This is a guest post by Quinn Cummings, author of The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling
Our species has been recognizably human for 130,000 years, give or take, and for all but the last 400, no one has learned a classroom. Even with these last 400 years, education as we would know it was a very small part of anyone’s life; no one was spending a quarter of their day, three-quarters of year, twelve years in a row, learning subjects which might hold no interest or relevance to the student.
Algebra, I’m looking at you.
Unschooling believes it’s more important to learn when you’re passionately engaged in a subject, follow it as long as it interests you and seems meaningful to your life, and move on when it no longer does. Another way to describe it might be, how we learn when there isn’t a system in place which needs us to hit benchmarks, to excel at a standardized test.
I love the idea of unschooling, but we don’t unschool. To let my daughter lead her education-to let her blow off math until she decided she needed it for something she wanted to do-requires faith, and I lack faith. But unschoolers are some of the quirkiest, happiest people I know, and I’m certain they’re going to be some excellent, fascinating adults.
Girl on Fire
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