Unschooling is not unstructured

Many parents are curious about unschooling, a style of homeschooling that allows the child’s interests and passions to dictate the curriculum. Unschooling is sometimes interpreted as a complete lack of structure, but it is most effective with the right kind of structure.

As a general philosophy, especially for very young children, unschooling is useful way of framing a parent’s role. Little ones are effective scientists, constantly running and evaluating experiments on their environment. They are gathering so much data from the world around them that they don’t need it organized or structured for them — they are doing that on their own.

As children get older, they require more intricate frameworks for acquiring knowledge and skills. This doesn’t have to mean the end of unschooling, but it might mean that the parents provide access to traditional materials and mentors in specific areas.

For example, a toddler can be endlessly entertained by a piano. They will bang and tap until all surfaces are covered in a sticky film. But at some point (maybe age four, maybe age seven, maybe age thirty), the child becomes dissatisfied with the music they are making. They want to know how to play a song.

At this point, the unschooling parent could encourage the child to keep tinkering. But this is not actually following the child’s interests. It’s neglecting them. The child is not going to magically find their way to Beethoven or the Beatles.

Instead of providing little to no guidance, the parent could take advantage of more than four centuries of collective human knowledge regarding keyboard instruments by sharing it directly with the child (possibly saving the child four hundred years of tinkering).

This sharing could take the form of hiring a piano instructor, showing the child a song you know how to play, or providing a useful book or instructional video. There are lots of options — and within each one, there’s still room to follow the child’s lead in determining when and how much they want to learn.

Unschooling doesn’t have to mean “unstructured.” The “big picture” might be loose and go-with-the-flow, but the individual learning tasks can be meticulously constructed.

When I learned to knit this past winter, I sought help from books, YouTube, and fellow humans to learn how. I set goals and worked hard to reach them. I practiced for hours every day. I aimed to make my stitches uniform, with precise technique and good ergonomics.

There was plenty of structure — but I, the learner, got to determine what it was. That is the heart of unschooling.