Recently I responded on a homeschooling messageboard to a query about unschooling.  A mom was contemplating homeschooling her kids, and was intrigued by the idea of unschooling, but concerned about the possibility of missing certain things if her kids didn’t happen to learn them.  Things like division.

My reply garnered an “excellent post” response… so I thought I’d clean it up a bit and offer it here as well.

Here’s a worst case scenario.

You were unschooled and never learned division.  Now you’re 25 years old and you find that there’s something you can’t do because you need to divide some numbers.

You’re probably already recognizing that this is a pretty unlikely scenario, to make it to 25 years old and to have never encountered a situation where you’d have to figure out how to divide something.  But this is, as I said, a worst case scenario.

So, just for the sake of argument, you’re 25 years old and you realize that you have to divide something. You’ve never done it before.  Now think about this… Do you really think you’re not going to be able to figure it out, to learn how to do it now?

Or do you think that you’ll just open up an elementary math textbook, or ask someone who knows, and learn how to divide in like 10 minutes?

Yeah, I thought so.  Voila, problem solved.

One of the biases we all have to overcome as homeschooling parents, because most of us were traditionally schooled ourselves, is the notion that children must be carefully fed bite-sized bits of information, little by little, in carefully graduated and incremented portions, and this must be done at certain ages and in a certain prescribed sequence. Or else…

Or else what?  “Or else they never will learn it” is the unspoken conclusion.  But that’s just illogical.  The real answer is “Or else they learn it later.”  And learn it faster, and all in one go rather than spread out in tiny bits over years, because their brains are now more mature and because they have the self-motivation to want to learn it now.

There’s a great difference between “learning” something because it’s being fed to you in a classroom, and regurgitating on a test, for the purpose of attaining a passing grade… and learning something because you want to know more about it, because you have an interest in it, or because you need a particular skill to accomplish a particular task.

When you stop and think about it, how much of what you “learned” in elementary school has actually stuck with you?  I know I can remember about a half-dozen things from grade one:

• “Ça va très bien merci et toi?”
• French for crutch is “béquille”
• “Le bon roi Dagobert a mit sa culotte a l’envers”
• Our gym teacher could make a hula hoop roll backwards.
• French for ladybug is “coccinelle” and they drink dew off the rose petals and we made puppet masks and took turns playing the different parts in this cute little play about it.
• Véri-tech puzzles are awesome, they make cool patterns.
• I loved Rémi et Aline books.

And…. that’s about it.  My memories from grade two at least include a few “academic” things but they are just as scanty:

• I learned about < and > and they were graphically demonstrated on the wall as the mouths of alligators.
• We played a dictionary game where we’d have to look up a word and race to the blackboard to write down the page number.
• We learned about multiplication and I was humiliated that I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.
• I loved Dinomir books.
• French for “factory” is “usine”, I learned that from a 2-part puzzle card.
• I listed very definitely which boys in the class I would marry and which were just yucky.
• I played Santa Claus in the class Christmas play and got my picture in the paper and had to bring in ice skates to use as prop presents.
• Our music teacher was awesome, he’d turn around and play the piano with his butt during “Trois petits chats” which would get me laughing so hard I couldn’t finish the song.
• I actually probably remember more just from music class — all the french folk songs, etc — than from the rest of the years’ “subjects” combined.

You’d be hard-pressed to say that those were all essential skills and knowledge that, if neglected or delayed, would have imperiled my eventual success.  I did have some fun times, but I did not learn anything that I could not have learned equally well — or better — later.

There’s a famous case, where formal math was not taught to an experimental group of students until grade 6.  Instead, they read, wrote, and talked, and any math was incidental and in context.  When they started formal math in grade 6, they were completely caught up to the “control group” kids within 4 months.  And all of that time which the “normal” kids had spent working on math lessons, assignments, homework, and problems for six years, the “experimental” kids had spent reading, writing, and thinking.

So there’s my first major point.  Delaying the teaching of a particular concept until a child is developmentally able to understand it more easily, will not irreversibly handicap them forever. Even if they do not end up learning this particular fact or skill until adulthood, they will still be able to learn it.  Did you stop being able to learn new things when you left school?  So why do we fuss and fret and worry that our children will be utterly helpless if they don’t learn everything when they are still very young??

Here’s another major point. Yeah, an unschooled kid might end up with “holes” in their education. But find me just ONE public schooled child who does NOT. All kids have some holes, they’re just in different places. If a child has a love of learning and self-motivation and has learned HOW to learn, then as they uncover their holes they will fill them. A child who has only been passively ‘spoonfed’ factoids and test-fodder might not.

After saying all this, of course I must say that unschooling isn’t the best fit for all families. We ourselves are hardly radical unschoolers.

But I will say this — I know of more cases of families who started off doing strict “school at home” curriculums, who gradually over time, as they gained the wisdom of experience, became more eclectic, relaxed, child-led and “unschooley”… than those who start off as radical unschoolers and added more and more curriculum. Of course the latter does happen, especially as kids get older and more mature and start wanting to enrich their knowledge in a more structured way — but just from my own anecdotal observations, it’s far less common.

I would venture to say that the majority of homeschoolers (again just my anecdotal observations) are eclectic, with lots of unschooley-child-led stuff (I’ve recently heard this called “rabbit trails”), but with a few curriculum-based subjects for whatever areas they personally felt were too important to leave to “chance” or did not believe their children would take to on their own, etc.

And that’s what we’re like, in fact. I do a certain amount of planning and guiding for “core” subject work, even more carefully planned lately as we’ve shifted into some Charlotte Mason-inspired ideas.  I have learned that my son lacks inner motivation and drive, he does need a minimum amount of structure. But it’s just ‘minimum’… beyond the few things that I structure, the rest of the time is his own, and he learns just as much that way too.

I’m trying to ensure he has a good, broad foundation to build upon… but I’m not stressing about the “holes.”  We all have holes.  I still have holes.  He already knows more about dolphins and whales than I ever did.  As we’re gearing up for a couple sessions on Ancient Egypt and Greece, I’m learning just as much as he is… I certainly never learned that stuff when I was a kid.  Even as an adult my knowledge is limited to a few Discovery Channel specials and “Stargate SG-1″.

Final moral:  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  And elementary curriculum?  It’s all small stuff.

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