#12 Unschooling – “School Age”
Categories: Unschooling, Léo’s Insights 2025-2026
Once children have reached “school age,” most parents simply do as expected and send their children to school. This often comes with resistance and tears. Why? Children know they are safe at home. They know school will not be a place where they will be coddled and loved like they are at home. A question worth asking is what part of tears do parents not understand? Keep your children safe at home while remembering that learning needs to be age appropriate and ability based. Not every five year old is ready for the “rigours” of school programming.
On another note, some people say school is necessary to enable children to exercise independence from their parents. Others say children become witnesses of their faith. Still others say children need to hone up socialization skills. All very poor excuses. Let children mature to adulthood before expecting adult independence.
Should you decide to keep your children at home, you may be conflicted about what program to follow. Why? Programs are part of the problem with schooling. Besides, have the children stopped learning at home? What has been going on up till this time? They have been playing and, in the process, they have been learning and gaining enormous amounts of information about the world and themselves. Don’t stop that. Let them play. If they are ready to learn academically, they will let you know in their own way and in their own time.
Why did God make humans take so long to reach sexual maturity? Could it be because he wanted children to learn through play? He most certainly did not instruct parents to engage in programming. That’s what you do with computers, not children.
You may ask, “Don’t children need to learn certain things by this age?” What age? Who has standardized children in such a way as to have universal expectations of them? I have seen a child seriously reading at age three and half and I have seen dyslexics learn to read as late as eighteen. One thing for sure, every home educated child learns to read, eventually. This cannot be said of schools. Schools often expose children to learning what they are not ready for, resulting in poor skills and a bad attitude. Teach them when they are ready. At this point, no program will be necessary. I am not discouraging the use of programs as much as encouraging you with the knowledge that learning requires readiness, opportunity and encouragement more than programming. Let it happen naturally. That is unschooling.
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