I have an adult learning unschooling challenge for you! It’s part of a series of challenges that I’ve written that, hopefully, will help turn unschooling principles and ideas into something real in your lives.
Years ago, I used to think education was for kids. I’d been to school and completed my education. Now it was my children’s turn to work (and their turn to suffer.) It was me against them. Some days getting them to learn was a real battle.
I’ve realised since those early days that learning is for everyone. It’s not something just school-aged children do. We’re all going to continue learning throughout our lifetimes until the day we die.
Knowing that learning is life-long is exciting, isn’t it? What have we yet to discover? What adventures are ahead of us? What passions and interests will we get involved with and how will we use them? And if there’s something we wish we’d learnt about when we were younger, well, it’s not too late to learn it!
When we think of learning as something our kids do, we focus all our time and energy on them. We put aside our interests. We don’t think about the things we’d like to know more about. We sacrifice what we enjoy, thinking we’re doing it for the sake of our kids.
But our learning isn’t a luxury. We don’t have to feel guilty when we spend time doing the things we enjoy because we have to be good examples of learning for our children. It’s important that they see us learning, isn’t it? They need to know that learning is something everyone does. It’s an essential part of life. It’s just what we all do.
Also, excitement for learning is contagious. If we want our kids to love learning, we have to visibly love it too.
And if they see us involved with our own learning, there’s a chance they’ll be curious – “What are you doing, Mum? Can I have a go? Can I watch too?” – especially if we take an interest in what they’re passionate about as well.
Then there are times when having our own interests keeps us out of trouble. If we’re busy learning, we‘ll be less inclined to interfere with our kids’ learning. We won’t be hovering at their shoulders when they’re involved deeply with something, wanting to direct things, worrying about the value of what they’re doing, because we feel at a loose end and not needed.
So, for this challenge, we’re going to think about adult unschooling.
- What are we learning at the moment?
- Do we have any passions and interests?
- How are we learning?
- How do we learn best?
- Do learning opportunities arrive unexpectedly?
- Do we search for them?
- Do we learn something new every day?
We could also think about this: do kids learn in the same way as adults? What if there was no such thing as school and even homeschool? Would our kids still learn?
I discussed this topic in a vlog: An Adult Learning Unschooling Challenge. I hope you’ll watch it!
And one last thing: as I mentioned in my vlog, there are lots of stories about how kids learn and the importance of adult unschooling in my book, Curious Unschoolers. Maybe that’s something you could check out!
Update: You can find 76 unschooling challenges, in my book, The Unschool Challenge!
