5. Independence and Autonomy

Today’s world is full of helicopter parents who do not allow their children the freedom to explore their world; these children grow into adults who have no idea how to make decisions or care for themselves, let alone others. While it’s necessary for parents to care for their children and keep them healthy and safe, it’s also necessary to equip them with the tools and knowledge to be able to do this themselves as they grow into adults. Unschooling provides children with thousands of choices, responsibilities, and experiences with their own independence to ensure that when they do leave the nest, they are ready to do so.

4. Value of Children

This is not to say that parents whose children attend public schools do not value them—on the contrary, many parents value their children above all else. Unschooling children, however, values children at their very basic form. It doesn’t rely on their grades, academic acclaim, or teacher pleasing as its backbone; rather, it is formed with the children’s interests, personal abilities and goals, learning styles, and very character at heart. It is a very customized, individual approach to learning that values each child’s uniqueness, worth, and humanness.

3. Discernment

Rather than learning falsehoods and later having to re-learn information—or discover an entirely separate side of an issue never presented to us—as many of us have had to do as a result of our public educations, unschooled children can become critical thinkers, researchers, scientists, and explorers as they learn information firsthand themselves from various books, interviews, historical sites, and other sources rather than textbooks.

2. Whole Body Learning

In a traditional classroom, children often sit for hours on end, jotting notes and memorizing facts to be tested over—to simply forget the material days later and begin stuffing in new facts for a new test. As Sir Ken Robinson notes, we learn inside our heads instead of with our whole selves (bodies included). It’s no wonder why so many of us have no idea what to do with our bodies, end up obese or unfit, and develop so many problems—we spend too much time sitting and not enough time using our bodies to begin with. Unschooled kids can use their whole bodies in the learning process. Instead of reading about Spanish culture, for example, they might learn Spanish with a group of children through dance, conversation, and song, learn to dance Flamenco, and cook homemade paella.

1. Success

As I mentioned in my lengthy defense of unschooling (as well as #6 in this list), we do need to redefine success in our society. Even as success is currently defined (by the majority), public schools continue to fail. One in three students will not graduate from public high school—yet it is continually defended over homeschooling as a superior method. While any route toward education can fail, it’s been proven that the public system can work for some students—just as unschooling can work, and has worked for thousands of families.