Unschooling

Unschooling is often considered a form of home-schooling; however, it differs significantly from both schooling and homeschooling. Unschooling is derived principally from the work of John Holt. It refers to a progressive form of growing without schooling and is based on the premise that the bureaucracy of schooling incorporates many impediments to learning. Holt and his associates founded a magazine and an organization called Growing Without Schooling that encourages parents, children, and interested others to form relationships in which they grow without the impositions of schooling that can be counterproductive to interests and needs of learners.

Holt became well known in the 1960s for his best-selling books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn. Both were written as journals of his observations and interpretations of interactions with children. During the 1970s, he wrote books of ideas for schoolteachers to reach children while crediting their own insights into learning that best meets their needs. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Holt became disenchanted with the potential of schools to meet students' needs; thus, he emphasized the need to create alternatives to schools. Through Instead of Education and especially via Teach Your Own, he fully developed his position on unschooling. He provided compelling reasons for why parents should take students out of schooling to develop educational experiences with them. He carefully emphasized, contrary to mainstream homeschooling, that the point of unschooling is to create educational experiences that are not based on identification deficits of learners, that do not serve the interests of power-wielders at the expense of personal and public interests, and that do not incompetently or autocratically indoctrinate learners.

Put more positively, Holt couches his advocacy in the following: the civil liberties of children, responsibility of parents and children as central to meaningful education, and protection of children from harm. He counters objections to unschooling, discusses it political implications in fostering democracy, and presents strategies for taking students out of school in view of potential resistances. Holt elaborates on ways to build educational experiences on children's interests, live with children and explore together, and create opportunities for growing in the home and community. He advocates approaches to learning without formal teaching and building on the most important work in children's lives: play. Holt discusses ways for parents to develop networks, overcome problems, deal with legal issues, and respond to criticism from the schooling establishment. Finally, he provides a range of resources for those who are interested in pursuing unschooling.

More recently, John Taylor Gatto also serves the unschooling dimension of homeschooling. His 1991 book, Dumbing Us Down, is a major [Page 920]critique of schooling based on more than 30 years of experience and multiple awards as New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year. His work, like Holt's before him, proposes that parents, families, children, youths, and interested others need to develop curricula and not rely on the institutionalized and generic curriculum of schooling. Gatto has garnered much attention as a critic of schooling and an advocate for alternative, grassroots forms of education to overcome schools' inadequacies. In this sense, unschooling is related to deschooling proposed in the early 1970s by Ivan Illich. Moreover, it complements the transition within the curriculum field (identified by William Pinar and his coauthors) from emphasis on curriculum development to focus on understanding curriculum as multiple social forces: political, racial, gender, phenomenological, international, theological, aesthetic, biographical, autobiographical as well as institutional factors within schools.

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