Many parents with families and people planning their families have realized that there are many alternatives to the mainstream schooling system. Whether it be homeschooling, unschooling, Waldorf or Montessori, just to name a few options, there are so many out there. Today I am going to introduce you to my friend, Lucy, at Life Without School and she is going to share 6 reasons why she chooses to unschool her children. Here she is... Lucy: Hi everybody! I'm Lucy. I live in New Zealand in a yurt with my 2 children, Ramona who is 9 and Gina who is 7. And my partner, Tim. One of the more radical parts of our life is that we live a life totally without school. In fact, we live a life totally without any curriculum whatsoever. Some people call this unschooling, some people call it whole life learning, but it's really just living as humans have lived for millennia. Which is learning by doing and learning within your community. Learning from those around you. Simply experiencing rather than sitting behind a desk being taught stuff that you're not really that interested in. It's really a paradigm that exists totally outside of mainstream education. And today I wanted to share with you 6 of the main reasons that we do it. There's actually loads and loads, but I've tried to distill them into 6. When we became parents, one of the main things we wanted to do is to provide an environment for our children where they could just blossom into who they were inside without any of our molding or shaping of them. I don't really think that that is the the job of the parents. I think the parents main role is to make space for this unique human that has been brought into their life. For us, unschooling is really an extension of that philosophy. We just want to support our children and the way they want to learn and what they want to learn. Without them feeling any need to conform to what we expect or what we think, arbitrarily, they should be learning. So, the number 1 reason is that we want our children to be able to learn in a way that is free from shame. So, you know, 85% of adults have had an experience of shaming in their school years that so effected them that it impacts their adult life. That's 85%. That's a huge majority of people. And that's because mainstream education uses shame and punishment as a way to get such a massive group of kids learning what teachers think is important. Shame can have a pretty catastrophic impact on your ability to really be yourself. So we wanted to provide an environment where our kids didn't experience that. Even when they were learning in a way that seemed pretty random or messy (laughs), we could just make space for that learning and how they wanted to do it. I think because of the mainstream education system we've made shame and punishment quite an everyday part of the human experience. We've kind of normalized it and that has been done to the detriment of our ability to create a fair, just, and beautiful world. Okay, number 2. Unschooling is curiosity based learning. And we embrace that because all of the studies show that learning that is done where there is self motivation, or a kind of seed of curiosity is one, much more effective for learning the actual thing that you are trying to pick up, but also activates parts of your brain that makes it easier for you to learn anything that is coming up while you are in that state. Also, thirdly, studies show that curiosity allows learning to be stored in your memory. So, the learning when you are curious is like a long term thing. I can imagine that quite a lot of you watching understand that on some level, because how much of your schooling do you actually remember? For me, it is very little. I am a writer and I have to google the difference between noun and adjective (laughs) on quite a regular basis. The 3rd reason that we are unschoolers is because we want to create a learning environment that's totally stress free. Just like learning without curiosity, learning in a stressful environment is such a waste of time. Stress has a huge impact on your amygdala, which essentially ends up sending information to the wrong part of your brain, not to your higher brain where you can rationally look at the information and create a learning journey. But it sends it down to the fight or flight zone when you are in stress, so your brain actually doesn't know what to do with information when you are in a stressful state. There are some statistics about this, saying that 65% of 12 year old school children are stressed because of their school environment. Obviously, that has a massive impact on what they are actually taking in, what information they are actually taking in while they are in the classroom. But also, huge impacts on their mental health and their physical health. I just think that trying to raise children in a constantly stressful environment, because of testing and competition, because of shame and punishment, is just a super unhealthy thing. So, a typical day of unschooling might involve us hanging around here. It often involves us meeting up with friends and doing different unschooling groups and exploring the wild. It's always fun. There might be conflict, but there is space to figure out the conflicts so it doesn't become a genuinely toxic or stressful scenario. We're joy seekers rather than stressed out learners. 4, we are unschooling because we believe that you are learning all of the time. Learning doesn't begin at 5 and ends at 18 when you leave formal education But most parents get this, right? You don't try to teach your child to walk or talk, you just know that they're going to pick those things up by being in a walky, talky kind of environment. And we just believe that that continues on. Nothing needs to change when they turn a certain age. Our kids are 7 and 9 now, and they are reading, writing, doing art, creating, making things, doing heaps of math, like genuine love of math. And they are just doing it by living. There has never been a sit down, formal class for my children. They always just learn through their experience of being human. And, actually, as adults we do this all the time. If we want to learn something new as an adult we will just find a way to access it. In the last few years I have taught myself how to play the ukulele, I've taught myself how to make electronic digital music (laughs). I've built a business. I've done absolutely loads of things like moving almost into mastery of some of those things simply by accessing the resources that will help me. Even doctors do this when they get presented with a case that they don't really know what's going on. They might ring some colleagues, they might look up online, or delve into their books in order to get to the bottom this new illness or this new case. That is really essentially unschooling. It's learning through doing. The 5th reason we are unschooling is because we just trust our children and we want them to learn that they can trust themselves. Our children know that their instincts are good, that their urges are good, that their needs are valuable. Whereas I think mainstream education can really undermine a child's trust in themselves. They're told to learn this in this moment, and then a bell rings and they're told to switch their mind over to the new thing and learn that thing. They're told to mistrust their body's desire to move when it wants to move. We even ask children, through schooling, to trespass on their own boundaries, both mentally and physically, quite a lot through mainstream education. And through unschooling we kind of do the opposite of this. We say, what you are feeling is good, your needs are good, I trust you and you can trust yourself. And that leads me to the 6th reason that we are unschooling and that's all about world change. When i first began this whole unschooling thing I just thought, ya we're doing this because this is what works for our family and this is the path we've been called to. But the more that I'm immersed in this world, I've actually come to believe that unschooling and other forms of alternative education are really the embodiment of the just and peaceful, loving world that I think is possible. I believe that mainstream education, as it stands, with it's shame, punishment, testing, competitive nature...you know, ranking kids against each other...I believe that is like the seedbed of some of society's most problematic issues. We're coming into this understanding that we are actually not born competitive. We're born cooperative, that's our human nature, I really believe that. I think through the schooling system we pit kids against each other and that bleeds into the rest of society. There's almost like a collective societal wound from our school days and it makes itself known in individuals in a different way. So, some people are people pleasers, some people are afraid of authority or afraid to rock the boat. A lot of people feel that they are just not intrinsically good enough. A lot of people struggle to rest and play. This is all stuff that we learn through our schooling years, when we are being shunted from one activity to the other with our minds placed in somebody elses' hands. These days I tend to think that mainstream education is one of the strongholds of capitalism. Raising people who are so unhappy and mistrust themselves so much with so much mental anguish that we have to consume and fight in order to feel okay. Oooh, got a little bit heavy there (laughs). But for me, that makes sense, when you place children for 15, or more, of their formative years into an institution that's kind of what you get. Those are 6 of the reasons that we've chosen unschooling. I'm super happy to answer any questions that you have and the unschooling world is very friendly, so if you want to jump on board this ship we would welcome you with open arms. That sounds a bit weird and cult-y, it's not really like that. There's too much anarchy for it to be cult-y. (laughs) Rob: I hope that you got a lot out of that time with Lucy. If you did, make sure to subscribe to her channel where she shares a lot of valuable information on teaching children in a home setting. And make sure to subscribe to this channel, as well, for a lot more great videos to come. I love you all very much and see you again real soon!