Unschooling - A definition

My mission on #steemit is to write about my recent ‘awakening’ about raising children consensually and help them to successfully practise self-directed learning instead of going to a mainstream school. However, I thought it would be useful to clarify what unschooling is before I refer to it in my future posts.

According to the UK Unschooling Network this is the current definition (as of July 2017). Please note that there are many ways to define unschooling and other terms such as ‘autonomous education’ and ‘consensual living’ are being used. This definition of unschooling will evolve over time like everything does.

1. Respect
   We focus on understanding and connection. We recognise that a child’s viewpoint, however it is expressed, is to be valued and considered important.

2. Freely Chosen, Supported Learning
   We strive to create a safe, nourishing and supportive environment where the child's freely chosen learning can flourish. We are our children’s partners in learning and supporters of their interests and passions. We seek to offer choices that will meet the needs and desires of our children but we understand if a child does not want to take up these opportunities. We recognise that children learn best when they can learn at the pace that suits them.

3. Learning and Unschooling
   Individuals learn using a wide range of methods: implicit and explicit, intuitive and rational. Learning happens when information is presented in many different ways: by chance, by the presence of a deliberately created, rich learning environment, by demonstration or by the offer of new information. The key distinguishing features of learning in unschooling are that the learner is self-motivated and that the information is relevant to the learner.

4. A Variety of Learning Settings and Types of Information
   We recognise that should the learner be interested, there can be value in all manner of sources of information, from shopping, cooking and eating to video games, to walks in the woods, to a text book. We also recognise that people learn more effectively when they are able to mix with those who interest them, irrespective of age or any other artificially enforced barrier and that learning can be a co-operative as well as a competitive venture. We see the value in real-world, contextualized learning rather than abstracted school-based knowledge. As long as learning is freely chosen by the learner, it is unschooling, whether it be informal, incidental, inferred from inexplicit example, social, private, conversational or responsively structured.

5. Coercion Limits Learning
   We understand that learning does not happen effectively when one person attempts to impose it upon other person against their will. All learning is initiated by the learner since any growth of knowledge will first require activity in the mind of the learner. Information cannot simply be forced into the mind of the other. We define coercion as "being forced to enact a theory that is not active in the mind, thereby limiting the capacity for rationality and creativity". For the reason that coercion inhibits learning, we strive to avoid it. Unschooling parents also seek to help their children to resolve any internal conflicts (self coercion) that may arise in the child by seeking creative solutions that will reduce such conflicts.

6. Partnerships
   We seek solutions to problems so that family members do not have an outcome imposed upon them against their wishes. In other words, we strive to find solutions that suit everyone.

7. The Balance of Support and Freedom
   Respecting the desires and rights of a child involves being attentive to the child’s needs and desires and prepared to answer questions and offer information. It is not laissez-faire parenting, a lack of involvement or neglect. It also does not mean that the adult should sacrifice their freedom and happiness to support the child’s, but rather should be about seeking to maximise freedom and happiness for all. We are also aware that partnering a child in a sensitive and responsive way does not mean being intrusive or overly involved.

8. Humility about our Ideas
   We realise we need to be alert for mistakes in our thinking and in particular to be aware of the possibility of false assumptions that we may have acquired from our own childhoods, the prevailing culture or simply as a result of human nature (eg: errors made as a result of confirmation or availability biases). We seek to correct misconceptions by staying open to new ideas and constantly testing the validity of our ideas against reality, as far as we can know it.

9. Love, Trust, Honesty, Optimism and Challenge in the Family
   We seek to build honest, trusting, loving relationships in the family through all of the above. Families should be places where ideas can be challenged, mistakes easily admitted and where people do not get disheartened by failure, but rather see it as a useful way forward, and are optimistic about finding solutions.

10. Advocacy on Behalf of Children
    We acknowledge that many of the societies that we live in have a very different view of parent-child relationships from the principles expressed above. We seek to promote and normalize within our societies, the idea that children are full, complete and equal human beings, deserving of the same level of respect and as many as possible of the same freedoms that are afforded to adults. Indeed, we see the concept of Adultism as being as important as Feminism.