What is Unschooling?
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About this ebook
Children are born curious, creative, and wired to learn—and we value those traits in adults! Still, as our children grow up, we often insist they change to fit into the education system, where curiosity is replaced by curricula, creativity by conformity, and learning by memorizing.
But if you’d rather nurture your children’s curiosity, creativity, and love of learning, let me introduce you to the world of unschooling.
In this short book, we’ll explore some of the common questions people have when they first hear about unschooling:
What is unschooling?
How will my child learn?
Without a curriculum, what will they learn?
How do I know they’re learning?
Will unschooling work for my child?
But what if my child already has trouble at school?
What is deschooling?
How do I get started?
Life in the real world is much bigger and more exciting than a school can contain within its four walls. If you're ready to embrace life and eager to share its wonder with your children, unschooling might be for you!
Read more from Pam Laricchia
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Book preview
What is Unschooling? - Pam Laricchia
What is
Unschooling?
PAM LARICCHIA
Copyright © 2016 Pam Laricchia
All rights reserved.
Published by
Living Joyfully Enterprises
Erin, Ontario, Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-9940555-2-1
Cover design by Jane Dixon-Smith
Introduction
Hi, my name is Pam Laricchia and I’m the creator of Living Joyfully, a website all about unschooling. I live in Ontario, Canada, and we began unschooling in 2002, when my children were nine, seven, and four. They are now all over eighteen and beyond the compulsory school age here so we can officially call it living, even though that’s really what we’ve been doing since they left school all those years ago.
I put together this introductory book about unschooling because I still remember those first months, reading anything and everything I could find online about unschooling. I began questioning so many of my basic assumptions about learning and living, and recall the empowering, yet disorienting, feeling of information overload. And that was back in 2002! There's even more information (and misinformation) to sift through now.
Looking back, it's now more apparent to me which ideas and bits of information ended up being most helpful on our unschooling journey, and it's those I will focus on sharing with you.
How Do You Learn Things?
Let's first take a moment together to explore how you like to learn new things. That may seem like a trivial place to start, but I promise it will be so helpful in setting you up to get the most out of this book!
How do you first dive into a topic you want to know more about? I usually start with a web search and begin reading the websites and articles that catch my eye. I’m likely to check out a few related podcasts or YouTube channels, and buy a book or two. At first I don't really have a clue if the information I’m gathering is particularly useful, or even true. But soon I begin to notice different people sharing similar information. That information begins to rise to the top as more credible, while things I read or heard once and are never mentioned again start to sink to the bottom.
All this information swirls around in my mind as I go about my days. Our subconscious does some amazing sorting and connecting. The stuff that makes sense to me begins to rise to the top, while I discard that which so obviously doesn't align with my own experience. I start to develop a level of trust in some sources and dig deeper into the information they provide. And I keep my eyes open for more sources. Magazines? Online forums? Local groups? Friends I can connect with? Again the good stuff rises, the rest falls away. I'm learning.
What does your learning process look like?
Now let's look specifically at learning about unschooling. As someone new to the topic, reading about what experienced unschoolers are up to can be incredibly inspiring—and also a bit scary. I remember when I first began reading unschooling forums. I was so sure I had an open mind, but I remember thinking, Well, we won't ever be doing that.
More than once. Yet as I learned more and more about the principles of unschooling, about the ideas behind the actions that had at first seemed so irrational, they began to make sense to me. And surprise! I was doing many of those things a few months down the road. It’s a pretty fascinating journey.
With this book, I hope to help you
navigate the sea of unschooling information out there;
understand the principles and basic concepts first, so that you have a strong foundation to build upon; and
avoid the chaos that can happen when families jump into unschooling without understanding how it works.
And here’s a tip. Don't do things that don't make sense to you. That's just an invitation to disaster for everyone. Instead, take the time to learn more about unschooling, to discover the wonderful people that your children are, and in a few months you too may find yourself joyfully doing things with your family that right now may seem unthinkable.
Work Your Learning Process
Learning about unschooling is really exciting! It challenges you to think for yourself, yet rewards you deeply. Taking the time to understand how you learn will