The Power Of Unschooling: Why My Daughters Don’t Go To School
How does a 10-year-old Atlanta-based black girl with Jamaican parents, shoulder-length locs, and zero interest in school become deeply immersed in the studies of Finno-Ugric language groups and Eurasian migration?
It started with flags. And the Internet, of course.
Sage would come across an image of a flag, then search online to find its related country. Then, she’d see the country’s name written in its national language(s) to the right on its Wikipedia page.
Seeing the languages written down nudged her toward exploring the languages themselves, and that’s where she discovered that she loves languages.
But why would a 10-year old be researching flags?
For a school project, most likely. Right?
Not in this case, because Sage, along with her twelve-year old sister, are part of a family that practices self-directed education: specifically, unschooling. Unschooling, a term coined by John Holt in the 1970’s, is used to describe self-directed education, or learning that does not centralize school or a particular curriculum.
As a self-directed learner (unschooler), much of Sage’s (and her sister, Marley’s) time is spent exploring the things they find interesting.
Those interests, like all things in the world, do not exist in vacuums. They are connected to other things, people, and places, and so their exploration of a single thing will always result in exposure to other things, the same way flag research led Sage to discover her love for languages in written form.
