Are you ready to change your boring, life-draining homeschool?

Are you homeschooling and ready for a change from your rigorous curriculum? Are you interested in unschooling but not quite convinced that your child would thrive? Is your child attending a more traditional school that is draining the love of learning and life out of him? There is an alternative! Better yet, this alternative can be extremely inexpensive, easy, and require little to no planning.

I'm talking about self-directed learning with structure. It doesn't have to be 100% unschooling, and it doesn't have to require you to spend hundreds of dollars on curricula or workbooks that your child hates.

What is self-directed learning? It's an educational method where a child (or adult, even you) decides what, when, and how he or she wants to learn. Most of our lives, we engage in self-directed learning. Young children learn how to walk, talk, run, and jump often with no help at all. Do you need to learn a new skill or information for your job? Maybe you spend some time looking on the internet for the answers, or maybe you ask a co-worker who knows the answer. Maybe you decide to take a course or purchase a book. What if you just find yourself enthralled with something you didn't even know existed last week? Want to learn more about fungi? Search for a documentary or visit the library. Our methods of learning something new are endless, but we often figure it out.

As adults or very young children, we are extremely good at learning the things we either need to know or want to know. Something changes in how we treat school-age kids. Between the ages of 5 and 18 (and beyond), we as a society have decided that every single child needs to know the exact same things. It doesn't matter if you become a doctor, a plumber, or a housewife. There is a certain amount of information you need to know in order to graduate from high school and move on to whatever is next in your life. And every high school graduate uses and needs this information. Right? Right?! Maybe not.

I love the concept of self-directed learning, and I love the idea behind unschooling. However, not every family is set up for success at using this to educate their children. Free to Learn by Peter Gray is a phenomenal book in which the author explores the research and supports self-directed learning. Gray lists six optimizations for self-directed learning. These are

1. Education is the responsibility of the child.
2. Unlimited freedom to play, explore, and pursue their own interests.
3. Opportunity to play with tools of the culture.
4. Access to a variety of caring adults who are helpers, not judges.
5. Free age-mixing with children across all ages.
6. Immersion in a stable, moral, and caring community.

Hmm. That sounds nice and all, but maybe you live in a home, like mine, where

1. Education is the responsibility of the child. I have agreed with my state to educate my child at home, making me liable for my child's education, if not completely responsible.
2. Unlimited freedom to play, explore, and pursue their own interests. We've got to run errands (or do x, y, and z), and my kids are too young to be left home alone.
3. Opportunity to play with tools of the culture. The tools of my culture can be dangerous and include access to the internet. The potentially big, dark, scary internet. I'd like to at least monitor that.
4. Access to a variety of caring adults who are helpers, not judges. I'm the one at home with my kids. Me. Just one adult. A variety of adults? Maybe on the weekends, but there's also a pandemic to contend with at the moment. I also can't guarantee that other adults will treat my children as I would like all of the time.
5. Free age-mixing with children across all ages. I have three children, and none of them are teenagers yet. I don't mind having them around kids who are older, but our opportunities for age-mixing are limited.
6. Immersion in a stable, moral, and caring community. We moved during the pandemic. We have a bit of a community now, but it's not like the hunter-gatherer bands that Peter Gray thinks are ideal.

So what's a parent in the real world to do? Provide self-directed learning opportunities but with a bit of structure. You could potentially do this while your child is enrolled at a more traditional school, but this blog will explore structured self-directed learning while homeschooling.