Just Enough and Nothing More

A recent comment about radical unschooling: “A reason we don’t 100% radical unschool, is that part of my job is to expose him to things he wouldn’t necessarily come to on his own.”

Although we are not full-fledged unschoolers, one of the reasons unschooling is appealing to me, is because kids get exposed to things they wouldn’t come to if their learning was directed by school/me/the standards.

I’ve come to accept that nobody can know everything. There are things our kids will miss, just like I missed out on so much when I was in school. However, I’ve noticed that although we don’t direct our children’s learning, they are exposed to a whole heck of a lot more than I would have imagined possible without a long to-do list of checkpoints.

Hubby and I direct what our kids are involved in a lot more than perhaps most unschoolers would do. However, I realize very clearly that I am not the nexus of decision making when it comes to what is life and interest worthy for my kids. They are their own persons, and they are growing up in a world that is very different than what I grew up in. They are teaching me, I am teaching them, we are learning from the world, and we are teaching the world. It’s a huge system of circles, intertwining with each other. What they get out of their experiences and what they decide is worthy of attention in their education is all theirs. They own that. I’m only an educational tour guide who doesn’t give the tourists a quiz after telling them about the coolness of quantum mechanics. I’m kind of a pushy guide, as is part of my personality. But I am only pushy in what they are exposed to, not in what they take away from that exposure.

Yes, we expose our kids to new things on a regular basis, but no, we don’t demand or expect that they like it or even get anything out of what we expose them to. That’s for them to decide. Yet, we’re always pushing them to be one step better, while letting them tell us where that next step is going to be. And if they aren’t ready to move to the next step, to meet them where they are until they are ready.

And, we know, in the end, they will miss something. That’s a reality that most schools can’t accept. There is a false sense that if we teach our kids everything, and test them on everything, they will not miss anything. Everyone has holes in their learning. That is a given. But that’s not so bad. That can always be made up.

What’s not a given is the ongoing love of learning and the desire to always explore and continue to expand our understanding of the world. That is not guaranteed. Kids don’t have to know it all before they are 18. Turning 18 is only the beginning of the rest of their learning life. But if they don’t have the desire to keep exploring and learning when they are 18, that is much harder to recover.

That doesn’t mean don’t do anything. Far from it. It means now is the time to really explore because they don’t have jobs or kids or day in and day out responsibilities. So now’s the time to travel, ask questions, have no particular plan, and simply be free. Prepare for the future, but enjoy life every moment that comes. By that, they are preparing for adulthood, getting to know the world they live in, learning *how* to fill in holes, and keeping their love of learning alive throughout the process.

If we think about it, for kids who are homeschooling from the beginning, the vast majority of what they are exposed to comes from parents. Whether we are unschooling or any other kind of “schooling”, they depend on us to know about pretty much everything in the beginning. Perhaps friends and TV and other sources might supplement that, but mostly it starts with us. As they get older, it comes more and more from other sources. But how do they know about the other sources to begin with? Guess who showed them it was there?

So, it’s not a big surprise that unschoolers still manage to expose their kids to things that they wouln’t necessarily find on their own. It’s been that way since the baby is born, and it just keeps being that way. That doesn’t mean that unschooling is always perfect. Perfection is subjective and nothing ever achieves that. But thinking about unschooling does challenge us to see things from a different angle. The question is, can we do it? Or are we so entrenched in “how we do things” that it’s impossible to conceptualize something that is not already in alignment with what we believe to be true?

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2. Unschooling Demographics
3. Our Kids Are OK Just the Way They Are
4. Not Getting Work Done By 3pm
5. Training Kids for College