Unschooling came on a train of a whole bunch of other parenting choices, naturally and without a lot of fuss.
First, we chose to have our babies at home, using an un-hospitaling approach. Then I chose to breastfeed and we kept our babies in bed with us, leading to attachment parenting. I chose not to go back to work full-time and not to put my kids in daycare. Then we chose respectful parenting and discipline styles, influenced first by Magda Gerber and later by Faber/Mazlish.
Okay, so flash forward to Morganne at 4.5, technically ready for kindergarten. I'm suddenly supposed to hand her over to the public schools? Uh, no thanks. Well, then, I'm supposed to stop trusting her good sense of what is right for her and feed her a prepackaged curriculum? I don't think so.
Well, okay, we'll try unschooling and see what happens. Maybe we'll need to augment her chosen learning with some sneaky Mom-led learning. Hmmm. Let's see, at the end of kindergarten, she seems to have learned things way beyond the kindergarten curriculum. Most kindergartners aren't studying Spanish, anatomy and multiplication. Okay, we'll do it for first grade, too.
Golly, at the end of first grade, she's reading on a 6th grade level. What a great un-teacher I am. And she's also doing math at 3rd or 4th grade levels. Her vocabulary is enormous and her writing is progressing.
I'd better start worrying about geography, then. ;-)
I guess we did fall into unschooling, but it seems more that unschooling grew gradually out of our basic parenting philosophy.
In one of his books, John Holt says that the American educational philosophy starts with the belief that "Children are no damned good." (expletive his). The unschooling philosophy starts with a belief in the natural abilities of children to learn and grow.
I think that's why the religious wars on unschooling get so vehement. People insist that unschooling doesn't work, so I look at my children, see proof that it works very well and scratch my head at these other folks' lack of understanding. They look at their children, see evidence that children won't learn without coercion, and think I'm nuts. Our basic beliefs are diametrically opposed.
Copyright © 1996 by
Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.