APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

Summary

In this episode, Adrienne explores the concept of unschooling, a child-led approach to education that emphasizes natural learning and autonomy. She differentiates unschooling from traditional homeschooling, highlighting its flexibility and focus on real-world experiences. The conversation delves into the balance between chaos and structure in unschooling, the diversity of unschooling practices, and the importance of consent and boundaries in parenting. Ultimately, Miller encourages listeners to embrace the unschooling journey as a way to nurture children’s innate curiosity and passions.

FREE Unschooling Resources:
👉 Take the FREE Quiz: What’s Your Homeschooling Superpower? https://thesereveries.com/quiz
👉 10 Simple Ways to Connect With Your Child https://thesereveries.com/10-simple-ways-to-connect-with-your-child
👉 Is Unschooling Right For Me? https://thesereveries.com/is-unschooling-right-for-me-guide

Stay Connected With These Reveries with Adrienne Miller:
Instagram | Pinterest | Facebook | Youtube | TikTok

Read the Transcript:

Adrienne Miller (00:00)
Hi, welcome back to the show. Today’s episode is going to be about what unschooling is. I know it’s not a super common term and maybe if you follow me, you are wondering what that is. Maybe you’re already doing it. Maybe you’re homeschooling and curious as to how unschooling is different. So I’m going to talk a little bit about that and just what this word is all about. So under the umbrella of home education. So that’s anything that’s not happening at like a brick and mortar school.

are a bunch of different types of homeschooling. So you have traditional homeschooling, there are also like Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, there could be Montessori, there could be eclectic, who are using a different mix of curriculum and methodology. The unschooling realm really, yes, it falls under the umbrella, but it’s so much different in the sense that

It is not replicating school at home and it’s not adhering to any kind of forced curriculum or timeline or methodology. So the way I like to explain it to people is that it’s this natural way of living and learning and I use the term natural in the sense that it’s

organic, it’s flowing, it’s flexible, it’s dynamic, it is anything but rigid, and it is anything but like imposed or coerced. So a lot of times what we see in the homeschooling community are people who are either replicating that same system of school at home, so they’re adhering to

a September to June schedule or a nine to three schedule or a Monday to Friday schedule, maybe they’re adhering to a specific set of curriculum. So they would purchase and require that their kids follow math curriculum, science curriculum, art history curriculum, whatever.

This can also involve a set of prescribed learning outcomes or planned lessons and activities that are kind of non-negotiable. So yes, maybe that lesson can be completed at a different time outside of nine to three, but essentially it’s about completing lessons and completing curriculums. And it’s about having our children

learn in ways that we kind of prescribe. So that’s really how I differentiate unschooling versus homeschooling. And again, this isn’t to create division or shame or, you know, criticism, anything like that. This is just explaining that in the unschooling community, which I don’t speak for all homeschoolers, and I am not

gatekeeping what unschooling is. I am just doing my best to explain how I understand it and how we live it. So at its core, unschooling is about liberation. It is about trusting our children and it is about not imposing an agenda on them. It is about allowing them to

self-direct their own education and their own learning. It is about not separating learning from real life or learning from play or learning from, you know, work. It’s looking at all of these things as one in the same. So we recognize that children are perfectly capable of learning.

that they are born wired to learn, that they’re constantly observing and communicating and experimenting and testing and taking risks and all of that is learning. We also take this approach that it is not our…

duty or responsibility to tell kids what they need to learn, when they need to learn it, how they need to learn it, why they need to learn it. It’s very much focused and centered on the child and not, you know, containing learning in this specific set of rigid expectations and standards. So whether that means a schedule, whether that means

what that learning looks like. Like, is it textbooks and worksheets and anything outside of that is not learning or not forcing them to complete assessments and quizzes and not giving them grades and test scores and anything that stands outside the realm of force and coercion and manipulation.

Unschooling is also about unpacking everything around schoolishness, a term coined by Akilah S. Richards. So it’s unpacking how colonialism affects education and how we parent and how we live. It’s unpacking Western white supremacy. It’s unpacking

capitalism. It’s unpacking just all of these preconditioned beliefs that we have, all of the thinking that’s been ingrained within us from a very early age. It’s unpacking this idea that our worth is tied to our performance, our academic performance, our obedience, our conforming, our productivity.

So for me, unschooling goes so much deeper than just being an educational philosophy or methodology, which I think is also a distinction between unschooling and the traditional homeschooling worlds that often ties it into education and kind of limits it there. I look at unschooling as being related to every facet.

of how we live, how we operate, how we parent, how we think, how we work, how we love, how we rest, all of that. So for me, especially, I guess you could tie this into intersectional unschooling, because I think there are a lot of people who are unschooling, who don’t have, you know, a social justice agenda. I see that quite frequently. If I kind of have this Venn diagram.

of unschoolers and I have, you know, right wing conservative traditional homeschoolers on one end and I have leftist kind of progressive unschoolers on the other end. In the middle of that Venn diagram, I often see, you know, talk of freedom and liberation and rights and

you know, all that same idea that we need to get away from this dogma from schools and, the government’s agenda and whatever. But when you dig a little deeper and see how these voices differ or how we define freedom, it’s actually quite apparent that we define them quite differently. So when I think of unschooling and intersectional unschooling specifically,

I look at it as we are heavily invested in upholding rights and freedoms for everyone and not just the dominant power. We are looking at things like trans rights or abortion as healthcare or…

we kind of unpack the ableism that tends to follow the anti-vax movement. So that really is how I differentiate, you know, that intersectional piece about it is this isn’t just about pulling our kids from school to make sure that they’re learning about things that we value because a lot of people are doing that. It’s just

it looks very different for why people are pulling their kids out of school. I personally did not pull my kids out of school to ensure that they wouldn’t learn critical race theory or I’m I wasn’t afraid that they would learn about queer history and trans rights. I actually am very concerned that they’re not learning enough about that, which is one of the reasons why I pulled my kids from school.

A really common question I get asked is like, well, how does unschooling work and what does it look like? And I think that that is such an interesting question to answer because it truly is going to look different for everyone. And that’s the beauty of unschooling. if you Google homeschooling or if you search it up on Instagram or on Pinterest, you’re going to get a very specific image of what homeschooling looks like. So it tends to be.

people wearing linen, it tends to have a tradwife component, it tends to have, you know, a lot of people homesteading. It all the photos generally are of white families and straight families. The images that often get pulled up are this like very aesthetically pleasing, almost, you know, Little House on the Prairie-esque vision.

It’s often kids at oak tables, you know, working on worksheets. So that’s kind of the procured image that homeschooling might give you. Unschooling, and the way I see it, is very much, you know, the person living on a yurt in New Zealand, or the person sailing around the world with their family on a sailboat

You know, it’s single moms and expats in Mexico. It’s digital nomads. It’s like, that’s such the beauty of it all is the absolute diversity that can come from living this type of lifestyle because it’s not about a certain look. It’s not about certain, you know, homeschool classroom organizations. It’s not about a Pinterest board. It’s not about

certain curriculums and adhering to a certain methodology. It really is any walk of life, any career, any type of home, any country.

anyone’s day to day can look absolutely different as ours does. And so I’ll often do a day in a life and every single time I do one, they look completely different because we don’t have a set schedule. Now, I just want to note here that unschoolers can use curriculum. Unschoolers can have a schedule. Unschoolers can plan things.

It’s not that that’s like illegal or not allowed. It just means that we aren’t forcing that and imposing that on our children. That’s generally the understanding of unschooling is that it is a family decision about how we want our life to look and our kids’ voices are very much involved and included in the decision making for.

the lifestyle that we have as a family. So if a child, we’ll take my oldest son, was very into gymnastics, really wanted to do that, it was like five days a week, and we did that for a few years, that was scheduled in our calendar, very much so. We got to a point where we decided as a family that the cost of that,

was not working for us as a family, the financial cost, the scheduling our life around his very intense competitive schedule, planning, you know, travel around that everything was kind of centered around his gymnastics schedule, which was not working for Joe and I was not working for his sisters. And so that was kind of a family decision that that just wasn’t ideal for all of us involved.

You also have unschooling children who very much want to learn in a linear way. I generally see this as kids get older, however, not, you know, when they’re five, but they might have a certain skill or academic subject that they really want to master. It makes the most sense for them to learn it in a step by step.

linear lesson by lesson way. This might also completely depend on the temperament and personality and maturity level of your child and desire of your child. So we don’t have these rules about like, if you’re using a curriculum, it means you’re not unschooling. It’s just, are they being forced to do what you’re? Are they being forced to do these things? Are they being forced to adhere to certain curriculum?

Are they being forced to adhere to a certain schedule and plan? So that’s, you know, kind of, that’s the point I like to make there is you will see absolutely families that plan differently and schedule differently and learn differently. And that is fantastic.

It just means we are not saying, okay, it’s September 1st, you’re five years old, school and learning starts today and it starts at 9 a.m. and it finishes at 3 p.m. and you are learning by doing these worksheets and handing them into me and me grading them. So that’s typically not what the unschooling vibe is. Another question I get is,

that it kind of sounds like pure anarchy and chaos and kids are, you know, running everything, making all the decisions and it’s just chaos everywhere. So let me address that. On the one hand, I love what Neil deGrasse Tyson says about children. He says that they are agents of chaos and he talks about them as being very destructive and messy and experimental and that that is the great joy of

children and Akilah S. Richards talks about embracing the chaos. So for one, I want us to think about chaos a little bit differently. I want us to see children as these like raw beings who have come into this world in complete wonder and amazement and just see everything so differently than we do.

My goal is that they get to continue to be those children without having so many expectations and rigid timelines and schedules and demands placed on them that they are left to kind of have this childhood that is unburdened by arbitrary

decisions and arbitrary standards and expectations. So on the one hand, yes, it is chaotic because when we let children develop naturally, playfully, creatively, and they are able to authentically express themselves and be themselves, it is going to be chaotic.

One of the first things that I teach parents and coach parents within my programs is about boundaries. It’s about setting and maintaining boundaries with children because unschooling is not about permissive parenting.

So if you look at consent and autonomy as being integral parts of unschooling, which it very much is, it’s about honoring children’s consent, honoring their bodily autonomy and their voice and their letting them be captains of their own ship. This does not mean they get to then infringe on everyone else’s rights. So take bedtime, for example. We don’t have bedtime in my home, which means

there is not a certain time on the clock that I then say everyone is tired or whether you’re tired or not you’re going to bed. Okay this has taken years of getting to this place by the way this is not also something that you just switch on and switch off like a light but unschooling to me is about letting kids become attuned to the messages from their body they are noticing

those cues for being tired. Joe and I teach them what tiredness looks like, right? We point that out. you’re yawning. do feel like your body is winding down? you know.

Do you start to feel dysregulated at night? Yeah, me too. dyou know, this is why daddy and I don’t have heavy conversations at nighttime because we’re both not at our best. We’re not our most regulated selves. And so that wouldn’t be a good time to have conversations. So unschooling very much is about having these lengthy, thorough conversations and discussions around all of these things. I think that’s what is such a missing part of this idea that it’s

chaotic and run by children and how can you possibly do that because I need to just be able to set down rules and have the kids listen and I don’t have the time to, you know, really delve into this. And that, again, is a piece of unpacking that colonial idea and Western ideal that we need to rush, rush, rush and be busy, busy and fill our calendars and it keeps life keeps us so busy that we don’t actually have time to sit with our kids.

and have these kinds of discussions. Now, I have three kids, they are of different ages, different personalities, different temperaments. It would be silly to have them all adhere to the same bedtime and the same routine and the same sleeping habits, just like it would be silly to do that to three different adults. They are at different periods in their life. They are at different phases of development.

They have different personalities that require different amounts of sleep. And I think it’s far more important as someone who was routinely told not to listen to my own body and that everyone else knew better than me because they were older and wiser and had more life experience or were in a position of authority. And so they knew what was best for me. I, it was ingrained to me that I shouldn’t listen to my own intuition and that my instincts were naturally wrong.

and that I was this like carnal human with terrible instincts and that I really just needed to listen to my parents, to God, to teachers, to church leaders, to the scriptures, everyone else except for myself, which really primed me to be in very exploitive states and manipulative scenarios where I allowed myself to be violated over and over because that’s what I had grown up with.

So let’s say my oldest wants to stay up later. He has the right to do that. He does not have the right to infringe on everyone else’s right to have a good night’s sleep and to go to bed. This means that he needs to be quiet. He can’t keep us all awake. He can’t demand that we entertain him or get him food or stay awake with him or

he cannot make enough noise to keep the rest of us from exercising our right to be able to go to bed, if that makes sense. So that’s just one example, right of discussing that with your kids. Now, I’m going to take this a little bit further. There have been some times where he is asked to have an all nighter, for example. And we had this discussion, you know, we talked about why our bodies need sleep, we talked about the

We talked about our immune systems. talked about, you know, what’s going on for your body when you’re forcing it to stay awake. We talked about sleep deprivation as a form of torture. Like we go into all the things. We allowed Linus to make this choice. We then talked about the expectations for the next day that he would not have the right to.

know, be mean to everybody else, he would not have the right to have his dysfunctionality show up in all of his relationships and not treat everyone else in the home with the same respect that we usually treat each other, these kinds of things. We then talked about the next day after he had his all nighter, how his body felt, we talked about the brain fog, we talked about how he felt sick, we talked about if

you know, a few days later when he immediately caught a cold and how that may probably be related to a lowered immune system from not getting enough rest. You know, we talk about all those things. Unschooling is very much about allowing for natural consequences and not imposing arbitrary consequences. So he experienced the natural consequences of having an all-nighter. And he realized and felt for himself, you know, he said, I looked at him and I was like, buddy, do you feel really shitty? He’s like, yeah, I totally do. I don’t feel good. And all day, he did not feel well.

Now, this wasn’t the end of the world. He’s done a couple since then, you know, in the summer with his cousins and he even got to hear his older cousins be like, I am never doing this again. I feel terrible for the next like few days. I don’t like how this makes my body feel. So it’s really important to me as I’m parenting in an unschooling way that we are having these conversations that we’re still allowing our children to make decisions without infringing on the rights of others. So during that all-nighter, they had to keep a, you know, certain level of noise. They had to get their own food and their own water. They had to, you know, adhere to things that would allow the rest of us, including our Airbnbs that we have downstairs, to all have a good night’s sleep, which was our right to have. So I hope that explains a little bit about

unschooling and consent and autonomy and how that fits in. will absolutely do an entire episode around consent and autonomy and go through that. But that’s kind of how I see that world of allowing our children to have these rights and allowing their voice to matter and be acknowledged and part of our family community as an equal member of our family community and not a lesser voice.

while still maintaining the respectful environment that we all get to have and exercise our rights as well. So that is really what I talk about when I talk about boundaries, especially as someone who grew up with no boundaries and is, you know, very new to this world of setting and maintaining those boundaries, especially with my kids. I know that I overcompensate a lot because of my upbringing.

And so I really had to learn that just because I’m unschooling my kids, which means we’re around each other a lot does not mean that I don’t have rights to take breaks or a right to work to pay for the ability to unschool. So there have been all of these things that I’ve had to teach my kids in the light of

boundaries and consent and their autonomy where it works for all of us as a family because if one person in our family is suffering it means that whatever it is is not working so we unpack that we start at square one screens for example we have done I don’t know a dozen different ways of looking at screens we’ve done a day on a day off we’ve done an hour a day we’ve done weekends only we’ve done

month on, a month off, like every scenario under the sun that you can think of. And it only works when we all agree. And it works for all of us, right? The parents, the children, everybody.

So do we do all day? What does unschooling look like? I talked about that a little bit earlier in this episode, but it is going to be so different. I just want to point out that it looks like having real world experiences out in the community. It means that we are learning from.

going to farmers markets. It means that my kids are learning how to knit because they saw Nana knitting a toque and they’re like, Nana, can you teach me that? And that is a new skill. It means that when Joe is building something outside and one of the kids is interested or Joe, you know, invites one of them to participate, they are learning that math and the physics and fractions and measuring and estimating and they’re learning to pour concrete and all of these different life skills just from

living out in the real world. So our kids are developing social skills because we interact with people of all different ages, all day long, at the post office, at the grocery store, at community events.

It means that we are going on field trips, right, to the SPCA or to learn about the salmon run because we go to the fishery. It means that we are a part of our community. We are not sheltered in our little bubble home cave and just not doing anything all day, right? We are building connections and relationships and we are, they are alongside Joe and I all day every day doing what we do, seeing how we make money.

learning about entrepreneurs, learning about different industries and businesses, and they’re learning from cousins and neighbors and aunts and grandparents and friends and, you know, First Nations elders when we go to different Indigenous cultural celebrations.

So it’s really looking at the world as our classroom. It’s looking at nature as an environment for learning, the beach, the woods, the library, know, Morocco, if you want to, it really, can be anything that you want it to be. Unschooling can be homesteading on a farm and learning about canning and preserves and herbal remedies. that’s

Again, the joy and the beauty of it all is that it can be so incredibly diverse to suit whatever works for your family and for your lifestyle.

I also like to point out that the learning that comes from homeschooling is often purpose driven. So I use the example a lot with my kids in Google and they were playing Mad Libs with Google and…

It was asking them, of course, to list adjectives and pronouns and adverbs. And my kids hadn’t learned that yet. We hadn’t sat down and had a formal learning lesson about any of that. They came to me, they were engaged, they were developmentally ready. It had a purpose for them. It was meaningful for them. And we were able to sit down and do that, you know, in 15 to 20 minutes. They’ve

quote unquote, mastered that skill or they’ve learned that concept and are able to then use it in a fun, engaging, purposeful way that they decided. So that was not forced upon them. That was not me being like, I wonder how I could get my kids to learn adverbs. I know. I will present this idea of playing Mad Libs, which again, that’s fine. It’s fine to come up with ideas and to invite your kids to do things.

I just find it problematic when we’re trying to trick kids into learning or trying to them to learn without them knowing. you, don’t need to do that. Natural circumstances will arise and we can absolutely invite our kids to learn alongside us. It’s just whether or not we’re manipulating them into doing that, whether we’re coercing them into doing that or forcing them to do that or forcing them to

prioritize the same things that we do.

So unschooling can look like that. It can look like learning about chemistry in baking and cooking. It can be about learning to sew costumes for Halloween. It can be about learning to collaborate with others and to do an exchange of services instead of trading with money and learning about bartering. It’s really just opening our…

vision and expanding our views and perspectives about what learning looks like. And it’s especially about not requiring our kids to prove to us that they are learning. It is not demanding performance from them, demanding productivity from them, demanding that they

prove to us that they are learning what we’ve decided they need to learn or even what they’ve decided that they want to learn.

So it’s treating them with that respect and facilitating that and supporting them and guiding them. And of course, being there in any way that they want us to be there. It is not hands-off parenting in the sense that it is not educational, educational neglect. And while I do think that that very much does exist, if you just go on Reddit and read about unschooling, there are some horrifying.

stories out there, which is not what the narrative that I’m trying to perpetuate. The idea that I’m trying to give people a sense of is that

We are not directing their learning and education. We are not directing their lives. We are not molding them or shaping them or, you know, pruning them. We are not filling these empty buckets. We are very much just continuing to ignite the passions that they already have and help feed and nurture those curiosities that they’re already born with.

and allowing them to freely pursue these passions and interests and hobbies that they have, exposing them to different things that is so much different than forcing, if that makes sense.

Okay, so that was my very brief overview of what unschooling is, how I see unschooling, what it means to me, how I define it. My content talks about this all the time, the different realms of unschooling, different definitions that people have, I interview different homeschoolers all the time and unschoolers all the time to get their differing opinions. So please don’t take mine as any kind of dogma. This is

my page, my podcast, my channel, my content about my experience with unschooling and how I understand it.

so understand that that’s where it’s coming from. Thank you so much for being here in this community. If you are interested about unschooling, mindful parenting, socially conscious parenting, ADHD, any of that, you’re in the right place and I’m so happy to have you.

Okay, until next time.