Kate HammerIt has been Saturday in the Laricchia household for nearly a decade.
The family’s three teenagers, Michael, Lissy and Joseph, have known nothing of alarm clocks, races for the school bus, arguments over homework or report-card angst since their parents started “unschooling” them in 2002.
The small but growing movement the Laricchias have joined is known by many other names, including deschooling, life learning and edu-punk. At base, unschooling is home-schooling returned to its postwar progressive roots, far from the Bible-thumping mould that has come to dominate the modern image of home-schoolers.
Unschooling takes children out of schools, but, unlike a lot of home-school approaches, it doesn’t import the classroom into the home. It does away altogether with educational clutter such as curricula and grades.
Unschoolers maintain that a child’s learning should be curiosity-driven rather than dictated by teachers and textbooks, and that forcing kids to adhere to curricula quashes their natural inclination to explore and ask questions.
To an outsider, unschooling may sound like pedagogical tofu: a shapeless, idealistic substitute for an education. But there’s a growing consensus that unschoolers might be on to something. Their ideals have been quietly infiltrating public education.
“An unschooling family mostly just looks like a family living life … hanging out on the weekend,” says mother Pam Laricchia, a former nuclear engineer who lives in Orangeville, Ont. “But there is lots of learning going on when you take the time to look at it from the kids’ point of view.”
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