Homeschoolingism or Homeschoolingaphobia?

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!

Definition of homeschoolingism:  Being judgmental and prejudice against homeschoolers because of ignorance and closed thinking. 

There was some confusion about the term.  Perhaps homeschoolingaphobia would make more sense?  Feel free to share your opinion.  :)

The biggest challenge about making the decision to homeschool and especially unschooling is the prejudice, negative, judgmental reactions of certain people.  I decided to call it homeschoolingism.  There is racism, sexism, homophobia, among others that I may not be thinking of and the newest prejudice is homeschoolingism.  This is a term I just made up.  Maybe it'll catch on.  :)

We are homeschooling pioneers in both of our families.  I come from a family of many public school teachers and no one has homeschooled in mine or my husband's family.  Then we came along and challenged everyone's boxed views of the world and the traditional educational path.  This has been both challenging, interesting, empowering, and at times, quite annoying.  We are not only thinking outside of the box, we just eliminated the box through this process.

We are closer to my husband's family than my own since I was the youngest in a very large family and my parents have passed away.  One particular family member on my husband's side has not been accepting of homeschooling and is definitely not supportive of unschooling.  This has been very challenging and unfortunately it has put distance between the children and this person.  I have explained it and recommended books, but nothing seems to work.  I figure this person will eventually come around, but until then, there is just a big distance there that I'm not comfortable with, but I guess that is just how things work out sometimes. I also had to set a strong boundary with another one of my husband's relatives because of a negative reaction to homeschooling/unschooling.  I never thought that something as positive as unschooling would create a void between either of our families, but unfortunately it does.

I recently shared one of my blogs with my family group on Facebook with a very positive attitude about sharing our life with them and had extremely negative reactions related to unschooling by mainly 2 family members.  At first, I thought it was interesting and was so excited to share my new outlook I had discovered regarding educating children and I was happy to respect their differences and share what I have learned and was even considering sharing the discussion on my blog.  However, too much drama got unleashed and derogatory statements about homeschooling were made that I would then defend. It ended up being this long attacking thread towards me and the word 'unschooling' rather than the actual approach, which they did not understand. Up to this point, I only had positive feedback from people in my family.  I did have questions from time to time and teachers concerned about their importance, but never something negative like this, so this reaction was very unexpected.  Hopefully this discussion will help them open their minds and relieve the prejudices and judgments they have formed somehow. I was also able to set some new boundaries that I was unaware needed to be set until this moment. So I'm glad I shared the blog with them, the reaction was different than I was expecting.  It also made me realize that I need to include a brief description of unschooling on each blog to avoid confusion.  So even though it seemed negative, it was a positive experience because I was able to gain insight about some family views and able to be more descriptive on my blog.  It became a good learning experience for me and I hope it did the same for my family members who needed to be educated further on the subject.

So this is the main homeschoolingism I have experienced so far.  As my children grow older, it may become more frequent, but I am ready for it.  Being alienated from our families somewhat has helped me expand my social network.  This has been the most positive social experience of my life so far aside from maybe college.  My confidence increases as time moves on and I grow stronger as a person because of it.  It is very empowering.  I can't wait to continue meeting other parents and children and educating them on unschooling if they aren't already aware of it.  This is an extremely positive approach to education and I am so glad I discovered it. So I will fight against homeschoolingism until the end.  :)