I was having a conversation with another unschooling mother about teaching our children to read.  She asked me how my oldest son learned all of his letters.

At the time I drew a blank.  How did he know all his letters?  I certainly never “taught” them to him in the conventional sense.  We never sat down to do workbooks, trace letters over and over, or practiced reading on those boring learning to read books.

So I answered her the best I could at the time and said, “I don’t know, I guess he just absorbed it.”

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If you ask unschoolers for a definition, you’ll probably get as many definitions as you find people to ask this question too. If I’d take a sling at a definition it would be something like this:
Interest led, lifelong, self driven learning.
The idea behind unschooling is that learning is a natural phenomenon, that children want to learn and that they learn the things they need when they need them. There is no need to impose the required knowledge or force them in any direction.

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My children don't go to school. Are they homeschooled? No. What we do is as far from school-at-home as homeschooling is from sending kids to school. Yes, my kids learn at home, but that is where the similarity ends. We are an unschooling family.

What is unschooling?

We believe that children can be in control of their own learning. Does this mean that I just let my kids run around free to do what they like with no structure, lessons or learning? In part, yes; we do not have fixed lessons like a school classroom or curriculum-based homeschooling, but what we do have is a lot of learning.

In the 70's, John Holt, a teacher in America for over 20 years came to the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all education system does not get the best from children. They are not all ready to learn the same things at the same time. They feel bored because they are ahead of their peers or, worse, set them up to fail because they were not ready for that skill yet.

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Last month, The Times’s Sunday Review published an Op-Ed article by Michael Ellsberg called “Will Dropouts Save America?” In it, he argued that our school system tends to stifle rather than promote creativity and that students do not learn essential skills and habits of mind needed to start businesses. He said that when it comes to job creation, he puts his faith in college dropouts who become entrepreneurs.

Meet one of those dropout entrepreneurs: Dale J. Stephens. After just a few months of college – in which he enrolled after spending his middle and high school years “unschooling” – Mr. Stephens, 19, left school. Based on his conviction that college is not necessary for success and fulfillment, he founded an organization called UnCollege, which promotes ways that young people can “hack their education” by finding individualized paths to self-directed learning. A Thiel fellowship recipient, he is currently writing a book for Penguin called “Hacking Your Education” and traveling extensively on speaking engagements.