In 2005 I created An Unschooling Life, a blog detailing our unschooling experience after adopting our three children. Over time, An Unschooling Life became a hub for unschooling support and advice and was also featured in print and digital media. I’m in the process of updating and moving all the posts to this blog where they will be housed under the An Unschooling Life section. This post was originally published in 2011.
The following questions were asked on a (long closed) public unschooling forum. The person responding is Joyce Fetteroll.
Can a unschooler go to college?
Can a schooler go to college? Not all of them do. Not all of them want to. I think it’s clearer to state that unschooling doesn’t get in the way of kids going to college. If they feel that college is a good way to explore their interests, there isn’t a reason they can’t go.
Is it difficult to learn to sit in a seat, or is one more adaptable when one needs after being allowed the freedom of unschooling?
I think it’s oh so common but oh so sad that people believe not only that we need to train for several years to sit through lectures but that the training is a good thing. I think it’s also sad that people believe that we learn discipline by sitting through things we don’t want to do. And that unless we’re trained through dullness that we won’t ever do something we don’t want to do to get to something we do want to do.
Be aware that you — and 99% of the people in the US — have no experience with people who have always had freedom from the time they were kids. You don’t know how people who’ve always had freedom behave. You only know how people who have been controlled act when given freedom. You only know how people who’ve been left to raise themselves act when given freedom.
It’s a wicked important realization. You can’t project what you know of human behavior onto kids who’ve always known freedom because you only know the behavior of controlled humans.
If you’ve spent 12 years learning that lectures and textbooks are dull and hard, then college looks like 4 more years of the same. If you’ve spent 12 years exploring all sorts of different ways to learn and college is a self-chosen way to continue exploring, then lectures and textbooks are just a part of the package.
My daughter has been taking college courses since she was 12 and hasn’t had any problems with the format. That doesn’t mean that everyone will have the same experience. Given freedom, unschoolers are free to come to the conclusion that lectures and textbooks don’t fit with their style of learning. (Schooled kids just end up thinking they’re dumb.)
I’m concerned my daughter will not have the skill nor the aptitude unless she goes back into “school”. Any thoughts?
At 18 she will be different than a schooled kid. She will not have the academic knowledge crammed into her (and often blissfully forgotten!) that schooled kids have. What will help is to get over the idea that schooling is what colleges want or need. It’s what colleges are given to work with. Colleges mostly don’t have a choice. More than kids who’ve been cramming textbooks into their head for 12 years and haven’t had a chance to experience life to figure out what they want to do, colleges like older students who’ve been out in the workforce, who are clearly focused on where they want to go.
Unschoolers can be like that.
Unschoolers get to explore life and figure out where their skills lie. They go to college because that’s the way they want to explore their interests, not because it’s another hoop to jump through to get to the vague destination called “Success”
I left high school to unschool myself. When I attempted to go back to community college it was EXTREMELY hard. However, I had been fed the line that college was a place to explore myself and my ideas. I swallowed that vision whole, and then had reality hit me square in the face. Had someone told me that college was a difficult place where the most important part was playing the political game and not “finding myself” then it wouldn’t have been nearly as brutal. If you are going to allow your children to be unschooled because you trust them with their education, just be sure you carry that over to other facets of their life. Be real with them. College is built much like every other educational institution in America. As someone who found that institution choking in grade, middle, and early high school, college was no different
I am trying to have an open about home schooling. I am an engineer, and prefer a fact-based approach to arriving at conclusions. I simply cannot find much data, statistics, on to compare the success of home schooled kids to public schooled kids. By success, I mean graduation from college.
What I find instead are two highly polarized dialogues. One side thinks of home schooled kids and undisciplined misfits, sitting around a picnic table in the park learning fractions by playing with pie pans, and measuring cups, and the home school side uses the self-righteous language displayed in this article. For example, the unqualified statement that ‘schooled kids just end up thinking they are dumb’.
Students who enter college with a strong background in calculus, have an enormous advantage over kids who enter college with merely a basic background in algebra. That is a fact. And you don’t learn calculus unless you have had years of disciplined study in math. You need experience and working knowledge of algebra, geometry and trigonometry before you can even start calculus. Home schoolers seem to believe that an inspired student will one day just start learning advanced math when he is ready.
How many home school parents can do a basic geometric proof, or know what a tangent is? And if you don’t know, you can’t teach it to your kids and you don’t know how much effort and work it takes for your child to learn it.
“She will not have the academic knowledge crammed into her (and often blissfully forgotten!) that schooled kids have. … It’s what colleges are given to work with.” This can be such an advantage. I was unschooled from 3rd grade on and remember going to a meeting with a professor in college to review a paper I’d written. We got into a long conversation about educational philosophies and the best ways to approach authentic learning. When it was time to go, he thanked me and explained that he didn’t often get to have conversations like that with students. So yes… unschoolers can get into college, and their professors are usually delighted to have students who still think learning is exciting.
WOW! Thank you for this! As a home and/or un-schooling family, we could not agree more! Not many people get this, so it is refreshing to see that someone else out there sees the value in encouraging creativity and self-direction rather than line-standing conformity!
As a trade school instructor at a Canadian community college, I’m happy to report that each year, some of my top students had not attended high school, for one reason or another. They often have advantages over students who did — increased focus, more comfortable being self-directed, less bogged down with terror of being “wrong.”
When you are considering your options, please don’t forget trade school. You may find that the hands-on approach, apprenticeship system, mentor-type relationships with instructors, high degree of personal responsibility, and above all high degree of respect for things learned outside of school is well suited to an unschooled mind.