Unschooling: A Beginner's Guide
What it is, and why it's less scary and more radical than you think
I’m committed to short, concise posts and you may have realised this is NOT my strong suit. So this post truly is a bare-bones look at unschooling for people who have no idea what unschooling is, or perhaps think it’s super out there and nothing they’d ever be caught doing.
Since there are quite a few new people here, I thought I would address the unschoolers in the room (me, and my kids), and explain what it is that we do.
What is unschooling? A very basic description.
There is no one definition of unschooling, which is very unhelpful. Educator John Holt, who coined the term, meant it to mean learning from life rather than school.
So in a basic sense, unschooling is recognising that learning happens all the time, and that every day, every place, every interaction, every activity has the potential for learning.
Unschooling recognises that learning is less like the filling of a cup, and more like the co-creation of meaning by the person doing the learning, as they interact with others, with knowledge, with experiences and with the world at large.
I say co-creation because learning doesn’t happen in a vaccuum, and while I have often said “She learned it by herself!” about something my child learned, in actual fact learning is hardly ever individualistic, and is almost always in relation to something, someone or some place.
Learning does not always require teaching, but it often requires relationship on some level. Unschooling, and some home education, recognises the crucial difference between these two things.
This is something humans have always known, and something that modern research bears out. It is not unique to unschooling, but the unschooling movement is possibly one of the only ones that has harnessed our understanding of how children learn, and facilitated a framework of autonomy for it to actually happen.
So to recap, unschooling is learning outside of school, in a multiplicity of ways, that are co-created, consent-based and chosen by the learner.
This last part is crucial: unschooling is by definition noncoercive and consent-based, which means that the living and the learning happen in a way that respects children and young people’s sovereignty, dignity and autonomy.
The issues with the term ‘unschooling’
The issue is that nobody can really agree on one single term, because the act of unschooling pre-dated John Holt, and has evolved in many ways since.
Many of us see unschooling as an extension of the way children have always learned before the institution of schooling was imposed on people. Even though John Holt coined the word, we recognise that children have always learned outside of school. He did not invent unschooling, so much as popularise it.
Unschooling continues to evolve. The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) recognises that unschooling falls under the wider umbrella of self-directed education, which is defined as “education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the learner, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education.” SDE can happen at home (aka unschooling) or in a self-directed setting or community.
Some unschoolers use the word in ways that not everybody really agrees with. It has become such an over-used, sensationalistic word that can be taken to mean a variety of things: from children left to do whatever they want with almost no adult support, to a pedagogy that is limited to interest-led learning but doesn’t seep into other areas of a child’s life, to “we’re unschooling but only only during the holidays” and everything in between. People are selling unschooling curriula, or promoting unschooling hacks, and people are unschooling their 2 year olds.
A portion of unschoolers focus on the learning part, and not so much on the consent and autonomy part. Other unschoolers put the emphasis on noncoercion, and remove learning as the aim of unschooling. Some focus deeply on personal autonomy and less on the partnership and mutuality aspect.
I do not particularly want to gate-keep or be the arbiter of what is more or less unschooly.
And I don’t blame anyone for being extremely confused about what unschooling even means anymore!
A lot of us have stopped using the word so much, perhaps opting for life without school, or lifelong learning, or something along those lines. I still use unschooling, but if I were to specify I suppose I would call us consent-based and self-directed.
This is what unschooling means TO ME.
I hope this can be a jumping point for anyone who is confused about what it is, and might want to explore further.
Unschooling is about seeing children as people
To me, this has meant deconstructing Western ideas around who children are, what childhood is and what children should be doing at any given time. In homeschool circles, we might call this deschooling. In academic or other circles, it might be called deconstructing or decolonising. But basically, it is about recognising the assumptions and narratives we have constructed about children, recognising the culture that birthed these assumptions, and pushing back on both.
Unschooling is rooted in consent
Unschooling is different to interest-led or child-led learning because it is rooted in consent-based-ness and noncoercion. As unschoolers, we commit to honouring our child’s autonomy and personhood, to acknowledging power imbalances, and to supporting our children in noncoercive and non-punitive ways.
For me, it is the added understanding of power, and of how imbalances of power are at the root of dynamics of oppression, coercion and domination, that makes unschooling what it is.
Understanding what consent-based education is and how it’s a core part of what I do, is crucial. You can read more about this in the book I’m sharing on here, or perhaps a shorter version right here.
Unschooling is living as if schooling (or school) did not exist
This is a longer post about this, but basically for me unschooling is not an educational method or philosophy - it is a way of life. It permeates everything we do, think, learn, experience, engage with. It is, however, about living as if the narratives and systems of schooling that permeate our culture, did not exist. Not in the sense of ignoring reality, but in the sense of recognising it, and then trusting myself and my child to build something different.
Unschooling requires us to trust our children, and ourselves, in a world that raises us to believe we should generally defer to experts and institutions, ignore our own instincts, and be wary of our ancestral wisdom.
Unschooling is about my child’s, my own, and every other person’s freedom
Akilah S. Richards speaks and writes about unschooling as anti-oppression work, and the ways we as parents use tools of oppression and somehow hope to raise people who are free. She defines unschooling as an approach to caregiving that is fundamentally liberatory and rooted in love and trust.
This echoes Audre Lorde’s essay about how we cannot dismantle power hierarchies and systems from within, by clawing our way up and then using the same exact tools that were used to build and maintain them in the first place.
Unschooling is necessary because it allows us to step outside of existing paradigms and systems of parenting and education, and actively divest from them. We need to find different ways to live in partnership with our children, ways that exist outside of the frameworks we were raised in.
Sarah Tyson, in the book We Grow the World Together, writes something that resonated with me deeply: “Even in one of the most asymmetrical relationships we encounter - the child and the caretaker - to choose one’s own freedom is to necessarily also choose freedom for the other.”
These words aren’t about unschooling, but they reflect what unschooling feels like to me: it’s a practice of choosing freedom over a bland idea of happiness. Freedom entails a degree of struggle, because as of right now, many of us are not free. And because freedom is a constant negotiation. It also, by definition, binds us together. My freedom ends where my child’s begins, and vice versa. This expands outwards to mean that every single person’s freedom is bound together in this way. We are obliged to struggle together, even if we were raised not to see this, even if we continue to pretend like this isn’t true.
Unschooling is living in partnership
I first heard this word from either Akilah S. Richards of Meghan Davies, I’m not quite sure anymore! And now I use it a lot because it’s perfect.
Unschooling is a partnership between all of us. This means we work together to make most decisions. I am not the foremost authority of what needs to be done and how. I do not get to make top-down decisions and I do not get to impose them. Nothing in our home is set in stone and non-negotiable. And, I do have a say in things as someone who has lived quite a few decades longer and whose role is to care for my children. My children and I are partners. It’s a work in progress, of course - the adult-child relationships can be complex at times, especially for those of us who were not raised in this way.
Yes, unschooling is also about learning
Learning enters the picture to the degree that I acknowledge that we are always living, always experiencing, and therefore always learning.
My version of unschooling sees all learning as valid. There is no hierarchy of learning, and there are no real boundaries between subjects. There is no one way to learn, and how much you know does not define you as a person. There are hundreds of ways for children to make meaning and gain skills, and no way is inherently better. Learning is not linear, and very often not visible.
That said, I also recognise that the world frames learning in very specific ways, and that some of those ways are helpful if my child wants to access certain experiences or activities. And so I sit in the rather uncomfortable place of not putting metrics above humanity, but also not pretending like the world we live doesn’t put more worth in certain things, that if my child wants to access certain institutions or professions they will need to jump through specific hoops.
Unschooling is healing
My own experience has been that living in this way has healed my children in some really big ways, and has also been healing for me.
This could be an entire post, but essentially unschooling allows us to step outside of the need for external validation for what we do and who we are, and this means we get to figure out who we ACTUALLY are and how we want to show up in the world, in a relatively low-pressure environment.
Unschooling is radical
Education and parenting are deeply political acts. I don’t believe there is any way you can engage with either one, and not be political - some people may think they’re doing this, but even a lack of politics is political!
Unschooling has radicalised me in ways that I’m not sure I would have been able to access otherwise. I don’t believe unschoolers are always, necessarily, radical. But unschooling absolutely CAN be, and for me, it’s really the only way to do it.
If we see unschooling as a direct critique of power imbalances and the hierarchical systems that resulted from these, then it also becomes part of an evolving understanding of the world, of who humans are and of how we might be able to live together.
Unschooling is reclaiming of the value of care and love under capitalism
We are so fortunate to be able to do this, and I never ever take it for granted.
And, it’s not without its struggles, but I wouldn’t call it a sacrifice because I don’t see carework as a sacrifice. I’m not denying it feels super tough at times, and is drastically undervalued by our society. But I refuse to call is a sacrifice because it is not inherently that: at its core, it is beautiful, essential and rooted in love. The reason it feels thankless at times is because of the systems we are having to care in. The reason it might feel like a sacrifice is because we are being forced to raise children under capitalism.
In some ways, unschooling is a profoundly anti-capitalist act. We reject that the only way to be worthy is to engage in work that capitalism recognises as valuable. We reject that our children be graded and measured and treated as economic outputs of a system that is designed to prepare them for the workplace.
In practice, what does this look like?
Unschooling isn’t real until you’re doing it. It is, above all, a practice.
This post is already pretty long, so keep your eyes peeled for an Unschooling In Practice post next week.
If you have any questions at all, pop them below! I’m so happy to answer them.
If you’re currently unschooling, and you feel like I missed something (which I probably did since there is SO MUCH), also comment below.
If there’s anything you’d like to see in my next post, let me know in comments.
Mom of an almost 3 year old and mentally preparing to have these conversations so I’m grateful to have found your voice!
Really liked this article, Fran! I would agree with this definition. <3