Unschooling

Unschooling is a method of education that, unlike traditional (coercive) forms of education, does not have any set curriculum and thus allows kids to pursue their own interests without intervention. Effectively unschoolers recognize the problems with coercive education and replace the system entirely with self-directed learning.

Origin

The term "Unschooling" was created by John Holt who wrote the book How Children Fail in 1964, and became a niche within homeschooling afterwards. It amassed popularity during the 2020s via social media posts on sites like TikTok.

Issues with coercive education

At least according to proponents of the "unschooling" movement, the traditional system of education, which has become known as "coercive education" for obvious reasons, has a number of inherent issues which make the system inherently incompatible with both Youth Rights and the way kids naturally learn.

• The curriculum is set by a central authority, with no say from kids in what they actually find interesting;
• Schedules are not determined by or with involvement from kids and often only contain those subjects selected by the curriculum;
• Kids are forced to change subjects by bells, rather than by their natural interests;
• The teacher assumes absolute authority over all students and often forces them to remain seated and quiet during their lessons;
• Grading systems are not only exclusively indicative of test performance (creating a "teaching to the test" mindset) but also create a 'pecking order' which encourages bullying between kids;
• Any form of distraction is immediately seen as "trouble" instead of being caused by boredom;
• Being forced to remain silent is potentially detrimental to any potential for creating and maintaining relationships.
• Kids are forced to attend by law, with truancy "police" enforcing this rule and either arresting the kid or their parents in case of any absence.

Overall, these and other points inherently take away any semblance of autonomy from kids and prevent them from expressing themselves within the coercive education system, but certain types of laws, like those banning books from libraries or allowing schools to share information about a kid to their parents without the kid's permission, make this situation even worse. Certain types of societal inequalities are also very likely to perpetuate within coercive education systems.

The idea behind unschooling

Unschooling seeks to address these issues by effectively removing all elements of coercion from a kid's learning experience, which only leaves behind self-directed learning. Basically this is what it sounds like: the kid gets full agency about their learning goals and how they pursue these. This does allow adults to assist these kids, but in a way that respects the kid's agency and interests. This is practically exactly how not only adults outside of a formal education environment learn, but young kids (before they're forced to go to school) as well. Effectively a kid in an unschooling environment learns what they are interested in, at the point they are interested in it, in the way that best fits them. This may include experience-based learning, learning by observation, one-on-one guidance and optional classroom-style learning activities.

Forms of unschooling

These are the forms of unschooling that exist today:

• Unschooling as a form of homeschooling: The parents do not enroll the kid into any school, rather allow and encourage self-directed learning in a non-coercive way. In some cases, however, information related to LGBTQ+, historical racism and evolution is held back despite the kid being potentially interested in these.
• Democratic or "Sudbury" schools: These can be seen as a kind of "at-school unschooling" with the "school" in question being a place which is controlled by the kids and staff attending it. This allows the same as unschooling in the method described above, with little to no parental influence. However, these places are almost NEVER funded in any way, and may not be allowed by jurisdictions across the world. This makes this form of unschooling hard to access for parents, and of course by coercive education laws, kids are still forced to report on arrival.

However, the ideal would be a national unschooling system in which all forms of coercive education are forbidden. This should allow direct and equal access to learning resources for all kids, with no form of external control. Such a system, however, does not exist in any country due to the push for coercive education done by so-called "children's rights organizations", foreign aid programs and teacher's unions.