American educator John Holt began the “unschooling” movement by coining the term for his philosophy of education in the 1970s. He believed that traditional education didn’t do children justice, and that the methods of teaching and especially grading in the modern school system weren’t providing maximum educational opportunities for children. While he believed that children were best educated at home, he warned that using an inferior method at home would be as bad as traditional schooling. Holt also believed that children shouldn’t be forced to learn, but should learn as they chose to do so.
Some believe that unschooling is merely lack of a formal structure for education, or anything different than the education received in traditional schools. While unschooling has become a common term for this, for most it refers to a specific method of homeschooling that would have been endorsed by Holt, also sometimes called the natural learning method. Parents allow the child to explore and learn how he or she wants, at his or her own pace. Parents can join in the discovery, but aren’t supposed to lead the child into any particular subject or activity unless the child wants to do it.
A main principle of unschooling is that experience teaches everything, not instruction. So an activity is always preferred over explanations. Even fun activities, though, like games that teach as the child plays, aren’t included unless the child wants to do it.
There is no requirement or even a goal as far as how much a child should learn and understand by a certain age, or within a certain time. No textbooks are seen as necessary, and in fact shouldn’t even be used unless the child wants to read them. The parent really has no authority over what the child will learn—the child basically chooses his or her own eduction by discovering interests and wanting to learn more about them. Grades and grade level don’t figure into unschooling, because there are no set things a child needs to have learned by a certain age.
As you can guess, critics of this method cite complete lack of structure and educational goals as its downfalls. Children aren’t pushed to learn or challenge themselves, and some won’t take an interest to do so on their own. Children aren’t expected to learn to read by any certain age, for instance. It’s believed that this method of teaching doesn’t adequately prepare children for the real world where there are expectations made of them. One of the draws of unschooling, though, is that lack of structure, the spontaneity involved because whenever the child wants to learn, the child learns, and the child’s ability to learn and develop at his or her own pace.
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