Why I Love Unschooling, Natural Learning or Whatever You Want to Call It

I have a confession. I am a closet unschooler, natural learner, delight led learner or whatever you may choose to call it. I have 100% faith that if I never forced my child to pick up a text book again they would still become productive, intelligent, happy adults. The ONLY reason I continue to "force educate" my children is because my ex-husband demands a quarterly progress report of the work they have accomplished.

Seriously, I believe that if left to learn what they want, when they want my children (and every other child) will learn what they need to know, when they need to know it and become productive citizens. When a child wants to or has a need to read or do math or cook or ...whatever, they will seek out a resource (person, book, movie, internet) and figure out how to do it. They will also learn the material quickly and easily. It is difficult to learn something when you are either mentally or emotionally not ready to learn it. Also, it is difficult to learn under duress. It is absurd to force feed a child, but our country force feeds education. Not everyone learns the same, not everyone needs the same skills or information. The entire education system is absurd.





In my gut I always knew that every human has a natural drive to learn and explore their world and things that interest them. My children learned to walk without me nagging them. They learned to talk without textbook lesson or forced, unwanted homework. Learning a language is an extremely complex process and most children master it before they are three years old. They learned to dress and tie their shoes, cook, do laundry and many other things when they had the need or desire to do them. I did not have to force them to WANT to learn. It came naturally. What makes us think that we can improve on that natural drive to learn and master our environment? In my opinion, this "forced learning" that is required of our children is harmful. It squashes that natural, God given drive.

My youngest son learned complex math completely on his own while studying nature and amazed me to already understand beyond most of what his first grade textbook taught. Also he regularly shared information in our nature studies that he had learned through his time spent observing nature. He often shared much more than our text had in it. (our nature text was "Nature Studies" by Anna Comstock, an amazing resource!)

My oldest struggled with his math text books and was told that he was terribly behind in his math skills but when he was training for his military career was able to confidently grasp the complex mathematical material presented and even tutored several of his classmates and now has a career that uses math on a regular basis.

My other two children have different learning styles and their strengths are more social and artistic. Most people do not consider those skills to be "educational". They have been able to organize a party, have a quality conversation with a child or senior citizen, nurse an ill person back to health and more at a young age. They are also avid learners but prefer to learn in spurts and in social settings rather than through long hours of quiet study and contemplation. My daughter did however attend high school as a senior so she could attend prom and other social events, even though serious study is not her strong point, she graduated with honors after being allowed to learn mostly in freedom her whole life.





OH, by the way, for those of you who feel that home educated children become social misfits, she was readily accepted by the "popular" and "unpopular" kids, she had regular dates, a very busy social calendar and even made the cheer leading squad. My son attended first and second grade only and has always had an easy time making friend with people of all ages, including his own age. My youngest boys also make friends with all ages easily. I have always received (and still do) compliments from adults commenting how impressed they are with my children at how comfortable and respectful they are and that they able and willing to look adults in the eye and carry a meaningful conversation.

I have loved to learn all of my life but hated school. School interfered with my learning. Seriously. I learned very little that has been useful at any point in my life (except to pass a test or class in school). Everything that I have learned I either taught myself or found people, books or other resources to teach me. I read for hours after school. School would make us memorize useless information that had no meaning in my life. (I am not against people having a broad knowledge base but am against the policy of forcing a person to memorize useless information to get money for numbers on a test) School would force us to get involved in a project and just as I was really enjoying it would tell us that we had to stop and move on to the next topic that we MUST learn. It was frustrating.

I loved studying nature. I took nature walks every day and was continually amazed at the changes that took place through all of the seasons. I loved to read, anything and everything. Some of my favorite books were encyclopedias and dictionary's. Amazingly my children love to spend much time lingering over these same books.

Actually, I hated school so much, and was a rebel, that I dropped out. I felt it was a waste of my time. I attempted to return to high school through adult education courses and found those to be an even bigger waste of my time. We had to spend a certain amount of time in the classroom. We turned our assignments in at the beginning of class and sat in a room with no instructor for an hour or so and were not given the next assignment until the end of class. I had babies at home with a crappy babysitter and I was sitting in a class with no teacher twiddling my thumbs! The material, other than civics/citizenship and finances was completely useless unless I intended on pursuing a career in one of those fields of study (such as science).





I do not regret dropping out. I did make better use of my time doing and learning other things. Well, the ONLY reasons I occasionally wish I had continued my schooling is that it brings credibility to a person. Unfortunately it is too easy for a "educated" person to blow me off as "just a mom" because I dropped out of high school and did not get a college degree. I did get my G.E.D. and was told that I could attend university with those high scores. Also, I cannot legally teach in the state of Michigan because I do not have a teacher certificate. I did not know I was a natural teacher when I was younger and would NEVER have chosen a teaching career so a college education would have been wasted and I would have had to go back anyway.

While on the topic of our country's educational system I have another complaint. Where in our society are we forced to spend 8 hours a day with people exactly our own age? It is unnatural. Where in our society are we forced to put up with bullying and teasing and extreme peer pressure to do what others do? Where are we forced to go exactly where we are told when we are told? To eat and go to bathroom only with permission? To move from place to place by the ringing of a bell? School and prison! and the military, but a person is not forced to be in the military.

This topic is bothering me right now because I am in the process of creating an educational resource/service adventure which will assist parents home school who feel they are inadequate teachers, don't have the time because they work or worry that their child will not get a good education outside of the standard American school system but know that system is not what is best for their child.

I hope to create a center that offers curriculum guidance and support, record keeping tools, will assist students and parents develop and attain their personal and educational goals, host and organize discussion groups for the students on topics of their choosing that is covered in the Grade Level Content Expectations developed by the Michigan Department of Education if they feel it is important, show parents that much of what our children do is real life learning and how to record it so it will count toward educational credit in Michigan, support and facilitate group projects and chat rooms, and host various other social and educational projects. I think I will call it REAL LIFE Educational Resource and Natural Learning Center. REAL stands for resources for education and leadership. LIFE stands for learning in freedom everyday.

Basically I hope to help others legally unschool their children and create an educational and social network of students and parents. My grown children had friends who were somewhere between unschooled and relaxed schooled and they had amazing conversations that really stretched what they knew and who they thought they were and encouraged one another to do things they never thought they would.

I loved observing the kids "jamming" and singing, while stopping to tell an extremely clever joke. Then later one would decide to make cookies (or bread or dinner or some other wonderfully delicious treat) and they would all help make it, and even clean up and somewhere in all this busyness the conversation would turn to some complex conversation about the laws of physics and if a certain law were different how would it affect another law. Maybe they would decide that they wanted to build a water fueled engine, or tweak a computer program or some other crazy idea. They were willing to try to do just about anything they could imagine to do. These kids had no fear of failing in a project. They knew that if whatever they tried didn't turn out the way they hoped they could walk away knowing something new or try again later. (thank GOD they never had any "big" explosions or serious fires LOL) They had no boundaries of where their minds and conversations could go. Anything was a possibility. They were dreamers and dreamed in reality. They were doers too and tried out many of those dreams.

I hope to find others who are willing to have this same confidence (or at least be willing to learn to) in their children and allow them to really LIVE life and LIVE learning. I hope that my younger children will be able to find a similar camaraderie that my older children had. I hope they can find fellow students in this life of natural learning to share in all the amazing adventures, jokes, projects, conversations and anything else their minds and spirits inspire them to explore.


I also hope to eventually be a part of a school modeled after Sudbury Valley School. If I have to I will eventually start one myself. You can learn more about this school model at http://www.sudval.org/ Be sure to check out the articles in the "about us" and "articles" section.