My son, Justin, has never been to school a day in his life. Nonetheless, he has spent the last 14 years learning all the time, every step of the way, without anyone making him 'do school.'
From the ABCs and 123s to reading, writing, and arithmetic, he has absorbed, almost like osmosis, a plethora of information around all of these topics--and more--from every day life.
As science, math, geometry, algebra, physics, geology, geography, language, biology, anatomy, sociology, history, politics, religion, music, art and any other area of life has been relative to his world at any point in time, he seems to have transfused the information through his veins to his brain – with little assistance from me or any other adult.
In short, Justin learns what he wants to learn, when he wants to learn it, at his own pace, and in his own way. My job as the full-time unschooling parent is to do the best I can to provide an environment rich in what interest him at any given stage of development. But it is up to him to choose what to learn from that environment.
The other important part of my job as an unschooling parent is to not make him learn what I, or others, think he should learn because I, or others, think he should learn it. This is, by far, the hardest part of my job.
Fortunately, for me, Justin quickly lets me know when I'm doing this. Then my job is to work through my past conditioning. As a result, there are many days when I don't know who is learning more, him or me!
In the 1960s this natural way of learning about one's world and the people in it was given a name by John Holt, called unschooling. Holt contends learning is an innate process that happens every second of every minute of every hour of every day. In other words, all the time and all by itself.
Learning is hardwired
Joe, my husband, and I learned this shortly after we became parents. During the beginning stages of Justin's life, it was so visible to us Justin was learning through observation, imitation and experience; there was never a stagnant learning moment.
When Justin was ready to learn something, he soaked it up like a sponge; as though it was the most fun thing to do in the whole world in that moment.
We also observed learning happens in subtle stages, on a continuum, often unobservable until all of the sudden it seems like it's magic that Justin knows what he knows, or does what he does.
In fact, it was during the baby and toddler years when we realized we didn't “teach” Justin a thing, except to model it. We talked and walked in front of him, and lo and behold he was talking and walking before we knew it.
It dawned on us one day we had not given him any instruction on how to put one leg in front of the other, yet there he was at about 11 months of age attempting to imitate what he had seen us do for the first year of his life - put one leg in front of the other.
The first day he actually walked, as all parents know, was like magic. “Holy moly!” I remember thinking, “He figured that out all on his own!”
It was the same thing with talking. The English language is one of the hardest languages to grasp – ask any foreigner – but at 2 years old he was on his way to mastering it. Yes, there were days of blubbering, but we could hear the traces of vowels and nouns under those beautiful sounds.
Studies show every baby's brain is hardwired to recognize the sounds of over 6,000 languages. All they need is to be surrounded by the language to pick it up.
When Justin was about three, I got proof of just how well he picked things up. One day, as I was cleaning the kitchen and he was in the living room playing, I heard him imitate perfectly the context, tone and inflection of a swear word I had modeled for him. Yep, he was learning all the time!
Research shows by 3 years of age, we learn 10 new words a day. That's a word every waking hour. And this is without flash cards or worksheets. We humans are truly a remarkable and brilliant species.
At 4, Justin continued to confirm this fact for us. He had a vocabulary that blew us away. We noticed he was continuing to learn his ABCs, 123s, and do-re-me's, simply because he wanted to. He was self-motivated, as all babies, toddlers, children and on up are, if there are no medical conditions or blocks at play-- sometimes even if there are!
The latest discoveries in human anatomy, biology and science continue to highlight this. By 4 years of age, we not only have an endless curiosity but we have a million new connectors made every second. Our ability to gather information through our sensors is amazing. By 4, our eyes are capable of picking out 7 million colors, more than we could ever put a name to. Our ears distinquish between 1,500 levels of sounds.
In short, we have an intelligence gathering system that is better than any computer. Research shows by 4 years old we're making thousands of calculations every millisecond!
Phenomenal from the start
Even though we didn't have this information at our fingertips when we started out on our journey with Justin, we could see it was true: we are an amazing and incredible species.
But this knowledge and understanding that learning is innate and easily occurs when there is freedom to choose what, how and when to learn is not the predominant belief of our current educational system. So we decided to not only home school Justin, but to unschool him.
For us, from the very beginning and to this day, this means there are no specific times to 'do' lessons. And forcing him to learn something isn't an option.
A couple of times I did cave to the predominant fear-based belief that 7 year olds should be able to perform on cue certain math skills, which I will share in a future post, because boy, did I learn a lot about who and what that was all about. Read: Me and my insecurities.
But other than that, Joe and I knew our cue to go on stage was if Justin asked a question or showed interest in something.
Still, there were many times, especially during the traditional elementary school years, when choosing this path wasn't easy because we felt so alone. No one we knew unschooled. But having the support of each other helped us stay the course.
And, yes, more times then we would like to acknowledge, we've droned on and on about something, refusing to exit stage right, even though the signs were clear Justin had lost interest.
But when we are more consciously aware, we continue to observe how all human beings have an innate desire to learn, how learning and living are interrelated, how we learn more by our mistakes and successes then test and instruction, and how it is never too late to learn more about ourselves and the world in which we live, which is exactly what Holt advocated.
In other words, learning is an incremental lifelong process that occurs everywhere, all the time. There is no need to hurry up and learn it all by 7 or 8 or 10 or 14 or 18. Or even 49.
Thank goodness for that because at 49, I have to admit I still don't know it all. In fact, the more I learn about the many discoveries made every day, the more I know I will be, forever, learning all the time. So will Justin.
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