The Philosophies: Unschooling

There are a bunch of different philosophies regarding homeschooling. Obviously. Or as L has taken to saying (to my chagrin), "Duh." (A lovely little gift from a friend's school class.) I would describe what we're doing as eclectic, which really means in our case, "We haven't got the faintest idea." But really, the options are so varied, and in some cases so contradictory, that it's difficult to decide which direction to go in.

So I'm going to try writing about some of these different ideas, more for my own edification, really, over the next weeks. I'll start with one I've been reading a lot about recently.

Unschooling is a lovely idea. One of its major proponents, John Holt, was a school teacher-turned-educational-reformist who eventually decided that the educational system was unreformable. He decided that schooling as we define it was totally unnecessary, and that children could teach themselves and what parents should do is act as guides and facilitators, helping kids get the information they need to answer the questions they naturally have. Of course, it's a lot more complicated that and someone who is into unschooling would probably be horrified at my thumbnail, so check out the link above if you want more information on this. I totally am infatuated with this idea. I wish I could do it. But I just can't. I guess I don't have the faith that if, totally left to her own inititative, L is going to want to learn to read rather than have me read to her. Or that she's going to be interested in Algebra. Or want to learn to write in a way that's legible to other people. But maybe I just don't get it.

I've been reading this book, "And The Skylark Sings With Me", about a real life unschooling family where the daughters get obsessed with things like astronomy (and learn trigonometry) and wild life studies (and learn about genetics and probability theories), and opera, etc. etc. The kids sound amazing, yes they do, but so far away from my L & T, and me. Do I want to spend 2 hours in the supermarket giving a seminar on pesticides on produce and the different forms of credit available for payment and the meaning of the nutritional information on the packages? Because that's what this dad's been doing for his daughters, at the ages of something like 7 or 8. No wonder they're prodigies! I'm way too lazy to do that. And frankly, I think if I followed L's interests at the moment, we'd be spending a lot of time learning about what Dora does. Because this is what I don't get. What if your kid isn't interested in much? Not every kid is excited by classical music and the genetics of cross breeding corn snakes and telescopes, although I wish mine were.

Maybe I should do an experiment and just not do ANY schooling for the next month and just ask L every morning what she wants to do. I wonder what we'd end up doing? Maybe I'm underestimating my child. It's sort of like Communism, though. I suspect that the philosophy is much more appealing than the practice.