My youngest daughter started school today, aged 13. Both of my children now go to school so, in many ways, our unschooling journey is at an end.
I guess unschooling doesn’t strictly mean not going to school: unschooling is about being learner-led. Going to school was a choice for both children. They’re equally free to stop if they want. Of course it’s a stretch to equate this choice with true unschooling. There are rules that must be followed, things that must be done.
But I hope that, at the very least, the years my children have spent living with the freedom to choose might perhaps give them a perspective on school that most children don’t have, that I didn’t have.
Maybe the most interesting thing about that perspective is the ability to see school as a service: school can provide them with new groups of friends, different things to learn, different ways to learn them, and qualifications. If school doesn’t provide these things or if it fails to provide a worthwhile experience in pursuit of these things then maybe they’ll rethink their choices.
Everyone learns differently – this was always one of the realities that underpinned our decision to unschool. In an ideal world everyone would have the freedom to build their own education: school might provide something, friend groups another, time at home something else. There are so many ways to learn.
The real struggle for us when we started with unschooling was the binary choice we were forced to make. There were times when we were afraid we’d done the wrong thing. If we’d been able to choose from more options, had the ability to choose a blended approach, maybe we’d have gone for that.
Looking back now we can see that unschooling gave us all something that a more mixed way of learning wouldn’t: we lived abroad, we went on long walks across Europe, we made our own ways to learn and we learned through just being in the world.
But maybe the biggest thing that happened was that we learned together. Unschooling is a whole family thing and we went on the adventure as a team.
I hope my children enjoy their new adventures; my eldest started school last year and she seems to be thriving. I know my youngest will be the same. I hope we (their parents) will be okay too. I hope we did a good job. I wonder what the next adventure will be.