KeyesFamily.org Life Learning - Unschooling - Home Schooling

=================================================================== Jordan and Garrett have not attended school. They went to pre-school for a bit, but never kindergarten or above. As of this writing, they are 11 and 9 years old. We "home-schooled" them for a while; then moved toward "un-schooling", which we now refer to as "life learning" to emphasize what we want over what we do not. We are often asked "how do you do it?" and "that must be very difficult and take up a lot of time" as well as "what about socialization?" and lots of other questions - all of which we enjoy. Life learning is easy to do and takes very little effort - just geniune, contagious, continuous curiosity. Still, it's hard to answer the questions directly because our model is so far from the typical paradigm. It's really easy to learn things all day, every day - especially without clocks and bells getting in the way too much. I guess it's hard to answer because an unstructured learning model is natural, but very far from the standard paradigm. We have lots of - some structured, some not - and many, many opportunities to learn beyond them. Perhaps our basic beliefs help: we're raising adults, not children; they're welcome to try most anything if it's not harming anyone else and isn't likely to cause themselves permanent bodily injury. That makes for a lot of room to learn in life. A few examples of things that make us very proud: - they've started their own businesses; - they wrote a partnership agreement and a basic business plan; - they can read a P&L and Balance Sheet; - they understand the concepts of assets and the fallacy of most statements of "I'm investing in..." WRT non-assets; - they are not intimidated by most people... regardless of age; - they will negotiate most anything - with genuine, open curiousity; - they take up new things regularly (sewing, reading, chess, surfing, climbing, skating, sign-language, balloon twisting, etc); - they entertain themselves without electronics (when electronics aren't available, of course); - they'll engage in a discussion about politics or religion as eagerly as video games. Of course, we are proud of their integrity toward themselves and others above all else. Yeah, they don't suck at reading, writing and arithmetic... but we're really not too worried about that. -------------------------------------------------------------