Unschooling as a term originated from John Holt. According to him unschooling seemed to have entailed to simply not send children to schools, preferring homeschooling instead. As time passed, unschooling started gathering it’s own characteristics.1 Unschooling is now different in that it lacks a set curriculum although in many respects, particularly legally speaking, it’s still considered a “form” of homeschooling. It also deviates from homeschooling in it’s preference to let the learner themselves determine how to engage with subjects.
Unschooling in practise is an alternative to both traditional schooling and homeschooling, favouring self-directed learning (uschooling) as an approach to education and life at large. Like other homeschoolers, self-directed learners might pursue a career in a college/university as well. But what is the fate of unschoolers that willingly choose to go traditional schools at some point?
So far we only have limited documentation of how unschoolers fare when they decide to go to college or similar but not if they decide to get formal schooling as an unschooler besides some remedial community college courses in preparation to go to higher learning institutions with more specific requirements.23 Curiously, from what I have found we do the have the opposite scenario studied, rather than unschoolers going to traditional schools, there was a self-study of applying unschooling concepts in traditional schools by a team of researchers. 4 To summarise, the researchers found that as students aged within a schooling environment, the more uncomfortable they felt with self-directed education. They also found that not only was this uneasiness apparent among the students but among the teachers (researchers) which they identified as trust issues. Among the benefits they described “Perhaps what we feel was most beneficial from our study is that we discovered freedom in
our own practices, even if that freedom felt stifled. We noted an epiphany type situation where
we realized that within our classrooms we had more freedom in how we accomplished our tasks,
addressed our standards, and interacted with our students than we previously conceptualized. Still,
this freedom felt stifled by the demands of pacing.”.
So it seems that it’s both a harder and longer process to go from schooling to unschooling than it is to adjust as an unschooler to traditional schooling, especially since theoretically speaking an unschooler that chooses to attend a school has a personal incentive to be there and also has the freedom to change their mind, take a break and so on, that is normally not even considered for those that fiercely believe in traditional schooling. On the other hand, putting someone with traditional schooling in an unschooling environment at random would likely perplex them, especially if said conditions are coming from unexpected sources, like school teachers in a public school settings and within a pacing, coupled with rules and codes that often run contrary to the unschooling spirit. There is also the likelihood that the unschooled are at least familiarised with traditional schools while the same cannot be said vice versa.
In order to make a proper conclusion, we would need more data on how unschoolers choose to engage with public schooling if the opportunity and will arises for them to assist. However, there’s a couple of theoretical approaches that can be made as alluded above. One is that they’d choose to go to a traditional school only to the extent they see it necessary for their own purposes. Some might choose to go to a school temporarily just to make a couple of friends and/or engage a particular subject or even a certain teacher’s teaching style about a subject. Others might do so out of curiosity of how their age-peers do with what seems to be majority of their youth period. In essence, the same spirit an unschooler’s experience will be different and unique so would their reasons to look towards voluntarily assisting a traditional school be particular, just like the multiplicity of experiences that are open and available for an aspiring, curious and enterprising unschooler.
Finally, I will re-emphasise that if one is to respect the essence of self-directed education/unschooling then we must be prepared to welcome the idea that an unschooler might wish to assist a traditional school, whatever their reasons might be, even if one disagrees with the traditional schooling system itself. That would be their choice to make and it is their interests they are following, if these are feasible then it should not be circumvented. If school ends up not working for their purposes they will say so and you should, of course, listen. But if it somehow does, why interrupt what they choose? The wonders of unschooling is that learner has the freedom to choose how, what, why, where and when they engage anything, that is to truly live one’s life.
- Unschooling or Homeschooling? – F.U.N. News, #12. (2025). Archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20131115060121/http://unschooling.org/fun12_unschooling.htm ↩︎
- Carlson, Melissa Marie, “Unschoolers in Higher Education: A Narrative Case Study of Unschoolers’ Sense of Belonging at University” (2025). Dissertations. 1172.
https://digscholarship.unco.edu/dissertations/1172 ↩︎ - Gray, P., & Riley, G. (2015). Grown Unschoolers’ Evaluations of Their Unschooling Experiences: Report I on a Survey of 75 Unschooled Adults. CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_pubs/480/ ↩︎
- Jordan, A. W., Hall, J., & Amelia Lancaster, F. T. (2016). A self-study of unschooling and student choice. Enacting self-study as methodology for professional inquiry, 471. ↩︎
02/08/2025
We can hardly blame anyone living in capitalist society for engaging in wage labor for a business, so why should we ever blame a child for engaging in a school. Even if one were to grow up without these institutions in their life, these institutions are despite everything still very useful to people and a better communist alternative most likely wouldn’t exist in a capitalist society anyway.
I think the problem with school is mostly the compulsory aspect of it where children are not allowed a choice in the first place and engage in similar menial tasks that jobs usually entail except they’re not even paid for it either. If a child had the choice to choose what to engage with and they go to school then that would still be better than to simply force them to go to school and to do stuff like punishing them for missing it, even jobs usually do not go out of their way to institutionalise you if you miss too many days of work.
I fully agree that within capitalist society the youth are kept stuck in schooling and ideally for them they should have the ability to choose if they go to school and if they want to go to work. Maybe this is actually ideal for adults as well because a common complaint is that children only ever cost money for parents.
You are already aware of this but I always supported the idea of allowing child labor in so far as they have the desired rights within labor. Allowing the youth to do wage labor can serve not only as a learning process but it also could give them financial independence from parents.
Also tbh my previous comment was kinda sloppy because “engaging in a school” probably can be interpreted in many ways X)
Yeah, to defend you, I did interpret “engaging in a school” probably differently from what you’re now communicating, which I completely agree btw. If adults engaging in wage labour can learn something or two, why can’t children? Especially in an economic system that relies on your ability to make money and gain experience as early as you can in your life, allowing kids the same rights to be independent in THIS society while fighting for a better one at the same time for everyone not having their value be determined by their productivity are not contradicting values. In this society, and in any other, children must be respected with the same rights and in all of these instances having said rights, while not abolishing misery forever, would greatly deter exploiters since it’s harder to manipulate, coerce and silence a child who has resources of various forms.