Unschooling 101

By Bridget Bentz Sizer

Colleen Paeffs 15-year-old son Jerry is a lot like other teenagers: he loves animation and video
games and spends hours on end talking to friends over the computer or playing with Nintendo
DS. But unlike other kids, Jerry doesnt have to wait until school lets out for playtime to begin.
Thats because Jerry hasnt been enrolled in school since 2007, when Paeff began to unschool
him.
Inspired by the teachings of John Holt (19231985), unschooling is a branch of homeschooling
that promotes nonstructured, child-led learning. Theres no set curriculum or schedule. If Jerry
wants to spend the day sleeping or playing video games or building catapults in the front yard,
thats okay. Actually, its better than okay, its greatso long as Jerry is happy and engaged. As
Paeff explains it, learning is not the main objective [of unschooling], it just happens as a side
effect of living your life with passion and exploring our interests.
Unschooling advocate Sandra Dodd describes a typical unschool day as the best ever
Saturday the day people dream about when they are stuck in school. Dodd, the mother of
three grown unschooled children, says that she never doubted that her children would learn
math and language and storytellingeven though they were never formally taught them.
Thats because she has complete faith in natural learning. You can only learn things that you
are interested in, she explains. My best definition of unschooling is creating and maintaining
an environment in which natural learning can flourish.
It may sound simple, but unschooling is hard for people to wrap their heads aroundespecially
since it sometimes looks like not much is happening. Is a kid playing video games or watching
TV all day long really learning? Unschoolers say yes. Kids can learn in a whole different way
than kids in a school atmosphere, says Helen Hegener, the editor and publisher of Home
Education Magazine and the mother of five adult unschooled children. But Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.,
the President of the National Home Education Research Institute, is more skeptical, suggesting
that more unschoolers rely on reading worksheets than will admit it: Parents can say they are
unschoolers, but every parent wants to see their child read and write.
Dodd insists that forcing a worksheet on a child in the name of reading isnt unschooling. Thats
like saying natural learning is not a guarantee, she says. Instead, unschoolers say, a child may
learn to read on his own, as a by-product of his attempts to decode a word spelled out between
parents or the instructions for a video game. The basics of math can come together by counting
the coins of an allowance, while geometry can be learned in a woodshop, with a hammer and
saw. And as for trigonometry or calculus, well, maybe they arent necessary. After all,
unschoolers argue, how many of us encounter quadratic equations on a regular basis?
For parents just starting to unschooland for kids who move from a traditional school into
unschoolingthe elimination of worksheets, tests and all the other structures of school requires
some mental adjustment, which unschoolers refer to as deschooling. Dodd estimates that it
takes one month of deschooling for every year a child has been in school.

Paeff says it took her and Jerry about two years to truly get into the unschooling groove. Still,
even after that deschooling period, Paeff says she still has moments when she feels like she
needs to teach her son something. It happened recently, when she was reading a book about
world religions. I thought, He needs to know about world religions, she remembers. But then
a friend countered: if Paeff was just learning about different religions at the age of 40, couldnt
her son discover them on his own time too?
Allowing a child to learn on their own time line and following the meandering interests of a
young mind are key to unschoolingas is trust. Parents need to trust the kids [that] they know
what theyre doing and they know how to do it, says Hegener. For her part, Dodd says that
raising children wellthat is, with a joyful, enthusiastic, respectful and open mindsetis a
guarantee that learning will become part of their being, as natural as breathing. Your kids are
as smart as you are, she says. They just arent as big as you are.