Case for Unschooling

Sometimes education professionals can be the most skeptical of self-directed learning. After all, they have extensive knowledge and training about how children learn.

This is a great personal story about how two teachers discovered unschooling for their children and changed their understanding about how kids learn and how to best "teach" them.


Why Self-Directed Education?

A couple of teachers discover Self-Directed Education after taking cues from their children.

Six years after deciding that our family was going the route of self-directed education, it’s almost hard to remember what we used to think. When I think about my wife and I earnestly discussing whether we’d choose a conventional public school (the diversity!) or a conventional private school (the opportunities!), it’s like I’m a fly on the wall in the house of people I barely recognize.

But that was us. My wife Taylor and I both went to college to be teachers, and while I never “used” my teaching degree, my wife taught in a well-to-do private elementary school for three years before we had our first son, Oliver (Ollie). We had both worked with children for the duration of our adult lives, and thought we pretty much had things figured out. Thankfully, Oliver became our greatest teacher.

You see, Ollie didn’t care for daycare. He didn’t care for doing things on other people’s schedules, and had no interest in being dropped off with strangers, or sleeping alone, or any of the other plans that the well-meaning adults in his life had for him. We were at a loss. We figured we’d be awesome at parenting, and six short months in, we felt completely clueless.

 

Read more at Self-Directed.org.