Unschooling: study without obligation

Unschooling in our country is not familiar to anyone. What is this educational format?

Oksana Turkina, mother of three and family education consultant: There is no such form of education in the Russian law on education. Unschooling is more of a lifestyle that is based on a simple belief: a child should not be forced to learn. He is committed to learning and development. Education for him is a natural process, not following the school curriculum.

Unschoolers don’t go to school. How do they build relationships with the education system?

Everything is different. Someone is certified remotely, someone is registered on a family or correspondence form. But unlike those children who are closely connected with the school (they study according to the program, regularly write tests and take exams), the unschooled child learns what he wants, goes where his curiosity leads him.

And he can come to school only in the ninth grade in order to pass exams in all subjects and get admission to the OGE. The law on education states that annual assessments are our right, but they are not mandatory. My older children are legally in family education. We live in Montenegro, but we remain citizens of Russia.

The eldest daughter Marina just recently successfully passed the OGE, and we plan that she will continue to study in a free form. The middle child, Valera, is 11 years old, he has been studying according to his own program from the very beginning. And the younger Vitalik is just approaching school – he is 6 and a half, and he will also study on his own.

On your own, does that mean with your parents?

I am not a teacher, I just help children get the knowledge they are interested in, provide a suitable environment, buy books, take them to circles and sections.

How did you come up with this idea?

It all started when we were still living in Moscow. In the fifth grade, we took our daughter out of school and transferred to family education. Then she studied at home, but according to the school curriculum, she had textbooks, tests, lists of topics for preparing for exams, deadlines.

But at the same time, she had quite a lot of free time, she was not tired of getting up early, and soon I noticed a curious thing: she began to read more, draw a lot, she had a strong desire to do something of her own, to study something on her own.

And we didn’t even send the middle child, Valera, to school. At the age of five, he was diagnosed with autism, and my husband and I realized that he would not pull through the compulsory school curriculum, even in a facilitated family education format.

And we decided that until the ninth grade we would give him the opportunity to study the way he wanted. And he immediately began to show curiosity to a variety of things.

Do you know how he learned to write? We didn’t even give him prescriptions. Once he wanted to write a letter to Santa Claus and sat me next to him. Notice I didn’t plant it. He didn’t know how letters were written at all. I brought him a felt-tip pen and a notebook with a laminated surface so that he could wash it.

On the first day, after several hours of effort, he wrote only the letter “d”. On the second – the whole word: “d-e-d.” On the third day he wrote the whole letter at once, a very long one.

Such progress is typical for an unschooler: when a child really needs something, he dives deep into the topic and incredibly quickly moves towards the goal. Valera’s interest in writing did not subside for six months. He wrote letters every day: first to Santa Claus, then to grandparents, then to another grandmother.

If, for example, at 9 pm he found out that he did not have time to write a letter, then he sat down at the table, sat me next to him and could write until one in the morning. I myself persuaded him: let’s sleep, I’m tired. “Mom, don’t get distracted,” he said.

And he also mastered the account himself?

This happened even before he could write. Somehow, on a whim, I bought a Kumon notebook with math exercises and just put it on Valera’s table. He willingly counted from 1 to 10, but went no further than that. One day he noticed a notebook and wanted to study mathematics. I preferred to do it only with my dad. In two weeks they went through the entire notebook, took the next one, it took about a month to complete it.

No one has ever forced him to study, it is always his initiative, his request. It often happens like this: we wake up, get up, have breakfast, and Valera is already awake and jumping around us: “Mom, maybe we’ll work out?”

But what if the request does not arise?

For it to arise, you need to create certain conditions, an environment in which the child will be interested. Need a book that will interest him. More precisely, a variety of books. Here, for example, only the middle one, Valera, became interested in “kumons” out of our three children. The elder is fascinated by everything related to drawing.

And the younger Vitalik is attracted to encyclopedias, he is passionate about science, and this format suits him better. He has a box in which he puts his tools: a compass, a microscope and much more.

He asks a lot of questions: why is garbage called trash and a giraffe is called a giraffe? Why does the word sound like this in Russian, but differently in Serbian? In Montenegro, in addition to Serbian, many names and signs are duplicated in English or Russian. As soon as Vitalik learned to read Russian, he immediately began to learn to read Serbian. He is not embarrassed by different fonts, long and complex words.

We recently went to a pharmacy with him, he then asked twenty questions about hydrogen peroxide: why is it so in Latin, but differently in Russian, and what is its formula, and what does it consist of, and why does it bubble …

But not every question you can give a detailed answer.

I am not a teacher, not a guide, but I can make it easier for a child to find an answer to a question of interest. If I don’t know the answer, I say so: I don’t know, buddy. Let’s look on the Internet, in the dictionary.

At one time, Vitalik was simply ill with non-Newtonian fluid, and I had to look for her recipe on the Internet. Fortunately, this is not such a complicated thing that cannot be done at home, all you need is starch and water. And with complex chemical compounds, you can experiment in a circle, which he recently began to attend.

Do your children have a routine, daily routine, schedule?

We have a fairly free schedule. Naturally, the day is structured by sleep, meals, when the whole family gathers at the table, and the activities that the children choose for themselves. What happens between, mostly on the conscience of the child.

Valera is more inclined to a constant daily routine. In the morning, right after breakfast, he goes for a bike ride. Then he comes back, does something: writes, draws or does mathematics. After dinner, he has videos, and in the evening before going to bed, he always reads aloud with his dad.

He himself decided so and adheres to this schedule almost invariably. And the older and younger are less inclined to such rituals.

How do you know it’s time to introduce your child to something new?

When he had a request. I never suggested to the youngest: let’s do experiments. No, he himself found somewhere on YouTube a video where a boy is conducting an experiment, and said: I also want to.

And my task as a parent is not to get confused and come up with an experiment that will seem entertaining to him at 6 years old. With soda and vinegar, we probably carried out a dozen and a half experiments: we poured them into different containers, and it was terribly interesting, he repeated the experiments many times.

And this is not easy, given that adults have work and household responsibilities. However, the child must also understand that sometimes you have to wait or find other ways to satisfy your curiosity. For example, go to your older sister or search the Internet for an answer.

Speaking of the Internet, do you restrict children’s access to it?

I am extremely device friendly, and we have no time limits. This approach has one drawback: when I have to ask the children to wait or be quiet to give me the opportunity to work, I cannot distract them with a smartphone, like most parents – in 15 minutes the phone will be forgotten.

But I can say for sure: the child’s interest in what can be found on the Internet does not outweigh his curiosity about the world around him. As soon as there is an activity in the real world: friends come or it’s time to go to classes, children immediately tear themselves away from monitors and tablet screens.

Recently, the youngest saw a stopwatch on the Internet, and he immediately needed to test it in real conditions. He grabbed some kind of toy that recharges from sunlight, ran outside and waited, looking at the second hand, for the toy to charge.

For ordinary schoolchildren, lessons and homework become work, duties. Do your children have responsibilities?

Yes, all by age. The older one washes the dishes, cleans the table, walks the dogs, the middle one takes out the trash, prepares simple meals, and the younger one goes to the store, buys bread, milk, speaks Serbian with the seller – I don’t understand how, but they find a common language.

And it is important for me to show the child that he must do something, not because I said so, and not because it is his duty, but because this action has a meaning.

But sooner or later, free development will have to be interrupted. They will have to sit down and cram all these theorems and formulas, otherwise they will not pass the OGE and the Unified State Examination. A formality that doesn’t seem to make sense. What will you answer the child to the question “why do I need this”?

Indeed, I have already heard such a question from my eldest daughter, who passed the entire program for the ninth grade in the spring, and then four exams of the OGE. She kept repeating: “I don’t understand why I need this! Why am I learning all this? Why should I suffer so much?”

It is clear that there can be no original answer to this question. She does not ask: why do I need English. She needs it because she has English-speaking friends, because she reads and writes in English.

And time after time I had to answer: “You need to pass these exams, because it is your duty under the law of the country of which you are a citizen. There is only one way to free you from these troubles, even less pleasant – illegally hiding from the laws of your country.

But for us to break the law is unacceptable. Therefore, I will do everything in my power to help you prepare and pass your exams.”

Personally, I am convinced that attestation has nothing to do with real education. But I understand that education officials must be sure that the rights of the child are not violated, that parents take care of him and fulfill their duties.

How are unschoolers different from other children? How does free development affect their understanding of the world and relationships with others?

My observations are, of course, limited: there are not very many such children among my acquaintances. But I notice, for example, that a child who is brought up outside the system has no fear of adults.

At school, children learn one thing very quickly: an adult is always right, his questions must be answered, and it is useless to argue and defend one’s opinion. Unschooler, if you start asking him questions like “Do you know the multiplication table?” or “Name the capital of Zimbabwe” might just ignore them.

Such children communicate freely with people of different ages and different cultures. Being an adult is not enough to earn the respect of an unschooler. For him, the authoritative is the one who knows more about the topic of interest to him than he does.

It seems to me that such a free upbringing will be successful only under one condition: when parents have absolute confidence in their children, in their natural abilities. How to get rid of the fear that the child will not want to do anything at all? How to make sure that he will be able to initiate the educational process?

Such fear arises in adults who have not seen free children. It is clear that most schoolchildren get so tired of the loads that they don’t want to do anything even during the holidays, and it seems to adults that apathy is their natural state. And what if they are not forced, they will lie on the couch, buried in the device.

For example, I noticed that my daughter, while she was still at school, during the summer holidays showed curiosity, a desire to do something. And then bam – and the new school year. We must, we must, let’s run, the schedule, the obligation, and what if we don’t have time … And her energy again went into decline.

We have gone through several such periods. And when she switched to family education, she changed: she had a desire to learn, try new things, the fear of failure disappeared. Gradually, I became convinced that the child himself wants to learn, this is his inner need.

After all, these are not my ideas. The idea of ​​adapting the environment to the child, and not the child to the environment, appeared as early as Lev Vygotsky. And Maria Montessori wrote about how important it is to create an environment of free development in which the child can learn something on his own.

Then these ideas were developed by the British educator Alexander Neill, who opened the free school Summerhill. He wrote that children are internally wise and, if left alone, they will develop themselves to the best of their ability. A child who follows his own interests always has something to do.

More often than not, they don’t have enough time during the day to finish their chores and go to bed. Another issue is that I am not always able to give them what they dream of. But this is life. Even if we choose each of 5 circles of different directions, the remaining 95 will still pass us by.

Are there taboos in your family?

I’m not setting the boundaries hard enough, but I don’t think that’s an oversight. A free approach to education, upbringing and life in general is our conscious choice. But we have rules in the house, there is a whole list hanging on the wall, and it lists what you can’t do: fight, shout, laugh at others, take other people’s things without asking.

We have reasons to both shout at each other and quarrel. But questions of food or sleep are not grounds for conflict. If dinner starts and the child refuses to eat, I will feed him later. But that rarely happens. Why? Do not even know. Probably because we are good together.