My family was part of the birth of the modern unschooling movement, over three decades ago. When Heidi and Melanie, now ages 35 and 33, were children, they didn’t attend school. Nor did they see learning as work. They didn’t use a curriculum or workbooks, nor were they graded or tested. They learned math, reading, writing, science and geography in the same way they learned to walk and talk. Their learning was experiential and inquiry-based, led by their interests and curiosity. They explored, investigated, asked questions, experimented, took risks, got ideas and tested them out, made connections, made mistakes and tried again. It was a rich and joyful way of life, with knowledge and skills picked up both purposefully and incidentally, guided by their innate need to participate in, explore and make sense of the world around them.

A lot of what they did day by day looked like playing or daydreaming. In our society, play is the opposite of work. As products of that Industrial Age-induced work ethic, we think of work as unpleasant, something one does during the week in order to afford to play during the week and summer vacation. We have made education into an industrial process, where facts are stuffed into people like so many sausage casings. And that, of course, is work. We have turned a potentially joyful experience hateful with our schedules and rules and structure. And we have confused our children, who are smart enough to know the difference between the challenge of doing productive work and the numbness that results from busywork that doesn’t accomplish anything.

The basis of unschooling, on the other hand, is that children are born to be curious, independent, active, self-directed learners and will remain that way if school doesn’t dampen their natural curiosity about the world by turning learning into something unpleasant..into work. Children don’t naturally think in terms of math or reading being “hard;” we create those feelings if we force them to learn these skills before they are developmentally or emotionally ready, or before they are interested. When people memorize something without truly understanding it, they haven’t really learned it. When a skill is mastered in the context of an interest and need experienced in the real world, it is truly learned.

Melanie is now a largely self-taught conservation horticulturalist who runs a native plant botanical garden that is part of a university-based environmental sciences center. Heidi is a talented, self-taught graphic designer and writer of literary fiction whose latest novel was short-listed for a book award. They pursue their adult lives with the passion, joy, curiosity and self-reliance that were hallmarks of their unschooled years. Their “work” is fun, and they continue to learn about the world as effortlessly as they did as young children. I think that’s evidence of a successful education and a successful life…and all a parent could wish for.