School Free

School free educating is something we chose for our family before we had children. It started with a pre-parenthood question: are there any feminist schools we could one day send our children to? Once we had our first child we had already discovered unschooling and eclectic homeschooling and decided this was the educational approach we wanted to adopt.

Unschooling in a nutshell is curriculum free home learning, where the child is empowered to learn what she wants, when she wants, how she wants. Unschooling is sometimes referred to as "natural learning" or "child-led learning". We are all for the path of least resistance. We do what works for us and "us" is a group of six individuals all at different ages and stages, with unique needs, interests and skills.

We make use of worksheets on occasion, we have regular music classes with teachers, sometimes Sazz or Eale will insist on one of the children seeing a project through to the end or suggest trying something new. We would most definitely fail at unschooling in the eyes of many, and have never aspired to be a radical unschooling family, hence the blog titles says unschool-ish (emphasis on the ish).

For us, unschooling means: interest-led, passion-driven, individualised, autonomous learning with as much support as the child needs. How we provide that support depends on the child and our resources.

For more on unschooling check out this article on Deschooling

For a brief definition of Unschooling versus Eclectic Homeschooling