a collection of posts written back in 2004...

What does unschooling look like?
Unschooling looks differently in different families in the same way that life unfolds differently. In my family, there's lots of science experiments, language play and history discussions because of dh's and my backgrounds and interests. We play lots of rhyming and free association games, get into historical comparisons and stop to recognize refraction in raindrops. Well, chances are everyone recognizes rainbows—we just happen to call it refraction. Dh spontaneously comes up with cool experiments like the one using his $250 green laser pointer from work. Shine a white light through a prism and it breaks the light, refracts it into its constituent parts—a rainbow! Shine a green light through a prism and nothing to refract but green. Green light in; green light out. Nothing to break apart. Having a scientist in the house is pretty cool!

My 6 year old is relatively well-versed in history. She knows more about ancient history than I ever did until I learned it alongside her. She's fascinated by mythology of all sorts and is perfectly comfortable carrying on a conversation comparing Osiris, Hades and Pluto. She also loves to play Ages of Empire and Ages of Mythology and is just as likely to learn from extended play on those games as she is by watching a documentary on the History Channel. She loves American Colonial history, Liberty's Kids and Benjamin Franklin. Abraham Lincoln is her favorite president, she dislikes Bush because of his push for child testing during his State of the Union Address, and she watched the procession for Ronald Reagan's Lying in State. Because dh and I talk about these things and hold them interesting and important in our lives, so do the kids.

In another family, music or art might be prominent with children playing several instruments or recognizing and appreciating the work of different artists, the fine detail of brushstrokes or the use of color. My children are learning to appreciate nature and how to garden for food and wildlife. With young children unschooling looks like a natural extension of the parents' life because that's what it is. Unschooling parents involve children in their lives and their own learning, and the children naturally pick up from there and begin to explore their own avenues. Learning happens because people are genuinely interested and curious, not because someone has handed down an edict declaring a subject worthy and important for study at a particular age. People become interested and curious by living, by encountering interesting and curious things. Getting out in the world and bringing the world into your children's lives makes their lives and their learning rich, full and lasting.

But how do your kids learn? How do you know they’re learning?
Kids learn by living in the world, by asking questions and following their interests. They learn by being exposed to your interests and passions, by reading, by watching, by playing, by exploring. Once you embrace unschooling, learning is everywhere! It happens in the minutest detail of daily life as you fold laundry, make breakfast, feed the birds, grocery shop, weed the garden. Try to stop separating learning into categories, special times and privileged modes and you'll see it taking place in all that your child does.

I can only speak at this point for myself and my young children, but I see little difference between their learning and my own. We become curious, ask questions, pursue passions, focus intently, make connections. I know they do these things because I see them do it everyday. I'm an integral part of their lives as they are in mine. We have interesting conversations, go interesting places, watch movies and tv shows together, read books and use the internet. You don't have to pick a child's brain or probe it with useless questions whose answers you already know. Instead, live and laugh with your child, share their interests, their passions and their journeys. Soon, you won't need to ask whether they're learning. You'll know because you'll be learning too. You won't need to wonder if they're remembering because they'll remind you when you forget. You'll see it in their play, in the connections they make and in their observations. Live with them fully and you'll see the learning all around!

Do you have to unschool from the beginning?
I have it easy because I have been unschooling from the beginning, and I feel lucky for that. My kids' lack of schooling mentality is really helpful and has gone a long way towards knocking the school mentality out of dh and I. We might get worked up about something or begin to project in a schooly kind of fashion, but because the kids have not been indoctrinated, they just keep on about their business and end up showing us just how wrong we were to have been thinking that way. Our hang-ups remain exactly that—our hang-ups that ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with the kids or their learning.

But that in no way means that one can’t come to unschooling after years of traditional schooling—in the public system or at home. I have so much respect for people who have come to unschooling later in life and have persevered through the deschooling process. The faith and love they show for their children by undoing however many years of traditional thought and making the major paradigm shift to unschooling is tremendous and so very, very admirable. I think it's hard enough to deschool oneself, never mind having the faith to sit back and grant children the freedom and time they need to deschool. Folks who come to unschooling later should be applauded because they've overcome so much more than I have! The gift they've given their children is of no less value than the one I'm giving my children.

For me, I've had to deschool and am still trying to get dh to deschool, but my biggest leap of faith has been letting go of the whole reading milestone. That's made so much easier because I can see how much Emily's learning in so many other ways, which gives me the faith to know that she will read when she's ready. Plus, I don't see her being resistant to reading, just not interested right now. I think that's another big difference. Though I can see that trying to get her to practice for 3 weeks (a dubious "deal" she made with dh that I was left to enforce) inflicted enough damage to have cured me from ever interfering again! That was a huge wake-up call for me, and I feel bad that it happened at Emily's expense. But first children endure a certain amount of that, and I'm thankful it wasn't any worse!

How do you satisfy state requirements?
It can be difficult if you separate your life into subject categories on a daily basis—this is one of my beefs about reviewing with my county here in MD. Knowing that the review is looming around the corner, I feel those subject headings clogging my brain. To go from unschooling to reporting is a major translation process, translating everything we do just living into neat subjects, definable categories and measurable learning. I hate doing that, but I've been inside education for so long that it comes relatively easily once I sit down to do it. My hope it that people will draw inspiration, however direct or indirect, from my webpage for their own review process—maybe I can make the process easier for others.

I've been setting up my website so that academic categories are in place and I can just add stuff once in a while instead of looking at life in those terms everyday. My blog is just a daily log of our life—not really necessary, but something I wanted to do to play with the technology and keep up with all the stuff available online. Plus, I think it's a really useful tool to demonstrate what unschooling really looks and feels like in a way that my website doesn't do. There's a definite tension between living (what's presented in my blog) and translating (what's presented at my website)—making my life seem kinda schizophrenic. But I've tried to create something that's useful to me in multiple ways—I have records for my reviews, I have a place to point skeptical family members, and maybe I have a place that will help reassure those with young kids who are just beginning their unschooling journey. Maybe if I show how things translate, it will help others relax a bit and not feel that they have to worry about that everyday. I think it's useful to show unschooling with young kids since so many stories tend to be about older kids, and I think it will be neat to see how things evolve as the kids get older.

I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to set myself up as some kind of expert or definitive model, just creating a web-based artifact of our unschooling journey. I really believe that unschooling looks different for different families.This is what it looks like for us right now, which I'm sure will change dramatically as life goes on. The web offers an interesting and useful set of tools to document our journey. What I do see as really interesting are the ways in which my kids engage in all kinds of learning, some of which looks academic because they've never been turned off to it. They come to it all on their own because they are living rich and inquisitive lives in which they are free to pursue whatever they choose. They learn stuff in so many different ways instead of being limited to just one or two or put off from questions that are too advanced. That's what always amazes me—the richness and breadth of their experience without some academic puppeteer controlling and ordering the bits and pieces of information available to them.

But what if your kids want to watch TV/ play video games all day?
I used to be very limiting in this respect. In fact, we didn't have "tv" (reception of any kind) for about 10 years (the first 4 of my oldest's life). We have, however, had lots of videos, which made it easy to pop something in that had a definite beginning and end, you know? With a tv channel, there's always a next show and loads of commercials; there's no intrinsic reason to turn it off because it never ends. Maybe the videos early on instead of tv helped my children become self-limiting and turn off when they're done watching what ever they were interested in, I don't know. That's all off-hand speculation. What I do know is that they tend not to watch all day, show after show. Overall, I've really come to believe that the negative effects of control far outweigh positive intentions—in relation to just about anything, tv included.

We got cable about a year ago (2003), so we've had tv for a year, and I lifted limits about 9 months ago. But, for a long time before that the kids had free access to their video collection and could pop one in whenever they felt like it. So, it wasn't a huge shift, more like a gradual realization that there was this whole tv world out there. Some days my kids watch lots of tv; other days we never even turn it on because we're out and about all day. They're still far more apt to watch videos or dvd's than tv channels, though they like lots of shows. We spend many of our days outside, which makes a difference. The kids explore, play with the puppy, splash in the pond, feed the fish, climb on the climber, help in the garden, ride scooters, swing with neighbors, you name it. We also have lots of dress-up and imaginative stuff, which almost always draws their attention more than the tv. Games are really great for rainy/cold days, and we've been working on building our game collection. I think it's important that there are lots of other equally interesting things to do—tv really must be one choice among lots of others, not the only or the best choice.

Same thing with the computer. We have two kids' computers set up next to each other in the family room, and the kids have free access to them. As we started accumulating more games, they were playing lots more because the games were new and more interesting than other familiar stuff. Gradually, however, they stopped playing so much and haven't been on in a while. I did the same thing: I was playing Majesty every night after dinner for several weeks after we got it. I don't think I've played it in two or three months now.

I think most things go in spurts and tend to balance each other out when you look at life long-term. For several weeks we were playing board games nonstop. Then for several weeks, it seemed like the kids did nothing but legos. TV and videos are no different—they come and go. Plus, I figure if the kids are vegging in front of the tv, then they must need to do that for some reason. Maybe we've been on the go too much, and they just need some down time. Maybe they need a break from some different kind of learning they're doing. I think it's a myth that to learn or become proficient at something you must do it x number of hours every single day. Practice helps, certainly, but not without desire and passion to drive it. I'm a firm believer that the brain/ body need down time to sort through and categorize any kind of learning and that this down time is most often followed by an ability burst within that skill. That, of course, precludes the possibility that watching tv or playing video games are there own kinds of learning, which simply is untrue. Kids learn all kinds of things by watching and playing. Here's a link to some wonderful stories about all that learning!

Do unschooling parents share opinions and experiences with their children or is that too much like teaching?
In my mind, unschooling kids are living and learning in the world by experimenting and exploring and getting real feedback. If we take away that real feedback, it's kind of like hiding part of the data from a scientist while still expecting him to draw the same rational conclusions that require the whole set of data. I think withholding our genuine reactions is akin to kids only having access to a partial data set.

I believe withholding information based on our best experience and judgment and expecting kids to learn from others what they could have learned more gently with us is unnecessary and potentially cruel, quite frankly.

I don't see dealing with such scenarios as they naturally occur through life with our children as bearing any similarity to sitting down to create a lesson plan that covers such things.

There are a lot of really difficult things to learn from life that a parent *sharing* rationales without compliance or obedience being expected can prevent. I don't believe the best way to learn is without any input from others. Everyone is learning all the time—it's part of life. That doesn't mean that we're learning by ourselves. My kids don't learn in a vacuum. Neither do they learn from instruction. They learn from taking in the world around them and all the information living in the world provides, sifting it, sorting it, slotting it, forgetting it, remembering it, connecting it.

I am part of that information. I am one source, one form of information. My children have many varied and rich sources of information of which I am only one though I do many things in a day. I model. I share. I reason. I support. I facilitate. I interpret. I love. I nurture. I do lots of things, but teaching isn't one of them. My kids, however, learn lots of things from me every day in the same way I learn lots of things from them. I don't control what they learn; they do. I don't approach them with an agenda or lessons of any sort or test them to ensure that they have learned my chosen lessons. I don't teach. I am a valuable source of information for my children. That's a good thing. It's all good.

Judgment, as I use it, is reserved for serious issues—violence being one of them, but even that is a matter of prioritizing. I think killing is bad, but that doesn't mean that in every instance of killing I would judge that action equally for another person. If my child were about to kill an insect, I might gently offer an alternative but leave it at that. If my child were about to kill a cat, I would stop it. I don't eat meat; my family does on a regular basis and I enable that. I buy the meat, take it out of the freezer, marinate it, sometimes cook it. I don't extend my judgment of eating meat to them. Judgment is a serious, weighty thing that demands a serious, weighty context.

Judgment brought to bear upon what my children are watching on tv, reading, eating, wearing, thinking about is not useful (and even detrimental) in an Unschooling context; knowing how to live in the world and understanding cultural expectations is useful. Being able to discern when judgment might usefully be brought to bear is an important skill for an unschooling parent to cultivate, and careful, critical, introspective thinking to determine that answer for themselves is crucial.

For me, it is about finding balance between the extreme of judging everything my children do and never offering my judgment of a situation and the rationale behind it for fear that I might be coercive or authoritarian or teacherly. I think it's a matter of priorities and balance and respect.