Unschooling

There is one other method of homeschooling that I wanted to mention, though it is not a method I use because I am, in my daughter’s words, a control freak! That is not very nice, is it?
So, what is unschooling? For most people, the picture the name conjures up is kids laying around on the sofa, playing video games. There is an idea that unschooling is not-schooling. I would suggest that unschooling is not nearly as undisciplined as that.
The basic idea of unschooling is to let the child’s natural curiosity guide what he studies. The job of the parent is not that of teacher, but that of facilitator. It is the parent’s job to make sure that the child has access to the materials and resources necessary for the child to learn about those things that interest him.
I have noticed, in my five years of homeschooling, that unschoolers may be as far from homeschoolers in philosophy as homeschoolers are from public and private schoolers. This is not a judgment on unschooling, just an observation.
I guess I am a control freak, as my daughter states, because I just can’t let go that much. It is important to me that my daughter take courses in traditional school subjects, because I need her to be able to take the SAT and get admitted to college at some point. In my own opinion, if I fail to act as teacher, to ensure that she studies courses that she is not good at, or holds no interest in (like math!) and she pays for that later in her education, it will be on my head. So yeah, I’m a control freak!J