The Unschooling Dilemma

I’m a planner.  I can’t help myself.  My lists and schedules give me great pleasure.  Not that I always follow them, but knowing that they are there is comforting.

That’ s why I’m having a difficult time completely giving myself over to the notion of unfettering my children with schedules and allowing them to learn what they want and when they want.   Unschooling, rather than schooling.

During our first year of homeschooling, I saw firsthand how my kids balked when I scheduled things too tightly.   As the year went on, we let up and were considerably more “unschooly”; although, there were certain things they were required to do each day.  Yet, as a new school year approaches, I find myself again trying to plug too many things into a schedule that I know, intellectually, will fall apart the first month.  Oh, I’m a little smarter:   I’ve planned three intense weeks, followed by a catch-up week each month.  Still, chances are it’s not going to work.

Why do I do this, when I know that my kids are naturally intellectually curious and could spend all day “learning” about their chosen interests?  Well, for starters, they are both incredibly single-minded.  BioBoy is now 7, but since he was at least 3 or 4 he has been so interested in dinosaurs and animals that they have been all-consuming.  It hasn’t let up and shows no signs of doing so in future.  I’d rather like it if he could grow up also being able to do some math, speak other languages and appreciate great literature. 

Also, sometimes in life you have to do things or learn things that you are not deeply passionate about, and I don’t want that lesson lost on them entirely. 

I understand that my children probably retain things better when they are passionate about them.  That’s why I’ve chosen materials that are, to the extent possible, living, exciting, challenging and stimulating.  We try to avoid unnecessary busy work that is common in schools and let ourselves be fully engaged.   But, we took them out of school to ensure that they were sufficiently challenged — letting them sit around and draw pictures of butterflies, or tinker with spare parts in the “science box” all day, while no doubt pleasurable, is hardly stretching them. 

In truth, the boys did express interest in many of the subjects I introduced last year.  We had lots of fun doing history and chemistry and we read some fabulous stories together.  Would they have done that on their own?  Perhaps, but I’m a little too uptight, I suppose, to sit back and leave that to chance.  They do need some structure in their lives, I believe, to ensure, if nothing else, that they develop character traits such as discipline and orderliness. 

Still, imposing a schedule over the whole thing seems like setting ourselves up for failure.  Routine is important — rigidity is unhelpful.   I’m going to have to go back to those schedules and build in even more flexibility.  Perhaps simply having a path in mind is better, with little guideposts along the way to keep us moving forward.  Problem is, sometimes we don’t move forward, necessarily, but we move deeper and broader.  Hard to schedule that and I really don’t want to stamp it out.

I have to remember that our goal, as the blog header states, is to keep the joy of learning alive.  Not to stamp it out with a drill-sergeant/school marm combo that is destined to make the children hate our time together.  Yet, I do still have to keep my rather old-school husband satisfied that we are accomplishing things (and that the kids could ace any standardised test they might take — and will have to, if he has his way), so it’s a balancing act for sure.   

Ahh…the pendulum that is my mind.