Shockingly efficient

Julie Daniel owns a company that advises people on efficiency and productivity. I interviewed her and asked whether unschooling had seemed inefficient. Her husband works with her, and she quotes him:

When I first started to explore unschooling one of the things I found very exciting was how amazingly effective and efficient it is. My husband, James, says it is 'shockingly efficient'. There isn’t any of the wasted effort that goes along with trying to entice someone to pay attention to something that they don’t care about. We notice what Adam is interested in and we think about what else he might find interesting and we provide opportunities to explore those things.

Mostly when people think about being 'organised' they think about structure and predictability. For me the point of being organised is to achieve a particular objective. I actually really like that I don’t need to have a lot of structure to achieve the goals of exploring cool things, learning about the world and having fun. Of course some of the basic organisational skills that I have learned do come in handy, like knowing where to find things that I’ve saved and keeping track of our calendar so we know where to be and when. But in terms of Adam’s learning I don’t feel the need for structure and predictability because I can see how incredibly efficient his natural learning process is.

—Julie Daniel

The Efficiency of Unschooling (interview)
photo by Julie Daniel
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Competitive efficiency

One problem that comes up is efficiency. The idea of the glory of efficiency can be a problem. Because people get competitive, we’re all keeping track of how quickly we got into university and how soon we got out. Or how many minutes we take to get dinner on the table. “Oh, well, I can do that meal in 30 minutes!” “Well, I can do that meal in 20 minutes!”

Unschooling isn’t like that at all, even in the long term it’s not about the completion of a project at all. It’s about becoming the sort of people who see and appreciate and trust that learning can happen. And who can travel with children, not just drag them along or push them along, but who can travel with children along those interesting paths together not until you get there, but indefinitely.

And for beginning unschoolers that sounds also a little esoteric, a little foofy. And not solid. They want to know what do I do when the kids wake up in the morning? So, the beginning information is very often, “What do I do?” But the information that will get people from the beginning to the intermediate is why. Why do we do this?

SandraDodd.com/parentschange
photo by Colleen Prieto