It’s easy to look back on your schooldays and feel bemused by what was deemed important for you to learn. I’m never calling on my hazy 15-year recollection of trigonometry, for example, though it was made to seem crucial at the time. In adulthood, however, I’ve had to research ISAs, voting and how much protein to eat – none of which, I’d argue, would go amiss in the curriculum if it were truly meant to set you up for life.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that parents are choosing to devise their own curriculums. Last month a “spiritual influencer” went viral on TikTok after sharing her radical approach to home schooling. “We don’t teach our children anything,” she said. “If you do not like this idea of sending your kids away for 40 hours a week … if you are not into your kids conforming, trust that you can follow their interests and they will learn everything they need to learn, not what other people need them to learn.”
In principle, I agree. I was taught by my mother for four years, from the ages of nine to 13, and look back on it today as in some ways my most useful and influential education. Where the influencer, Mami Onami, came undone was by proudly displaying her six-year-old son’s notebook, where he’d scrawled words like egg and lamp. Of course, developmental milestones aren’t uniformly met, and Onami later said she’d posted out of delight that her son was finally starting to take an interest in reading and writing. But the backlash to her video, with commenters calling Onami ignorant and negligent, suggests that it was not quite, perhaps, the endorsement of her “free-schooling” she’d intended.
Known more broadly as unschooling, this pedagogical method focuses on an informal approach led by the child. It was popularised in the 1970s by John Holt, a former teacher who’d become disillusioned by the education system. Today, unschooling is seen as distinct from home schooling in that there is no curriculum, classes or even formal teacher, but it is legal and reportedly gaining in popularity. In the UK, children must receive full-time education from the age of five, but are not bound to the national curriculum.
My own education cleaved to the curriculum, not least because my mother was a qualified teacher. But with the formal learning part of schooling typically over and done in a half day, I learned to fill the time by developing my own interests, following my curiosity and otherwise keeping my mind occupied.
Certainly there were gaps: I’m no good at maths, just like my mum. And I would argue that no child should have to learn sex ed in an intimate class of two from their parent. But the rest of my formative family education I remember positively as free-flowing, organic and influenced by my sister’s and my individual interests. That aspect I recognise in the aims of unschooling, and it’s served me well. No approach to (or experience of) home schooling will be the same, not least because of its overlap with family. But I credit mine with fostering in me an innate desire and drive to learn – something that not even the best schools can guarantee.
Having said that, I’m not sure I would look back so well on the experience if I hadn’t re-entered formal education, joining a high school in New Zealand at the age of 13. At first I struggled with the arbitrariness of the timetable (why did I have to go to English now, when I had an assessment due in art?), and its density: I’m not sure I ever retained anything I was taught between the hours of 2pm and 3pm. I settled in soon enough, however, and now I can see the benefits – of having to stick to a structure, sit through lessons that weren’t of interest to me and get along with people I’d never choose as friends. In those ways, at least, school is apposite preparation for later life and the world of work.
It’s those skills – certainly more essential than being able to analyse the themes of The Great Gatsby – that can be overlooked when discussing the benefits of unschooling or home schooling. But instead of some pedagogical idyll, home schooling can be a last resort. The recent rise in elective home education in the UK (to 92,000 children, as of last autumn) has been attributed to schools’ inconsistent ability to accommodate children’s individual needs, particularly in the case of neurodivergence or mental illness. But parents may not be equipped to meet those needs either. And children in neglectful or abusive homes are safer at school, as the UK’s child safeguarding practice review panel recently concluded, not because home schooling is an inherent risk factor, but because of extra opportunities for intervention.
In his inaugural Growing Without Schooling newsletter in 1977, Holt applauded the “good example” of parents who pulled their son out of a school where (even his father admitted) he was happy because they saw peer pressure, and even the mere presence of other children, as an exclusively negative influence. Holt agreed, writing: “If I had no other reason for wanting to keep kids out of school (and I have many), the social life would be reason enough … mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, full of talk about who is talking to so-and-so and who is not.”
That sounds to me like apt preparation for the world. Holt came to advocate for disengaging from the school system because of his particular objection to the curriculum, and its “absurd and harmful” assumption that there was a single body of knowledge that should be taught and tested. But formal education can have benefits beyond the letter of learning; and home schooling can result in crucial gaps. The system is undoubtedly in need of an overhaul, to better accommodate all learners; but preaching non-participation, in response to schools’ prescriptiveness, seems an equally narrow solution.
I feel grateful for my dual experience of a relatively free-form, personalised education, and the conventional one that came after. Both were challenging and expansive in different ways. But I often wonder how I might have fared in only one or the other.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
