Juxtaposing Unschooling

Husband, who taught for 13 years in various venues before becoming an adamant UNschooler, made note of this:

In a schooling situation, whether in school or at home, individually or in group, the sequence of learning to read & write would be, 'this is the letter and this is the sound'.

In UNschooling, we take the opposite and much more natural and productive approach of, 'this is the sound, and this is one way you could write it down if you wanted to.' Of course, we might actually have interaction about many differing ways to write something down. And it doesn't even come up until someone does want to write something down for some reason, their reason, because it is important to them not to the "curriculum" or the test scores.

Anyway, and likewise, there is music. Our kids know and learn tunes first, then how to play them on various instruments of their choosing (if in fact they want to play a tune at all). And only after that might they be interested in exploring how to write that down. This comes up because one daughter has composed several songs and is now engaged in picking them out on the keyboard and wants to write them down. She just is incredibly musical.

I juxtapose that with kids I've seen who play notes they've learned in "music lessons" but have no clue how to play a tune. In schooled music, the notes come first -- 'here is the note, here is how you play it,' and if music enters into it at all it is only because the kid has music in his soul in such a tough form that even the relentless grindstone of schooling doesn't grind it to nothingness.

Other daughter got a sewing machine for xmas. She's still not great with her stitches or the technical stuff of sewing, but she took out a scrap of fabric, cut it and put in seams so that it made a night gown that fit her perfectly, then took more fabric to make the trim, found a piece with a little bee on it and made it the center of a flower to decorate it, and then made matching house slippers and sleeping cap for it. It is incredible. She didn’t learn the stitches first – she expressed her inner fashion-maven/seamstress.

One son is simply not very social. He never touches surfaces. No niceties for him. But yesterday at the support group meeting he found a girl who played the same Nintendo game that he's on now and they walked around comparing notes on how to get through the temple and where to get all the potion bottles until each was satisfied that he/she understood how to do whatever it was. They each knew something the other didn't and shared it.

One of husband's sayings is, you choose the result when you choose the method. These are the results of UNschooling.