Unschooling versus Structured Learning

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!

We have been unschooling our children for 1 1/2 years.  We started when my oldest son was halfway through kindergarten.  Prior to learning about the unschooling concept, I was using more of a school at home approach with my child that I refer to as forced learning now; even though at the time, I thought I was doing something beneficial for my child.  I would pick up books and workbooks that indicated that they were appropriate for my child's age/grade level such as Kumon, Brain Quest, Everything your Kindergartener Needs to Know among a few others.  I was set.  I sat down with my little boy daily for a couple hours and worked through these books.  I would create a little spelling test for him each week with about five simple words and I felt like we were on the right track.  Then we decided to socialize and I thought it would be good for him to be around other kids his age, so I invited a couple other homeschooling families over to my home with kindergarten age children who I met through one of the homeschooling groups I joined.  The one child was very resistant to his mother and after two hours of playing with this child, my son seemed to pick up these traits and no longer wanted to do his school work.  He also did not want to have anyone over again.  No matter what I tried, he was resistant.  It was so frustrating.  He could write his name at this point and his letters and numbers, but it did not seem like he was progressing with much else and he was halfway through kindergarten.  It felt like a chore neither of us wanted to do when I sat down and did schoolwork with him.  I was frustrated and had very little patience and he was not learning.  I was about ready to give up on homeschooling at that point and just send him to the public school down the road. Then I discovered unschooling and started introducing this concept with our learning.  I kept things somewhat structured once a week as we transitioned towards a child lead approach. 

My daughter on the other hand started with unschooling and she does not know any other way.  She initiates her learning and actually started writing her name on her own at a younger age than my son did.  She also practices writing throughout the day and is always focused on learning and being creative.  I got her a journal to write and draw whatever she wants and she loves it.  She initiates art projects and writing projects and counting while with my son, I pushed him to do all of these things and it did not seem like he learned as quickly as my daughter is learning.  She is asking about how to sound out words already at the age of four and my son was pushed to do this with workbooks and structured approaches and still seems to struggle with it the age of seven and is not motivated to read.  He will do it, but not with enthusiasm and magic in his eyes like she does.  He still needs some direction and I do not feel like this would be the case if I would have started with the unschooling approach after witnessing my daughter's learning motivation.  So I will stick with this approach and continue to encourage the children to explore their world at their own rate and learn at their own rate.  I will step back and be a role model and guide for them. 

I suppose unschooling would not work for everyone, it does require a lot of trust in the children while stepping back and allowing them to learn at their own pace.  Some parents may find this challenging and cannot trust their children because they never learned to trust themselves.  Our society and the way I learned is not trusting.  When I was growing up, we were expected to go to a building daily for 6 to 8 hours and riding a bus for 2 hours from the age of 5-18 where we spent a majority of our time following a set curriculum of what someone decided was the ideal way and topics to learn.  We were given tests and expected to memorize information to regurgitate on paper that would usually be forgotten after the testing was over.  We were then judged and graded based on our answers that we only provided because this is what was expected of us.  Homeschooling was extremely rare and most people probably did not even know it existed at that time.  This is how I was taught when I was growing up.  I was often distracted and daydreaming as I was taught things that I had little to no interest in learning about.  In my opinion, learning in this manner is counterproductive and an irresponsible way of using this limited time we have on this earth; when in contrast, we can be spending our time learning freely and opening our mind to new things that we have passion and profound interests towards.  Therefore, unschooling as a way of life makes more sense to me.  It may not work for everyone, but it is definitely a good fit for our family and we unschool our way.

If any of you also have been able to compare the results of unschooling with a more structured approach, please share your experiences.  I am interested in hearing about them.