Unschooling and parenting
Unschooling Voices #2 (August issue) will soon be published. The optional August question is, “Do you extend the principles of unschooling (trust, freedom, etc) into any other areas of your child’s life?”. (Details on submitting blog posts) When I first saw the question, I thought to myself, “What a good question. I’d love to answer that.”
But when I had given it some thought (and I do have time to think about such things while driving to and from home on the weekends), I realized that, except in a tangental sense, I couldn’t answer it. In fact, given the way I approach most things that I do in life, it seems an odd sort of question. It occurred to me that a good illustration of my approach to life would be a discussion Andrea and I had a few years ago.
At the time, she was a member of an online moms forum which had a section set aside for attachment parenting. Over an extended period of time we had a fair number of conversations about threads on attachment parenting. Finally, because these discussions had piqued my curiousity, I asked her, “What’s attachment parenting?”
Her explanation started with, “What we do…”
You see, I’m not really the sort of person who reads up on various theories and methodologies and says, “Ah well, that’s a great theory/methodology.” And I really did not understand what unschooling was about and why it worked, etc. until I was already doing it. Realistically, in our early stages of unschooling, I would never have described us as unschoolers.
The reality is that unschooling does not extend into other areas of our children’s lives. Instead, through time, our parenting principles (trust, responsibility, maturity, etc.) inserted themselves into our educational strategy. No one will become responsible without responsibility being delegated to them. No one will become mature without the freedom to make choices. The inherent message in controlling, watching/supervising, evaluating and testing is that object of the control cannot be trusted, is immature and iresponsible. A child that always has to wait for an authority to tell it what he/she is supposed to do next cannot learn diligence. A very necessary component of diligence is initiative.
What I’ve said in the paragraph above was obvious to me for a long time before I recognized that what we were doing educationally was contrary to our overall parenting strategy. I don’t think it is particularly necessary for me to describe in minute detail what we were setting out to achieve as parents.
What I recognized several years ago was that the most valuable thing we had done toward that end had nothing to do with our choice in curriculum. We have given our children thousands of hours of free time that their publicly schooled counterparts were deprived of. We delegate things to them by which they learn responsibility. We trust them. There is nothing particularly complicated in terms of the principles of what we are doing. For us, unschooling is a means to an end rather than being an end in and of itself.
fascinating post Ron, thanks.
Comment by Jax — July 17, 2006 @ 4:21 am
That is very well said. I think I might need to write something for this carnival too, though I suspect it might be very similar to what you have said. Maybe the short version is ‘No, but the rest of my life has led me to unschooling’.
Comment by JoVE — July 17, 2006 @ 9:33 am
Glad you’re posting again!
Comment by Carrie K. — July 17, 2006 @ 12:24 pm
JoVE – I think it would be fascinating to read the progression from the perspect of a parent of younger children.
Jax & Carrie – You could both answer the question from your own perspective. Perhaps in the sense of how the lines between homeschooling and pareting have blurred.
Comment by Ron — July 17, 2006 @ 8:40 pm
That’s how I got there, too. At some point I realized that a lot of my homeschooling had gotten a bit artificial compared to the way I did parenting and other things. So it was the other way about, for me too.
Comment by WJFR — July 24, 2006 @ 1:59 am
I love the unschooling philosophy but have done so much reading about homeschooling that I’ve just confused the heck out of myself. I’ve been homeschooling our daughter for 8 years now (since she was born) and we pulled our (before we knew about homeschooling) son out of school when he was 8. I’ve never been consistent, switching from school at home, to eclectic to Charlotte Mason to unschooling then back to relaxed eclectic and now seriously considering a classical education because the arguments for it “seem” so right.
Classical education teaches logic, reason and rhetoric which is something that I never learned going to public school. I never learned how to spot fallacies or argue properly, so to me it seems as though its a must…but my heart just can’t get there. Is there a way to help children in those three areas without a classical education which suggests that the child learn in chronological order and be forced to write, read, write read all day long?
My son will be 12 in a couple of weeks and he does talk about going to college someday, I’m just starting to get a little bit freaked out and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Comment by Kay — July 24, 2006 @ 7:32 am
Y’know, I really wish I had come to unschooling through our other parenting methods…but it was unschooling that helped change the other. For me, it was easier to trust their “educational” learning, but I got stuck on more traditional methods in relation to chores, discipline etc…
Unschooling helped me see (finally) that if I could trust them to learn what they want, when they want, then that included ALL of their lives, not just academic stuff.
I think there’s an advantage in coming to it the way you did, because there is such a great foundation of trust established between parent and child. I had some damage to undo in my case….sigh.
Comment by Ren — August 1, 2006 @ 8:22 pm
WJFR – We’ve met quite a few that are making their way there.
In addition to what Ren has described, we have also seen that with bigger families it has been things that have shown up in the oldest that have prompted them to reconsider the method of education.
Comment by Ron — August 1, 2006 @ 10:52 pm
great post Ron…
but I’m here to give a bit of advice to Kay… Kay, you can still show your kids logic, reason, and rhetoric without “schooling” them in it. the beautiful thing about unschooling is… is that all that time that would be taken up by school work is now time freed up for LIVING! woohoo! talk, talk, and talk some more to your kids… discuss the fallacies that you see… discuss how to argue without hitting below the belt. listen to talk radio, watch TV, go out into the world and see for yourselves how life works and then talk to your kids about your values and then listen to what they think about what they’re experiencing.
really, I never heard of logic, reason and rhetoric studies until I came to CM while researching different homeschooling methodologies… and very very quickly came to unschooling (it just fits us… we love freedom!) I am a Public School survivor… but I am now a LIVER of unschooling!
Comment by lesa — August 3, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
[...] We were having visitors and travelling last month and so I missed out on writing an entry for Unschooling Voices #2. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I had anything to write… Ron wrote it all out for me at Atypical Homeschool in a post called Unschooling and Parenting. Like Ron and Andrea, my husband and I were practicing mostly attachment parenting before we knew what it was called. And it was working. AP took several years to seep into our educational method, though, or rather into mine. (My husband has always been sort of an unschooler at heart.) [...]
Pingback by everywakinghour » Unschooling and Reflecting On How to Live — August 7, 2006 @ 4:07 am
[...] I’ve found 2 more posts, written in response to the Unschooling Voices question I answered here, by WJFR & Gem. [...]
Pingback by Atypical Homeschool.net » 2 more posts — August 8, 2006 @ 10:09 pm