Successful unschooling

Unschooling might not look like a big deal when people are thinking "School? Curriculum? Unschooling?"

School or a curriculum can be picked up or put down. Unschooling, to succeed, needs to be lived, as a family.

SandraDodd.com/yacht
photo by Holly Dodd (it's called "Reach")

Shakespeare

A mom named Leonie once wrote:

My then-six-year-old once, when we were chatting to a priest friend over coffee, gave a quote from Shakespeare. The priest said he was impressed by our homeschool curriculum and a six year old knowing Shakespeare. I said so was I, since we didn't have a curriculum, and I wondered how my son knew the quote. I asked. "From reading Asterix comics" was his answer!

SandraDodd.com/strew/shakespeare
photo by Sandra Dodd, of ironwork on a gate at Windsor Castle
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Little Tools for an Epic Life

If you want to unschool, there's no curriculum to buy and you and your children will be discovering the secret passages and magical destinations without a schedule or a map.

To help you prepare for or strengthen your own heroic adventure, there are three tools you need, and a checklist of seven nest-building items for you to collect and protect.

Equip yourself with:

confidence
experience
good examples

Build your nest with

food
patience
shelter
enthusiasm
love
curiosity
joy

That's the extracted end of a pro-conference article from the June 2012 issue of California HomeSchooler. The text of the full article is here: SandraDodd.com/hsc/littletools
photo by Sandra Dodd

The ABC's of Unschooling

Mary G. wrote in 2002:

When parents first stop using a curriculum, they sometimes feel as if they are left with a big hole in their family's day where the textbooks and worksheets used to be. They know there must be thousands of ways to live a day, a week, a life on their own terms and with the unique recipes of unschooling. But where to start? And what exactly does an unschooler do all day?

Obviously each family's answer will be different. In fact, each person's answer will be different. But there are some wonderful resources, ideas, tools and activities that many unschooling families have used together on their journey of unschooled learning. Here is MY family's version of the ABC's of Unschooling.

A: arts & crafts, animals, acrobatics, acting, alphabet magnets, art galleries, art classes, Anime, archery, allowance, A&E, Animal Planet, American Girl, Aerospace Museums

B: board games, books, books on tape, bike riding, baby-sitting, balloon animals, Brain Quest, basketball, baking, building, beading, braiding, bubbles, Boy Scouts, baseball, bird watching, bowling, blocks, building toys, bugs

(Read much more at the link below.)

The ABCs of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd

Tools and equipment

If you want to unschool, there's no curriculum to buy and you and your children will be discovering the secret passages and magical destinations without a schedule or a map.

To help you prepare for or strengthen your own heroic adventure, there are three tools you need, and a checklist of seven nest-building items for you to collect and protect.

Equip yourself with: confidence experience good examples Build your nest with food shelter love patience enthusiasm curiosity joy

SandraDodd.com/hsc/littletools
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Don't bother

Pam Sorooshian's description of a talk she plans to give:

Unschoolers don't bother with lesson plans, curriculum, assignments, tests, grades, workbooks, homework, or other academic requirements because we have discovered that children who grow up in a stimulating and enriched environment, surrounded by family and friends who are generally interested and interesting, will learn all kinds of things and repeatedly surprise us with what they know. If children are supported in following their own inclinations, they will build strengths upon strengths and excel in their own ways whether those are academic, artistic, athletic, interpersonal, or whichever direction that particular child develops.

Pam Sorooshian, for the Free to Be unschooling conference
in Phoenix, September 2014.
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Swirly world

If you want unschooling to work just because you stick the curriculum under the couch, it won't! Get the world swirling around you (first) and your children (second) so there are sounds, sights, smells, tastes and textures for them to process and build their internal model of the universe from. GET MOVING, mentally and physically.

SandraDodd.com/addlightandstir
photo by Sandra Dodd

Live, see, and think

Unschooling isn't another version of a curriculum, that will take four hours a day. Unschooling is a different way to live and to see and to think.

SandraDodd.com/seeingitcomments
photo by Julie T

Awareness of options

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Lots of people go through their whole lives never feeling like they had choices in many many areas of their lives in which they really did. Just like it is useful for unschoolers to drop school language (not use the terms teaching or lessons or curriculum to refer to the natural learning that happens in their families) it is useful to drop the use of "have to's" and replace it with an awareness of choices and options.

How we think—the language we use to think—about what we're doing, matters.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/haveto
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Is unschooling too big a gamble?

Would school seem like less a gamble to you?
Would buying a curriculum seem like less a gamble?
Moving to a fancier neighborhood, or to a country not involved in any wars?

I cannot make my children's lives good. I can't ensure their success. I cannot make a tree grow. I can water it and put a barrier near so Keith doesn't hit it with a lawnmower, and ask my kids not to climb in it while it's young.

I could destroy that tree, all kinds of ways. I could do it damage. I could neglect it. But I can't predict where the next branch will grow, or whether it will double in size this year or just do 1/3 again of its height. Not all years' growth are the same.

I could mess my kids up and make them unhappy and keep them from having access to things, but I cannot make them learn. I can't make them mature. I can give them opportunities and room to grow, and food and water and a comfortable bed.

I can't guarantee anything for anyone else, nor for my own family. I know what does damage, and I know what might help.


from the page "Huge Gambles (or small gambles)"
SandraDodd.com/guarantee
photo by Holly Dodd
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Still on your path

Lots of the photos I have these days are of paths. I love them. They're taken by people who were there, about to walk that very path, seeing things to the sides, hearing birds, or the wind, or other people. But we only see one view of one path.

The symbolism and the idea of a person being on his own path can be confusing and restricting, if others are trying to manage who walks where, and how. Path, trail, course, curriculum—they all can be about a pre-determined, inflexible way to go.

We only see our own paths by looking backwards. Find joy, today, in options and twisty turns. You're still on your path.

Hard paths and soft ones
photo by Amy Milstein

Life-in-progress

The structured homeschooling that involves buying a curriculum and teaching at the kitchen table on a schedule is not the control group the school system needed. Those who practice “school at home” serve to reinforce the school’s claims that they could do better if they had more teachers and better equipment. When a structured family has high test scores, the schools say “SEE? We could do that too if we had one teacher per three or four students.”. . . .
Scientifically speaking, my children are not a control group. They’re not isolated and kept purely away from school methods and messages. But what is unquestionable is that there are now thousands of children who are learning without formal teaching. They are learning from the world around them, from being with interesting and interested adults doing real work and real play. Instead of being put away with other children to prepare for life, they are joining life-in-progress right at birth, and never leaving “the real world.”

SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo of Holly Dodd and Adam Daniel, by Adam's mom

Repeated, photo and all, from October 11, 2011. Holly is twenty-four years old now, and Adam is ten.
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Steam-power, restored

The first time I went to Hollycombe Steam Fair was in 2011. I have been twice since, always with other unschoolers. Part of what I love about the whole collection of steam-powered machinery is that it has been found, gathered up and moved, restored, and maintained by volunteers who learned how to repair machinery from before they were born. Curiosity, a love of technology and of engineering, and a sense of wonder at how people lived at the turn of the century before this one have proven again that learning doesn't require school, or a curriculum, tests, or degrees. If the engine runs and if the gears are all set up so that the ride moves smoothly and safely, there is success.

There are also calliopes, and if you click below, you can see and hear more.

Steamfair Sights and Sounds
photos by Sandra Dodd

Find your options

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Lots of people go through their whole lives never feeling like they had choices in many many areas of their lives in which they really did. Just like it is useful for unschoolers to drop school language (not use the terms teaching or lessons or curriculum to refer to the natural learning that happens in their families) it is useful to drop the use of "have to's" and replace it with an awareness of choices and options.

How we think—the language we use to think—about what we're doing, matters.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/haveto
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Clearer and larger

Unschooled children can organize their knowledge in free and better ways. They never need to feel they are through learning, or past the point that they can begin something new. Each thing they discover can be useful eventually.

If we help provide them with ever-changing opportunities to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, move and discuss, what they know will exceed in breadth and depth what any school's curriculum would have covered. It won't be the same set of materials—it will be clearer and larger but different.

SandraDodd.com/seeingit
photo by Julie D
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As big as the world

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

If you look at school and curriculum objectively rather than the fonts of knowledge they're touted to be, it's easier to see how hugely limiting they are.

Kids are stuck inside memorizing facts about life and the world from someone predigested facts about it.

Unschooled kids are out in the world learning as humans are designed to learn: by gathering in what they observe and pulling understanding from it.

Schooled kids lives are limited. Unschooled kids lives are as big as the world around them. And with the internet and TV, that's practically infinite!

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joycefetteroll
photo by Sandra Dodd

Life, living and being

I've said before that people shouldn't live with one foot in the school (with a curriculum, or trying to keep up with school), nor even in the shadow of the school. It means to live as though school didn't exist. It means live outside of, far from, without thought of school. Learn in ways that work naturally and holistically, where the learning has to do with life, and is living, and being. —Sandra Dodd, 2011

Step away from school
photo by Sarah Dickinson

Helping casually

No one needs an assembly line to make a single item, nor to educate a single child. Rather than seeing the curriculum and then trying to wrap that around your child, or insert all the parts, it works better to see your child and help him learn as part of a busy life, considering occasionally whether maybe you should introduce other topics into his life, or introduce him to other people, places and things. This can be done casually, though, and doesn't need to be scheduled or methodical.

page 121 of The Big Book of Unschooling (page 110 in first edition)
photo by Chelsea Thurman
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What if a parent is afraid?

Part of my response to a request for advice to fearful parents:

Turn away from the school and look directly at your children. Look at them as individuals, rather than as students, or third graders or eight-year-olds. Look at their potential, their interests, their sweetness, and find ways to preserve and nurture those.
. . .

Don't do school. Do life as though school didn't exist. Live to learn; learn to live. If after really trying it as hard and as honestly and fully as you can for an extended period of time you can't get it to work, then you can always go back to a curriculum.

School has already taken twelve or more years of your freedom and individuality. You don't have to let it take your adult life as well. You don't have to let it have your child.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/successful
photo by Sandra Dodd

What if a parent is afraid?

Part of my response to a request for advice to fearful parents:

Turn away from the school and look directly at your children. Look at them as individuals, rather than as students, or third graders or eight-year-olds. Look at their potential, their interests, their sweetness, and find ways to preserve and nurture those.
. . .

Don't do school. Do life as though school didn't exist. Live to learn; learn to live. If after really trying it as hard and as honestly and fully as you can for an extended period of time you can't get it to work, then you can always go back to a curriculum.

School has already taken twelve or more years of your freedom and individuality. You don't have to let it take your adult life as well. You don't have to let it have your child.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/successful
photo by Sandra Dodd
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