Home-educating a free-range, mixed-age brood

The ages of my children, in descending order, are 19, 18, 16, 6, and nearly 2. I home educate them all using the autonomous method, also known as unschooling. This article is about how that works.

So, obviously, I can’t spend all my time helping just one child to learn, or even all my time helping all my children to learn. I forgot to add that I’m a single mother, so there’s the house to run, meals to prepare, shopping to get and so on and I’m a writer too. We don’t all sit around the kitchen table pouring over or ploughing through coursework.

Is coursework the best kind of learning, anyway? This is the moot point. If you want to build a portfolio of educational certificates in order to help you find a job, then some coursework is necessary for that. But for actual learning – well, how do we really learn? How does that function work?

It usually starts with curiosity. Very young children are naturally extremely curious people. If allowed, they like to crawl or toddle around exploring, touching, tasting, listening and experimenting with their environment. If you watch a toddling child, you can actually see it carrying out experiments all the time: trying different things, seeing what the results are. Testing their ideas and learning from the results.

Most schools thwart this vital learning process by seeking to take control and direct it. The child stops experimenting, stops questioning. The best kind of educational provision allows exploration and encourage experimentation. Who are we to say what a child should learn? Curiosity is a fragile thing – if you override it, it switches off. Sometimes, permanently.

The best learning happens when we question things, when we burn to find answers and when we’re free to do both.

Let’s go back to the thing about portfolios and jobs. Is having a job the best way of earning money? For some people it might be, but for many it’s a soul-destroying way of life. Working for someone else, day in, day out, hoping for a promotion, seeing the bosses take all the profit. I know a lot of people who feel they could do a better job of running their company than the people in charge, but they daren’t branch out on their own because they’ve got a mortgage or rent and rent and debts to pay.

But imagine if, instead of school, you’d had a childhood full of natural learning in which you were free to find out what you were really good at and stick at it obsessively (we are naturally obsessive creatures) until you became an artisan. Imagine you never got used to a daily schedule, with measured portions of work but instead you liked to work non-stop on projects until you finished them and that you really enjoyed that work and could be well paid for it.

Imagine you had the confidence to intrinsically know when you were really good at something by virtue of the thousands of hours you’d been free to invest in it and from the peer group feedback you’d been free to elicit for yourself, when you felt ready to do so.

Then you wouldn’t need to go to an employer for a job to be able to pay your bills. You wouldn’t need your portfolio of certificates and you wouldn’t need to spend most of your time, until adulthood, in educational institutions learning what someone else decided you should learn, in the way they decided you should learn it. You would start your working life in credit, not in debt and you would fill your portfolio with examples of your success.

That’s not the outcome for all unschooled children, but it’s a likely alternative to the mainstream and of course, they’re not precluded from doing coursework or taking exams if that’s what they want to do.

My older three children haven’t pursued qualifications up to press. My older son (19) is gearing up to set up his own business, doing what he’s been so good at for so long: building, maintaining and repairing IT systems. His 18 year old brother is as yet undecided whether to join him in this, or to develop his work in translation and interpreting – languages being his thing.

They choose to spend most of their time learning and developing their skills and ideas. I don’t have to stand over them. Indeed, they wouldn’t thank me for doing so. All three of the older children have always been very independent learners. Over the years, I’ve provided tutors, books, equipment, transport and (when possible) funds for what they’ve wanted to do and I still do that.

I also provide a sounding board for their theories and – not to be underestimated – I stand as a protector of their freedom and space to live their own lives. I provide stability: the deep roots of a solid foundation from which they can safely grow in whatever direction and shape is best for them.

I’m the person they’re trying to explain their theories to, while I’m stirring a pan or cleaning a floor. Sometimes you can’t understand something properly until you’ve explained it to someone else. I’m the person they’re often brainstorming with while they’re trying to work out how to do something, or what to do for the best – though they use their siblings and friends for that too. I’m the person who says: “Yes, you can do that. I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Let’s work out how you could do it,” or sometimes just: “Let me know if you need help,” is enough.

They come and find me when they need me and I’m usually available to them, because I think older children – young adults – still need that kind of parental relationship. Perhaps we all do.

Our six year-old is learning all the time, but so is the baby too. In a natural, healthy environment, that’s what people do. But with the six year-old, it’s very definite, deliberate learning on her part. She says: “I want to learn this,” and she learns it, often with my help. She wants to learn to read and is making good progress in that respect. The reason she wants to learn is not because anyone has persuaded her that it’s a useful skill, but because she sees the rest of us benefiting from it and she struggles with the activities of her choice (computer games, websites, comics, maps) without it.

Like her older siblings, she comes to find me if she needs help with something or wants to share something, both of which happen frequently. Whenever possible I stop what I was doing and go to accede to her request. She doesn’t always need my help: sometimes one of her siblings is a better person for the job, or sometimes she’d rather play or work something out by herself.

The baby is free to roam around the house and, in good weather, the garden. I make the environment safe for her and there are many books and toys around. She often brings a story for me to read to her and I make it a priority to stop what I’m doing and to sit down with her and the book. How else will she want to be literate, if she doesn’t learn about the treasure and pleasure to be found in a book?

They both have free access to art equipment too, and computers, games and puzzles. Lyddie asks questions all the time, and isn’t scared to stop me when I’ve answered too much, or to challenge my replies. Nor am I scared to say: “I don’t know. Let’s go and find out,” to anything. I’m only her mother, not an oracle. But I do see it as my parental duty to help her find the answers she needs.

And that’s how we live here. Our days are free-flowing, not usually pre-planned. Each one is different; each hour is different. We do what we want and also what we need to do, to enable us to live the way we want to live. Home education frees us from structure and schedule, and from other people’s ideas about the way we’re supposed to do things and in our situation, this has had some very happy and healthy results for all concerned.

By Gill Kilner

http://gillkilner.blogspot.com/