Method
Unschooling
Overview
Unschooling is a practice of self-driven informal learning characterized by a lesson-free and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, under the belief that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood, and therefore useful it is to the child.
The term unschooling was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, who is widely regarded as the father of unschooling. Unschooling is often seen as a subset of homeschooling, the key difference lying in the use of an external or individual curriculum. Homeschooling, in its many variations, has been the subject of widespread public debate.
Critics of unschooling see it as extreme, and express concerns that uneducated children will be neglected by parents who may not be capable of sustaining a proper educational environment, and the child might lack the social skills, structure, discipline, and motivation of their schooled peers. Critics also worry that unschooled children will be unable to cope with uncomfortable or challenging situations. Proponents of unschooling disagree, asserting that self-directed education in a non-academic, often natural and diversified environment is a far more efficient, sustainable, and child-friendly form of education than traditional schooling, as it preserves innate curiosity, pleasure, and willingness to discover and learn new things. However, some studies suggest that children who have participated in unschooling may experience academic underdevelopment.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
When we image we merely perceive, when we reason we compare. Our sensations are merely passive, our notions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges. The proof of this will be given later.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
The author is tied to Unschooling in the knowledge graph.
It is rather the formation of mind by setting up certain associations or connections of content by means of a subject matter presented from without. Education proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without. That education is formative of mind is not questioned; it is the conception already propounded. But formation here has a technical meaning dependent upon the idea…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Unschooling is.
Facts which are not led up to out of something which has previously occupied a significant place for its own sake in the child’s life, are apt to be barren and dead. They are hieroglyphs which the pupil is required to study and learn while he is in school. It is only after the child has learned the same fact out of school, in the activities of real life, that it begins to mean anything to him. The number of isolated…
John Dewey, Schools of to-morrow
Close in meaning to Unschooling; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Paradigm shift
- Curriculum
- Democratic school
- Deschooling
- Lesson
- Daniel Quinn
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of education.