Is Following a Child's Interests Enough?

By Beverley Paine

Aeron wrote: "When unschooling do you completely allow your children to follow their interests for learning throughout their whole childhood and teen years? So if the child never learns, for example, that calcium is an
element and occurs naturally in foods and is also present in the
ground and in our bones, is that ok?"

I personally don't describe natural learning as allowing a child to simply
follow their interests - life is way more complex than that.

For instance, if life hadn't intervened, would my children have played LEGO most days for 14 hours a day? No way.

They would get up, start playing LEGO, then get cold or hungry. This would
necessitate getting dressed and browsing for food. At this stage they'd come into my sphere and we'd start talking, making plans about what was going to happen during the day. I'd let them know if we were going out, what chores needed to be done, if I needed their help. They'd let me know if there was anything they wanted to do, or not do. We'd bumble along through the day, doing all the things that have to be done to live. If they were in the middle of some project or game I'd make time for that, but if not we'd do things that interested all of us.

I 'strew' stimulating things in their path all the time too. Plus we did lots of
interesting things in our lives, as parents, and the children naturally became
involved in those things.

Life is busy, it's full, it's amazingly complex. What we found is that most of
the obvious and noticeable learning - especially knowledge - was through
conversation. We talked a lot! The informal learning - background learning - that happened because we led busy, complex and interesting lives - is where most of the skills were learned.

Let's not worry about what our children will 'do' when they are grown up and
educate them into that role. Let's give them a liberal education that is far
ranging and interesting and covers all the basic survival skills well and then
let the future take care of itself.