Unschooling as an Adult

what does it mean?

Unschooling as an adult is a somewhat confusing idea.

If unschooling is a reaction to compulsory, conventional education, what does it mean to “unschool” when you’re no longer legally mandated to attend school?

Some self-identified “adult unschoolers” grow up unschooling. Some are the parents of child unschoolers. And some, like me, discover unschooling as already-schooled adults and felt powerfully attracted to the concept.

Here are some different values and visions that I’ve seen affiliated with adult unschooling:

• Unschooling is about blazing your own trail. It’s about not doing what everyone else is doing. If something is popular, it’s probably not good for you. So be weird and different! The only way to fail is to be normal.

• Unschooling is about playfulness. To unschool as an adult is to retain a youthful spirit of fearless self-expression, play, wonder, and curiosity, long past the age where such traits usually atrophy.

• Unschooling is about avoiding institutions. Don’t go to college; find somewhere else to build skills and connect with people. Don’t enter a field requiring formal licensure; it will just homogenize you. Stay far away from anything resembling a lifeless, bureaucratic, mass-production school building.

• Unschooling is about consent. It’s about carefully analyzing your options in life, staying in touch with your feelings, and fully committing to whatever you do. In this view, an adult unschooler might happily pursue a traditional college degree or take a 9-to-5 job—as long they’ve made thoughtful choices, with full awareness of the alternatives, knowing none of their decisions are permanent.

• Unschooling is about resisting capitalism—whatever that means.¹ Through this lens, unschooling is necessarily political. Compulsory schooling, college debt, and and most normal jobs are part of the capitalist machine, conspiring to trap us in the wage slavery that feeds empire. To unschool as an adult means living a life dedicated to leftist or anarchist causes, working toward the liberation of the most oppressed, and becoming at least a part-time activist.

• Unschooling is about libertarianism. Unschooling is about expressing your natural liberties, battling illegitimate state power, and resisting government indoctrination. Schooling should be a free market, as should the “market” for one’s personal learning. Like the previous bullet, this is another explicitly political lens, but one favoring capitalism (of the small-state / anarcho-capitalist variety).

• Unschooling is about returning to ancestral roots and communing with nature. If the closest thing to unschoolers in human history are hunter-gatherers, then why not live more like them? Learn natural building, grow your own food, know your neighbors, and remove yourself from mainstream systems. Learn directly from nature and build a life that mimics natural systems.

• Unschooling is about self-employment. If school prepares you to take a 9-to-5, then adult unschooling means working for yourself, freelancing, being an artist or creative, taking interesting short-term gigs, and otherwise controlling your means of your production. Be your own boss.

• Unschooling is about being a passionate learner. To unschool as an adult is to declare, “I love learning, I never want to stop, and I don’t need school, college, or formal teachers to take myself where I want to go.” Simple as that.

If there’s a common thread here, perhaps it’s this. Adult unschoolers are those who look around at the expectations and constraints of normal adulthood and declare, “this is not how I want to live.” Then they make a decision that entails actual risk—the risk of appearing foolish, impractical, financially unwise, or romantically idealistic—in the pursuit of building a life of aligned values, improved mental health, and meaningful contribution to society. If they stumble and fall in this endeavor, they recognize that others will point and say “this is what you get for trying to be different.” But they press on nonetheless—aware of the risks, confronting the fears, in the spirit of adventure.

The Recess Bus

Thank you to Bria Bloom, Ben Rehrman, Genevieve Shade, and Grace Llewellyn for reading drafts of this.

1. Last summer I co-led a workshop at Not Back to School Camp called “Capitalism!”, in which my friend Nathen and I simply asked what people think the word means or implies. Most associated it with negative personality traits and concepts like greed, selfishness, rapaciousness, accumulation, patriarchy, and imperialism. The opposite of capitalism was generosity, cooperation, community, and inclusion. Few ventured a formal definition.