Unschooling

Some reasons why we homeschool, and specifically why we unschool:

We’re unschoolers because we think there’s a better way.

We’re unschoolers because we think the system is broken.

We’re unschoolers because we’d rather be living our lives and rebuilding our communities, than assisting a system that purposefully, willfully, and wantonly fragments families, neighborhoods, and communities.

We’re unschoolers because we trust children.

We’re unschoolers because we’re certain that children are better off left alone than shoved into little box classrooms with broken people who can only teach what they are.

We’re unschoolers because we trust children and parents and families and neighbors and communities to know what’s best for them and theirs–even when it’s choices that are different from our own.

We’re unschoolers because we believe in a wholeness to life, and we’re working against the splintering that’s created by schools and classrooms and the artificial divisions those institutions create.

We’re unschoolers because we believe that self-esteem comes from grappling with a project, working hard, and gaining competence, knowledge, and expertise can’t be done in the confines of 50 minute segments.

We’re unschoolers because we believe that privacy and solitude and time are important to human development.

We’re unschoolers because we believe in individuality, and family, and
neighborhood and community.

We believe in living in organic wholeness, and we believe that school is toxic to the that goal.

We believe in making mistakes.

We believe in self-reliance.

We believe in helping each other in the context of community.

We believe in mentoring and sharing and we believe that success often comes on the heels of considerable failure.

We believe in freedom, but to be truly free, we believe we have to be free to fail, free to make mistakes, free to make choices others wouldn’t make, free to be wrong, free to fall on our faces.

John Taylor Gatto on School: