Unschool

We’re the unschool crowd. Nope, not the uncool crowd; those extra letters are intentional. We don’t have to waste our time in car line or on the bus. We don’t have to follow dress code or wear uniforms. We don’t have to be confined to desks for hours or locked in one room. We don’t have to fill in bubbles to prove we know things. We definitely don’t have to raise hands and get hall passes to go to the bathroom!

We don’t have to wake up before dawn and rush to catch the schoolbus. We don’t have to go to bed before the sun goes down. We don’t have to walk in lines and we don’t get punished for running in halls. We don’t have to choke down cafeteria food in the five to ten minutes left after walking to and from a classroom and standing in line for a tray.

We don’t have to raise our hands to answer questions. We don’t have to complete extra busy work for a grade because the teacher has too many students to focus on one at a time. We don’t have to struggle to follow a lesson plan that doesn’t match our learning styles. We don’t have to be quiet and sit still.

We are the unschool crowd. We read every book we can find. We play every song, we paint every picture, we write every story. We watch the trees and the stars and the grasshoppers and invent new technology with what we observe. We play with computer codes in our living room and design complicated feats of architecture in our backyard. We run barefoot in the rain and harvest God’s bounty under the sun. We play games and watch tv, then create our own. We converse with the aged and cuddle the infants. We chase after dreams and make them goals. We trip over mistakes then use them as stairs.  We are free to find out who we are as individuals and free to act on that knowledge. We are entrepreneurs and leaders, philanthropists and friends. We are the unschool crowd, and we are very cool.