Unschooling is a controversial range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.

Unschooling, sometimes called “natural learning” is the ultimate in self-directed learning, where learning is child-initiated and child-directed. The philosophy maintains that most basic skills will be required by and learned thru life experiences, and that children learn better when they  truly want to learn and are self-motivated to learn about a particular topic.  Ideally this means that parents should act only as a facilitator providing opportunities for learning, but never trying to coerce a child into learning something they have not chosen to learn.

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