Unschooling’ parents put their kids in charge of their own educations. Are they actually learning?

‘Unschooling’ removes anything resembling a traditional classroom

This summer, a TikTok video of a mother showing off her son’s literacy skills went viral. “Not comparing myself to other moms,” said the social media influencer Onami, producing a notebook belonging to her six year-old son, Rainer, filled with crudely scrawled words in crayon. “Look at this: Lamp. Egg. Jar. Lion. This is him, doing this, by himself!”

The clip made the rounds online, eliciting outrage and indignation for reasons the 36-year-old swears she was not anticipating.

Onami, who goes by a single name, is one of many parents – increasingly visible on social media, more unassuming offline – practicing a radical form of home teaching dubbed “unschooling”. Also known as “free schooling” or “self-directed learning”, it is an informal educational approach in which the direction is dictated by a child’s interests. It eschews curricula, testing (standardized or otherwise), homework, recess, other pupils and all the other hallmarks of conventional education.

True believers regard it as a corrective to a flagging public school system, which leaves so many children behind. Critics, meanwhile, say that it’s little more than a form of educational neglect and abuse.

As Onami soon learned, not everyone values such an outside-the-box approach to education. Her feed was deluged with withering comments: “This is how my son wrote at 3”; “this is quite behind for a six yr old”; “all the letters were backwards and upside down”; “you’re crippling your children”; “this isn’t ‘free’ learning or ‘unschooling’. It’s just neglect.” Others chimed in to make fun of her tattoos, which include the word “gentleness” inked in cursive on the upper perimeter of her forehead, just below the hairline.

“What’s so interesting about all of these commenters,” Onami says from her home in New York’s Hudson valley, “is that nobody looked up what the average reading age is. The average age for reading in America is six and seven. People really wanted to throw my child – or really me – under the bus, but never even Googled the facts that they’re spitting out.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/sep/09/home-school-unschooling-influencers