Unschooling Is Educational Anarchy

A recent video interview posted at Motorhome Diaries shows Tim and Sheri Quinn talking about how the unschooling philosophy is working for their family.

I was glad to see this interview because I want more families to learn about unschooling and the benefits that come from raising your kids in an atmosphere of educational freedom.

One of the main reasons I decided to homeschool was because I saw how school was steadily sucking away my kids' natural curiosity and desire to learn. Before school age, we just had so much fun living and learning naturally and with loads of freedom and I saw no reason why that could not continue.

However, at first I did try to set up basic educational structure and rules because I wasn't quite sure TOTAL freedom would work. I mean, sure I wanted my kids out from under the ideas about learning and education that are inherent in institutional and government schools, but come on, total freedom is going too far.

So, at first I was an educational minarchist.

I believed in educational freedom and realized we really had the chance to live it by homeschooling, but I still felt like we probably needed some basic structure or it wasn't going to work.

Therefore, I drafted an educational constitution for our family.

But it didn't take long before I started seeing how my constitution was just a totally ineffective piece of paper and really didn't help us at all. As a matter of fact, I quickly saw that it was interfering with my original goal of educational freedom.

So I dumped it and we all became educational anarchists.

It was scary at first, but then I realized I wasn't starting anything new; I was simply going back to the educational anarchy our life had been before school came into our lives.

I think the reason I lost sight of how well educational anarchy works is because I was taught that when children reach a certain age, they need some sort of structured learning which is highly controlled by others or they won't learn.

But it's not true. All we really need to do is simply get out of their way.

So now I'm on a mission to start the first part of the revolution and help as many families as I can become educational anarchists.

Because freedom rocks.

One of my personal efforts to help spread the idea of educational freedom is offering a free online humor book about our family's early experiences with homeschooling/unschooling. I hope, in it's own fun way, that it helps explain how freedom works.