Why we decided to unschool our children (pt2)

in Unschooling4 years ago (edited)

Were we about to do make that jump in the ocean? Lots of questions turned into our head - bear in mind these decisions were answered 2 years before COVID hit us.

  • How are we going to make our kids socialize?
  • What program will we be following for each study field? This might be our chance to try more hands-on programs.
  • What will be the class schedule?
  • Are there any associations around us to seek help?
  • Are we Homeschoolers or Unschoolers?
  • What the heck is the difference anyway?

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To Homeschool or to Unschool, that is the Question.

Alright so before we started, we had some digging to do. We wanted to see if there were families living around us that we could talk to. We looked into the deep web - I kid - and found some pretty cool resources. Facebook was the easiest way to reach out to those parents, but there was also some online organizations.

We read a lot about homeschooling and unschooling and what were the differences or the similarities. In my head, after years of dealing with all that nonsense, I came to realize they are words representing mental "progress" towards something. View it like a line:

Schooling________________________HomeSchooling___________________________ Unschooling

And where you want to be on it. Unschoolers could be considered being a wee bit anarchist. Where homeschoolers are mostly parents that adopt a school lifestyle, at home. But I think that with enough time, most homeschoolers become unschoolers. Hence the two terms being used.

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Learning is Easy

The more you realize your kids are perfectly able to learn by themselves, the more liberty you realize you can give them into exploring the world. Exploration is discovery. As a kid, there is so much stuff to learn, you mostly just need to slightly guide them towards a goal and they go there by themselves. Readjusting the aim is what the home teacher does.

Letting them fail, and learn from their mistakes is a crucial part of learning that school doesn't teach very well. Failing is bad in school. Yet failing is where most brains are at their peak learning curve. The process being:
"This didn't work".
"What ELSE could work?".
"Let's try this then".

Failing is Hard

But oh so rewarding. What do you think?

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Read part1 here