The Educating Parent, Beverley Paine (formerly Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia)

Beverley Paine, Feb 2014

On the Unschool Australia support group a mum asked: "Can you please give my 5 reasons why you decided to unschool?"

We gently relaxed into unschooling after starting home educating with a school-at-home approach (children aged at the time 4 & 6)

1) unschooling made sense, trying to come up with reasons why my children should learn this or that to suit the school curriculum was often difficult, sometimes impossible - "learn it because one day you might need it or because it is the only way to get a 'good' job" sounded hollow and really not what I thought education was about;

2) it was working anyway, my children were learning just as much when I wasn't teaching them;

3) school-at-home was producing the same kind of behavioural problems and reluctance to learn that I saw in schooled children, and the carrot and the stick approach to coercing them to do the work wasn't working;

4) unschooling is super-efficient learning: I noticed that what my children learned on their own terms in their own way and at their own pace was retained and frequently used, unlike the school stuff I'd been trying to teach them. What goes in, stays in!

5) the focus on life, on simply living and living as a basis for learning, not schooling, naturally built skills across all areas of life, making for competent, cooperative, independent children who were confident to participate, as well as critical thinkers and problem solvers. That all happened naturally - they didn't have to be taught how to think or study or learn. Cool eh?

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