#10 Unschooling – Quick Review
Categories: Unschooling, Léo’s Insights 2025-2026
Let’s start the new year by first stating that most home education providers and facilitators do not wake up in the morning with the objective of obstructing the unschooling approach to education. Most, in fact, have never given unschooling much thought at all. They simply advance the only thing they know which is something aligned with public programming, as most everyone has adopted the idea that government knows what children need. Nonetheless, how can an agency incapable of procreation know what is best for children? Furthermore, how can a one-size-fits-all system accommodate the incredible diversity seen in humanity?
Although the education system may state it is focused on the well-being of the individual child, differences are dealt with by doing everything possible to make a child fit the government learning model rather than to encourage independent development. Unschooling is not like that. It is not encumbered with having to align children with a universal expectation. That is its greatest strength.
Still, we must be cognizant of the universal advancement and application of school-based approaches to education. As mentioned in the beginning of this year’s vlog series, the term unschooling has come into vogue of late, but has the understanding of what it entails grown with the movement? Unfortunately, no. Government programming remains the standard so there is a general movement away from the freedom found in true unschooling.
Indeed, there are some who use the term in an attempt to be all things to all men. In fact, there is a particular organization in the province that advances itself as unschoolers while pushing the need for government programming and accreditation. In this case, as in many others, unschooling has come to mean not being physically in school. But this is not what we mean by unschooling.
Unschooling is nothing more than not schooling. By that I mean it is something that starts when a child is born and continues throughout his/her upbringing within the family environment. It is natural learning fit for the individual without a preconceived objective or standard other than what is best for the child. It should go without saying that unschooling programs will be adapted with experience and maturation. But in the end, nothing really changes in the child’s upbringing other than providing more academic opportunities as s/he matures, in keeping with the innate individual gifts, talents and abilities of each child. Unschooling is fitting the program to the child not the child to the program.
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