If I may reiterate and elaborate: Homeschooling is duplicating school in the home. Although some homeschooling styles are more lax (less authoritarian) and/or eclectic and can thankfully deviate from the traditional school model.

But the goal of Unschooling is to get rid of all the insults to intelligence, obstacles to natural curiosity, and road-blocks to real deep learning that traditional school inflicts on kids, so that real education (understanding) can take place. It trusts that the child is a born learner, that she wants to express herself, wants to contribute her individual, unique, unadulterated gifts to the world and wants to get on in the world.

Traditional schools seek (unwittingly or deliberately by design) to force all kids through the same funnel at the same speed. There are many “square” kids who will not fit, at all or without being misshapen, through the round hole at the end of the funnel. Homeschooling hopefully deviates from this Procrustean travesty. Unschooling seeks to tunnel under the funnel escaping to freedom.

Traditional school and homeschool are teacher-directed. (But of course teachers, who were once truly in charge of their classrooms, are now more and more directed by higher “authorities.”) Teaching that seeks to mold, direct, and coerce actually robs the child and the world of her original, self-discovered, unhindered talents.

Unschooling, on the other hand, is learner-directed. Deep understanding has to happen in the learner, by the learner. Teachers (parents or whoever) can facilitate by being a resource like a dictionary. Dictionaries don’t hinder and meddle, people do — unless they are unschoolers. Teachers should explain . . . when asked. My kids will say, “OK Dad, thanks, but I got this.” But of course people give better hugs than dictionaries or computers! Hugs are more important than instruction. As A.S. Neill wrote, “Hearts before heads.”

Also, there are hybrid styles of homeschooling, just as there are for parenting. Sort of like on a continuum from authoritarianism to liberalism: School and homeschool seek to mold and shape, distrusting the questioning of the status quo and authority figures who are the keepers of the one right answer. On the other end is unschooling which seeks to free the child to question everything and everyone. One end of the continuum smacks of totalitarianism and stagnation, at the other end is the tintinnabulation of democracy and progress. At bottom education is change. Forward not backward.

I’ve posted my update on this, after making the decision to go ahead with homeschooling/unschooling: http://johnnybtruant.com/disobey/