When I started this blog, I advertised it as a place where I would write about autism and home-education. Some time has passed since then and, while I’ve written often on autism, I’ve yet to write anything here about home-education. At this moment, with the COVID-19 crisis in full swing, the UK in its third national lockdown, and schools mostly closed for a second time, I felt the time was right to talk about home-education, particularly the (often misunderstood) practice known as unschooling.
Many families start home-education with the best intentions and find themselves burned out and floundering within a few weeks. Often, this is because they are trying to emulate the classroom at home and, no matter how many pretty educational posters you have on your wall or how many whiteboards you purchase, the home will never be the classroom. Enter unschooling. Go to any home-education forum, anywhere on the Internet, and you’ll likely find thousands of posts from eager new families asking for advice on how to begin and time and time again the answer from veterans of the home learning environment have the same answer: Take a period to unschool. It sounds radical and counterintuitive, but it has proven to be an invaluable method of nurturing a healthy learning environment for thousands of families. Some people only practice unschooling and don’t do any traditional teaching at all; this isn’t the best approach for my family though so my daughter and I go through periods of unschooling and then go back to our more traditional timetable (which, if you’re interested, usually sees us doing table-work and more traditional types of schoolwork from 9am – 3pm Mondays-Thursdays and has the rest of the time reserved for documentaries, trips, and less traditional forms of education). We use unschooling as a reset button. We hit it for a few weeks and use that time to evaluate ourselves and our learning and teaching methods. We find new interests and things that we want to explore and learn about in more depth in the coming school term then, when it comes to it, we often find that we have acquired a shocking amount of knowledge in those periods of unschooling.
I think it’s important to mention unschooling right now because so many parents have their children home for the first time and the children and adults are feeling the pressure to keep up the learning that was going on in the classroom. I know that the autism forums I frequent are rife with anxious and stressed out parents talking about their anxious and stressed out children. Their mental health is suffering because they are so frightened of their children (or themselves) “falling behind”. But here’s the thing: they won’t fall behind because thousands of children are in the same position, they’re losing their parents, grandparents, and other relatives and friends to the virus, they’re stressed and missing their school friends. Even if they did every single piece of work the teachers sent them, the chances are a lot of their heads aren’t in the right place right now, so they’re not going to be learning effectively anyway. I came down with COVID in early November, I only had a mild case by many standards (I didn’t require hospital care) but I’ve not recovered yet, I’m underweight because I’m throwing up every day and most days I don’t even have the energy to sit up, my children are not only missing their friends, school (two of them chose to attend school instead of home-education), and their usual activities, they’re worrying about me as well and aren’t able to enjoy the walks and games we used to play when I was well. I know I’m not alone in suffering the long-term effects of this illness, and many other children will be in the same position as mine. It is not an environment or situation conducive to good traditional learning and teaching but children who practice unschooling usually learn as much as or more than their traditionally schooled peers. Unschooling is about child-led learning; it’s about letting your child learn about and experience the world in a way that works for them. And it works! If it works for children who never go to school, it can work for our children during these uncertain times too.
There are lots of different ways to learn without a classrooom.
All families are different so unschooling will look different from family to family, what I’m writing here is only how unschooling works for me and my family, so if you decide it’s a tool you’d like to use for your family then you’ll need to adapt it to fit your lifestyle and the current situation. As previously stated, I do not unschool fulltime, but we have been known to go through a period of up to a couple of months where we do it. Normally, unschooling for us means lots of trips to zoos, aquariums, museums, art galleries, castles, and other places where we can have fun and learn, obviously at the moment all of that is, sadly, impossible but there are still plenty of real-life learning opportunities for us. During our unschooling periods we also tend to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books together (I always buy several copies of books so that I can read aloud and my children can read along with their own copy of the book), this often sparks new interests and leads to my daughter doing her own research and learning lots of things completely on her own and away from traditional learning. About a year and a half ago my daughter and I read my favourite childhood book: Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian this led to an all-out obsession with World War Two, more than a year later my daughter is still learning about WWII, this has led to an avid interest in political structures around the world and a keen eye for spotting propaganda in newspapers and other media outlets, none of this is part of our traditional schoolwork anymore so I suppose it could be classed as unschooling; she’s learning and teaching herself because she’s interested. Learning about the war led Emma to study maps of the world; which led to an interest in the formation of the modern continents and continental drift; this led to an interest in faultlines; which naturally led onto her wanting to learn about earthquakes and volcanoes; after learning about volcanoes she wanted to learn more about the structure of the Earth; which led her to deep ocean trenches like Challenger Deep and about the life that dwells within them, she watched Blue Planet to learn more about these things and that led to an interest in global warming and conservation. All from reading one book with me! A book that she chose after I told her I loved it as a child.
Many other seemingly mundane activities can become lessons under the right circumstances. Baking and cooking are my favourite examples as they combine reading, maths, physics, biology, chemistry, and life-skills. Planning and taking a walk can require reading, maths, map-reading, first-aid (if your children are anything like my clumsy son!), history, botany, biology, ecology, astronomy, and life-skills. Paying the bills and managing finances are valuable life skills and teach maths too. If you’re imaginative enough, any task could be called school: feeding the goldfish? Husbandry practice! Doing the vacuuming? PE! Watering the plants? Biology! Okay, I’m being a bit facetious but hopefully, this will let you see that stepping away from the reams of paperwork getting sent over from school does not mean stepping away from education, in fact, with any luck, it will mean making education more accessible and fun for any children who are struggling with the difficult situation in the world right now.
"Do You Sell Nipples?" 