Unschooling is an approach to home education based on
- learning through living rather than through the conventions of school
- parents partnering with their children rather than re-creating "school at home"
- children following their interests and curiosity, with help and resources from supportive parents
What is unschooling?
If you can't figure out what the term "unschooling" means, don't feel alone. Defining, recognizing and naming unschooling can lead to disagreements even among people who have been homeschooling or unschooling for years. Originally, to "unschool" meant "not sending your kid to school."
It's become more specific than that now, and it's commonly known as a "homeschooling style" or an approach to homeschooling that generally means learning without prescribed lessons, textbooks, or the school-like methods many other homeschoolers use.
People suggest these other terms for unschooling:
- self-directed education
- delight-directed learning
- autodidactic education
- natural learning
- life learning
- interest-led learning
- child-led learning
Although unschooling is sometimes called child-led learning, some people don't see it that way since it works best with a highly engaged parent, who provides valuable guidance, experience, and resources. Yet, compared to learning prescribed by a school curriculum and taught by a teacher, unschooling certainly is more child-centered.
How do I start unschooling?
If you have been homeschooling by requiring your children to complete traditional curriculum, the transition to unschooling may feel unsettling.
As with all homeschooling, you'll need to know your state's laws and plan ahead for any annual proof of progress your state may require.
Here are some steps to take to help you and your family start and adjust to unschooling:
- Make changes a little at a time. There is no need to pull the rug out from under your kids and remove all more formal or more curriculum-oriented homeschooling at one time. Make a small change and give the family time to adjust. Then make another small change, and so on.
- Listen to resistance. Consider making a change first in an area where your child resists the current homeschooling approach. For example, if you have a child who hates their science textbook, begin introducing opportunities to learn about science in more integrated ways, such as by identifying birds at the feeder during breakfast, doing experiments, or watching good documentaries together and discussing them.
- Note what engages your child and do more of that. As parents, we are typically quick to classify some activities as "academic," but many activities that engage kids can become academic over time. Does your child love horses, dogs, pottery, skateboarding, building things, watching international soccer, or something else? Provide time and space for your child to engage further and with your support. Learning about any of these things can involve reading, research, and interdisciplinary learning your child may gravitate toward in the future.
- Consider emotional context. Even if each of your child's interests does not lead to what you would consider obvious academic benefits, remember that your child is learning to feel engagement, focus, and contentment while they are pursuing interests in a peaceful environment. Having that feeling in their bodies and minds means having the opportunity to recognize the goodness of that feeling. Learning can flourish in a positive emotional context.
- Continue your own process of parental deschooling. Read our five-part series that will help you challenge your notions about what education at home must look like. While exploring deschooling is important for all parents who want to home educate, it's essential for those who want to unschool. And yes, there is a difference between unschooling and deschooling!
Is there unschooling curriculum?
Unschooling, by its nature, cannot lean on a pre-made curriculum meant for "any kid" or "all kids." That's because unschooling is based on facilitating the interests of individual children and supporting their autonomy in learning.
An unschooling curriculum is, then, a bit of an oxymoron.
Once we parents—or curricula we purchase—start prescribing what to learn in the way that a formal curriculum does, we will have left unschooling behind. We might be homeschooling effectively, but we aren't using an unschooling approach to homeschooling.
There are some nuances here.
Let's say you have a child who wants to learn Spanish. You as a parent might provide multiple resources to help your child learn Spanish. One resource you share as a possible resource might be a Spanish curriculum that your child tries out and decides to work through because they like how the curriculum helps them learn.
This is not an "unschooling curriculum" at all, but it is a curriculum, and it is being used in the context of unschooling. Because the child is unschooling, they might use the curriculum in less formal ways than a school student or a traditional homeschooler.
They use the curriculum by choice and might abandon it or take big breaks to use other resources when the curriculum is not useful for them. They might mix in speaking Spanish with a friend or tutor or using an app to learn vocabulary.
Teens, in particular, may want to take classes or use curriculum to further their interest in a subject or help them meet a goal. But use of curriculum early in the transition to unschooling can make it more difficult for families to adjust.
When we're requiring a curriculum, we may miss other and more valuable ways of learning as well as other things to learn because they aren't in a curriculum! And besides, there are lots of ways to homeschool without curriculum.
Beware curriculum companies that encourage you to use their curriculum as part of unschooling. This is disingenuous.
Combining parent-required homeschool curriculum with some interest-led homeschooling might be the best learning approach for your family, and it might mean you have been influenced by what you learned while exploring unschooling.
But this combination is not unschooling, and your family's homeschool approach will be different from families who embrace unschooling across the board.
Unschooling is not un-everything. Unschooling that works well includes a parent with time and commitment to provide resources and experiences to help a child follow interests and have exposure to new interests. Unschooling parents spend a lot of time with their children.
They're not teaching didactic, pre-planned lessons, but they are enjoying the wonder of the world with their kids, reading aloud, helping a child engage, supplying materials and opportunities, and providing loving guidance.
Unschooling parents emphasize partnering with their children and strewing the environment with resources kids might become interested in. They tend to avoid the automatic "no."
Teen wants to build a boat in the back yard?
Instead of thinking, "That's not practical or possible and would take time away from school," unschooling parents try to think about all a kid could learn from boat building and then provide support and resources for the project.
Unschooling parents typically don't overplay "learning moments," and they aren't concerned with disguising learning as fun in order to make it more palatable. They trust their children will learn what they need to know through lived experiences, their interests, and when or if the time and goal are right—self-motivated study.
Unschoolers may not use typical praise phrases and do not tend to use rewards-based learning, since research shows that external rewards can make people less motivated to learn independently.
Unschooling parents also help their kids with the tools they need to move forward, such as having homeschool transcripts and showing they can do college-level work if they want to go to college or need a transcript for employment.
Is unschooling legal?
Can learning without textbooks, classes, tests, trained teachers, and even curriculum or lesson plans possibly be legal?
Yes, absolutely! Unschooling is legal.
Homeschoolers of all stripes do away with many of the conventions of school. Unschoolers just take it further.
Home education laws in some states include specific requirements that unschoolers (like all homeschoolers) have to meet. These may include year-end testing, evaluation, or portfolios with specific examples of work. While these laws create hoops for unschoolers to jump, unschoolers in every state in the United States are able to comply with the laws.
If you're wondering how to do this, look for unschoolers where you live. Those who have been there can give you the information you need.
Remember, unschooled kids are still learning. Unschooled does not equal uneducated.
They aren't learning using the conventions of school, but they are still learning. Parents may have to recognize and present everyday activities as meeting "learning standards" in a few states, but it's legitimate.
A child who is reading a favorite book that's not in a curriculum is still reading.
A child who has written up a menu for a pretend restaurant is still writing.
A teen who has built her own computer is still doing tech.
A little child who recognizes mushrooms, pine cones, and a hawk on a nature walk is still being introduced to the life sciences.
How do unschoolers keep records?
Record keeping and unschooling may seem to be in tension with each other, but our free Unschooling Record Keeper can help with that.
The tension boils down to:
- How to support learning while prioritizing your learners’ autonomy
- How to document learning in order to:
- Meet homeschooling requirements, if any, where you live
- Prepare to create high school transcripts, which EVERY homeschooling/unschooling grad should have
Often, keeping records feels connected to completing formal lessons or emphasizing teaching over learning. Keeping records can feel contrary to unschooling, but it doesn’t have to be.
And sometimes, keeping school-type records can exert subtle or strong pressure on parents to reach for prepared curriculum, which has daily or weekly lessons that are easy to enter into records.
We understand that feeling!
But you can stick with unschooling and keep records if you use our record keeping approach.
Here are some tips for record keeping while unschooling:
- Make note-taking part of your routine. We suggest you pick a regular time and day of the week to complete notes on the forms we provide. You can always add brief notes at any other time, but the weekly “date” helps establish the habit.
- Try a few forms of record keeping. For unschoolers, we provide a Weekly Unschooling Record, an Activity Record, and a Portfolio Checklist. You may find your notes overlap across the various possible forms. You may gravitate toward one form or the other as time passes, or you may find writing notes on each of the different forms encourages you to remember and notice more.
- Use quiet observation. Peek in at your kids from the other room to see what book they are reading, what narrative they have developed for their Lego guys, or how they have sorted their toys by color or size. Watch your child work out a challenge with their robotics team; listen to piano practice or Spanish pronunciation from the other room.
- Use inquiry-based observation. Whether you ask younger kids questions about pine cones or older ones about the Middle East, you will gather information about the level of their knowledge from their responses.
- Keep a list of who, what, when, where, why & how. Keep track of resources such as books, field trips, mentors, tutors, activities, documentaries. Keep track of activities, experiments, projects, and original work.
- Use technology. Photos, audio, and video are tools for documentation. For example, a short video of your child reading at the beginning of the year and months later may demonstrate improvement, and you can record the video casually.
- Keep it relaxed. Becoming overly focused on your need to describe learning in writing can change your interaction with your kids or cause you to slip into prescribing learning. Remember to center the your child rather than centering observation and note-taking.
We also include general homeschool record keeping forms in our Unschooling Record Keeper because unschoolers do have to comply with their state homeschooling laws.
If your state requires annual progress reports or testing, check with established unschoolers in your state to learn how they demonstrate their kids' academic progress. Many unschooled kids do well on standardized tests, and in some states, you can meet with evaluators who understand unschooling well.
Is unschooling effective?
Unschooling is effective partly because the approach allows parents to respect the developmental readiness of the child. There is no pressure for children to do things on an artificial timetable that sorts children and specific skills into grade levels.
Science and psychology both tell us that children develop within wide ranges of "normal," and unschooling allows parents to take that into consideration. Children don't have to be pressured, shamed, or remediated when they are later readers or writers.
That said, responsible unschooling parents will look for help when help is needed. For example, a child who can't read may need glasses!
Can unschoolers go to college?
Like other homeschoolers, unschoolers can and do graduate from college, start businesses, get jobs, live creative lives, and become independent adults. Some unschoolers take nontraditional learning paths right through their teen years and into adulthood; others begin taking community college classes as teens, or they work with mentors.
UnschoolingMom2Mom has a great collection of resources about grown unschoolers and what they're doing.
Unschooled teens have different backgrounds, different abilities and interests, and different aspirations—just like teens who go to school. Everyone has a different journey in mind, and mileage may vary! There is a lot of variety in how unschoolers turn out.
What does unschooling look like?
The Class Dismissed movie paints a fairly realistic picture of how and why people arrive at unschooling and what it looks like. Over at UnschoolingMom2Mom, you can track down stories of typical unschooling days.
It's true that there are some "school things" that homeschoolers and unschoolers don't have to do. That said, just not doing school things doesn't mean a parent is being a responsible unschooling parent.
Unschooling does not mean:
- Complete freedom/anything goes
- Not helping children learn what they need to know
- Unparenting or lack of guidance and supervision
- Doing nothing
- Neglect of medical or mental health needs
- Homeschooling, but not doing it well, so calling it "unschooling" or "sorta unschooling"
- Not having a schedule
Sure, unschoolers may enjoy not having a schedule, and that can be part of unschooling. Unschoolers certainly don't have to use "school hours" any more than other homeschoolers do, but avoiding schedules is not necessary to unschooling. Families whose kids enjoy dance or art lessons or soccer or visiting with friends or even regular afternoon tea may have a busy schedule that includes keeping a calendar to keep it all straight.
When parents extend their non-coercive approach past academics and into parenting and family life, some people call the practice radical unschooling.
What are some unschooling resources?
Unschooling podcasts
- UnschoolingMom2Mom with Sue Patterson
- Off-Trail Learning with Blake Boles
- Life without School by Stark Raving Dad aka Issy Butson
- The Unschooling Life with Amy Childs
Unschooling websites and social media
- UnschoolingMom2Mom
- StarkRavingDad
- Free Range Learning Facebook page
- Life Learning Magazine
- Growing Without Schooling with John Holt
- Growing Without Schooling with Patrick Farenga
- Just Add Light and Stir
Unschooling books
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