an unconventional learning method, but it is becoming more and more popular around the world. Unlike conventional schooling, unschooling does not follow a curriculum or fixed lesson plans. Instead, the children are allowed to choose how, when, why and what they learn, based upon what interests them. This is because the philosophy of the method is that children are naturally curious and will seek out the information they want to learn for themselves.

As with many other followers of unschooling, the Taylors think that formal education, either in schools or at home, stifles children's creativity and curiosity by telling them what they need to learn and how to learn it. They believe that if children are allowed to direct their own education, they will be more interested in learning. 'You have to trust the kids,' said Todd. 'You can't force them to learn. They will find out what they need to know when they need to know it, but it must come from within.'

This does not mean that Todd and Mary are not involved in their children's education, but rather than taking the role of teachers, they prefer to act as guides. 'We still give them guidance and advice, and help them to set and achieve their goals — we just don't tell them what those goals are,' explained Mary. 'A single child can't learn everything there is to know,' added Todd. 'So, we simply provide our children with a wide range of learning resources and support, and let them discover for themselves what is truly important to them.'

Some people worry that unschooled children may take advantage of this lack of structure and end up doing nothing all day, or that they will concentrate on things they are good at and ignore their weaknesses. 'If the child can choose what to learn about, he or she may end up knowing an awful lot about basketball, but nothing at all about mathematics,' said Nigel Foster, an educational psychologist. 'I think it's possible for parents to provide structure and supervision and still keep things interesting and relevant to children.'

However, many families that unschool feel that the traditional methods do not cater to students' individual differences. Advanced learners may get bored waiting for classmates to catch up, and slower learners could fall behind because they do not receive enough attention from their teachers. This is not an issue with unschooling as children are treated as responsible individuals who can work at their own pace, moving on whenever they feel ready.

In addition, individual students have different interests. 'If you try to teach a child something they're not interested in, you'll teach them nothing,' said Tessa Conway, who lives in Toronto and has been unschooling her seventeen-year-old son, Jack, for a year. Jack agrees with his mother. 'If I don't like a topic, I can skim through it quickly and focus on things that are more interesting and useful to me. I've learnt more in the last year than I ever did in school,' he said. 'Also, I don't have to worry about things like bullying, peer pressure, being scolded by strict teachers or exam stress. It's a cool way to learn.'

While unschooling is not for everyone, there are certainly advantages to this unusual method. 'Unschooling is about treating children with respect, trusting them to want to learn about the world they live in and helping them to achieve that,' said Todd Taylor. 'What other schooling provides that kind of education?'

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