Unschoolers and Uncola

     A Little History: The term Unschoolers began as a short-cut word in the 70's. Author John Holt suggested we use it to refer to parents who were teaching their kids at home..so we wouldn't have to keep saying "parents who are teaching their kids at home". It wasn't until later that it acquired other connotations. 

     The "un" part was probably why the term caught on. Like UnCola drinkers who want a beverage as different from cola as possible, early home schoolers seemed to want their children's education to be as unlike public school as they could make it. Being an Unschooler sounded very liberating. We were open to starting from scratch and inventing something new. 

     But we soon discovered that not everyone wanted to be liberated. Some families had no quarrel with public school concepts of education. They just had their own ideas about how these concepts should be carried out. 

     One of the first families I met, for example, had a perfect replica of a public school classroom in their basement. My friend Meg had a green alphabet chart over the chalkboard and a brass teacher's bell on her desk at the front of the classroom. Her four children began lessons promptly at 9, sitting on real school furniture purchased from the attic of a local elementary school. They had tests and recitations, homework, and textbooks. They worked hard in classic textbooks. I couldn't understand why they bothered to leave school!

     They, in turn, were startled by our notion that our son would learn math by managing his allowance, or helping us with baking and carpentry, or working with the family business. We were sure that if our life was busy and absorbing enough, we wouldn't have to sit him down to scribble in workbooks and do formal lessons.

     Meg's family, on the other hand, was sure that their kids wouldn't be educated without workbooks and formal lessons. We studied each other with interest. We each thought our own plans made so much sense, but here we were taking opposite roads to the same goal.

     These opposite roads eventually were named; Home schoolers were the ones who, like Meg with the basement classroom, created a miniature public school at home. Those of us eager to chuck everything about school and try what Holt wrote about in his books, were tagged with the word John coined, Unschoolers.

     Over the years I got to talk with hundreds of home schooling families, some like Meg's and some like mine. When they shared the details of their schooling plans it was easy to see that the two modes had dozens of variations, and that they were all successful.

     In time, I would find myself explaining to reporters that they could line up 100 home schoolers and ask how they educated their kids, and they would get about 99 different answers. And I could truthfully say that any of those methods appeared to work. You just had to pick one that fit your family.

Nancy Plent, Director