Unschooling in Action

I believe in unschooling. For anyone who's not familiar with this term, it's the strangely familiar idea that children have an innate desire and capacity to learn, regardless of their environment. The obvious extension of this belief is that there's no particular reason to send them to school.

I've been interested in this concept since I was in high school, when I somehow came across a copy of Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life. I didn't, but I was extremely excited and convinced by the theory, and I've never seen any compelling evidence against it in the years since. (In fact, I've seen a lot of evidence for it. Recently I've been really into reading the blogs of older unschoolers, and learning about the awesome adventures that these kids seem to get into.)

Still, as a parent it's sometimes nice to see the theory in action. River's not old enough for school, but from an unschooling perspective there's no clear boundary there. Kids are naturally driven to start learning before they're even born, and there's no reason why that should stop or change at a specific age.

Anyway, yesterday River and I were playing with post-it notes and scissors. He uses two hands to cut, and likes to practice his technique. With a couple of random slices, he dettached a small piece of paper.

"Oh, a triangle," I said.
"Triange," said River, "cut another triangle."

And then, while my thoughts raced forward towards the ideas discussed in this post, he proceeded to do anything but. He made some more random cuts in all sorts of directions, then experimented with slicing through a whole stack at once. I reminded myself that this is sort of how unschooling goes, that it's important to trust the process and not feel that it's somehow better if some sort of concrete "result" is produced within a certain time-frame. It was obvious that he was having fun and getting a better grasp on paper, scissors, and what he could do with them.

And then, when I'd almost forgotten about it, he said, "watch River cut a triangle!"

And I did.