Homeschool Interview with Judy Arnall of Alberta Homeschooling Association

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Alright, well, thank you everyone for joining us live and everyone who will be joining us afterwards for this a very informal discussion with Judy Arnall, who is in my estimation an expert with unschooling. She’s an author as well of several different topics, and the one book that has my attention right now is this one here that she has written, and it’s called Unschooling to University. So we’ll be talking about specifically unschooling, what it is, what it isn’t, and examples and all sorts of things. So buckle yourself in, we’re going to have a really fun ride here today with Judy as we learn more about unschooling.

So Judy, thanks so much for joining us today. I know you have a very busy schedule and you’re involved in so many different things, to to include the Alberta Homeschooling Association, so your time is precious. So I definitely appreciate you making time to visit with us today. So at this point, I’d like you to introduce yourself and let us all know your background in particular, in those areas that led you to unschooling, and how you got involved with the idea of homeschooling, the philosophy, how it just grew in your mind as to what it is and what you wanted it to be for your children.

Judy’s Background and Philosophy
Okay, that sounds great. Well, my work life is actually in teaching Child Development and best parenting practices. So I’ve worked for 13 years for Alberta Health Services and I’ve also taught at the University of Calgary continuing ed for 13 years, and I’ve always and adult education is self-directed education, it so is. So we don’t stand at the front of the room and lecture, that’s not cool. We send out needs assessments to our participants and find out what they want to learn, and that’s what I want to do today. I’m not going to give you the full webinar of what what unschooling is, but I want you to ask your questions and we’ll jump off from there.

So then I had five kids and they started school, and then a lot of the schools are being underutilized so they were closing schools, and I just thought, “Oh boy.” I had one child with a learning disability, another child who um just was bored and didn’t want to be there. So I fought with them for two years to keep them in school, and then I decided, “No, this isn’t working. I’m going to try homeschooling.” So I did that, and then by November that year, the kids stopped listening to me, stopped doing the assignments, and it really occurred to me how different the parent-child relationship is from the teacher-child relationship. At home you’re safe, they can say no to you, they can put up tantrums every day, things they wouldn’t do in the classroom. I hope, maybe they do, but I know mine wouldn’t. So they just stopped listening to me, and I thought I was yelling, I was um trying to get assignments done to send into the school and it just was not working. So then it was either um we had to change something. So I knew about unschooling but I so didn’t trust it. I thought it was kind of wacky and flaky, you know, the granola people do that. And then but more and more we let go of the assignments and we played. We just played, we traveled, we did projects, the kids played, and it was all un-parent directed play. So the best play, for example, was the year we cut down our big tree in the backyard, dug up the roots, and the kids had so much fun. They were making cities in the mud and the dirt and they added water and and built little homes for the worms. Now the neighbors’ parents didn’t like me very much, but the kids had a ball, and they were learning science and properties and and social skills and all those things. So that’s when I realized that my kids were learning pretty well everything the kids in grades one to nine were learning in, but in a more experiential, fun, play-based way.

So when my kids went to high school, they’re old enough, you can sit down and say, “Hey, what do you want to do with your life?” and they by then they had interests and passions and you could really see what their their uh their gifts were. So I said, “Well,” I said to the one who was really good in math but never could catch long division, I said, “What do you want to do?” and he was kind of leaning toward engineering. So I said, “Okay, well you’re going to need some Grade 12 credits to go into engineering in math, science, and whatever else universities need.” And by then they’re like, “Okay, yeah, I can do that,” because they haven’t had nine years of schooling. So just when kids are burning out, like kids enter high school and they’re like, “Oh, I’m so done,” and really unschoolers start gearing up because they haven’t had all that um schoolish. So they we did a self-directed high school program, which means that we had to meet Alberta programs of study outcomes, but we could have a lot of leeway on how we did that, and we did that under home education. So they all got diplomas, Grade 12 marks and credits and the Alexander Rutherford scholarships and University entrance scholarships. So three have graduated University now, three of my kids went into stem careers, one’s in a master’s program, she’s in Humanities, and they’re happy and they’re all working, yay.

So, what is unschooling? Because you’re going to find a lot of people have different ideas of what it is, right? So I want to show you this little graph of what unschooling is. So, as per our question, I’m just going to bring up slides that I think would be, I kind of remember where they are, but slides that I think would be relevant. So this is the trajectory of an unschooler. Everybody unschools actually from ages zero to six. So you’re a child’s baby, a toddler, a preschooler. And then at age six we say, “Oh okay, you can’t go on this play track anymore, you have to go on this school track.” So you can’t learn what you want to learn, you have to learn what the school wants you to learn. Whereas, and this could be homeschooling and school, it is a structured learning directed by adults. Unschooling is learning totally directed by the learner. So the learner decides what they’re going to learn, when they’re going to learn it, how they’re going to learn it, who they’re going to learn it from, where they’re going to learn it, and even if they’re going to learn it. If they don’t want to learn long division, they don’t have to learn long division, but at some point in their life they might need long division, and if they need it and they perceive a need for it, that’s when they’ll do it. It differs from, I like to use the buffet analogy, where there’s a buffet of all kinds of foods, and in school, the child is standing next to the buffet holding a plate and the school decides what goes on that child’s plate and how much of the the broccoli and the chocolate cake goes on the plate. In home education, it’s the parent deciding how much goes on that plate, but in unschooling, the child decides how much broccoli, how much chocolate cake, and even if those things go on their plate. And if you trust children, leave them to their own devices and you don’t put one on the pedestal against another, they will make good choices according to what they need. So unschooling is a methodology of learning, and yeah, so how’s [Laughter] that? That’s good.

Q&A Session
What Unschooling is NOT

Well, let me jump in if you don’t mind and say what what is homeschooling not like, what are because I think a lot of perhaps some people here in the in our audience and those who are going to be watching this later, they’re hearing that and their mind is going to the, “Yeah but what about this?” or so I’m thinking those “yeah buts” are based on understanding of unschooling or thinking of unschooling in ways that unschooling really isn’t. But it’s just we’ve all been conditioned, I think, according to school and we have to be unschooled in our own way of thinking about unschooling. So what is unschooling not? What what are you, what is, what’s a, or what’s a bad way of doing unschooling?

Okay, it all boils down to motivation. So if you’re having motivation problems trying to get your child to do something, learn something, practice a skill, that is not unschooling in a nutshell. So it’s totally learner-driven. Now unschoolers, it’s not to say that we don’t put things out there that they can stumble on, which is called strewing. So for example, I’ll take a bucket of pattern blocks and put them on the kitchen table and leave them there, and then soon my kids are walking by and they and they start playing, right? And I’ll leave them there until they no longer play with them, and that is so child-directed. So we may put things in their path, we may suggest, “Hey, do you want piano lessons?” or maybe, “Hey, do you want to try an online math course this year?” And if your child says yes, great, that’s unschooling. But if your child says no and you respect that and you don’t sign them up, that’s unschooling. Now, if they say no and you start to really push it, that is not unschooling. That is that is more parent-directed education, right? So it it has to be freely taken on by the learner. And I outline about 61 benefits of that in my book is that there are no motivation problems ever. A lot of schools are self-directed schools. The Canadian Coalition of self-directed schools has a conference every year and every year they talk about motivation problems, why? Because that’s not really self-directed education, it is in pace. The child gets to choose pace, but they don’t get to choose what they want to learn. So this is totally what they want to learn.

Is it fair to say when unschooling is done really well it actually requires more input and more time from the parent because you’re you’re creating environments? Is it correct to say that the parent is working behind the scenes to after after questioning the student, your child, as to what the interest is, then you go out and you try to find those resources, those opportunities? So you’re doing things in the background to create the environment. Is that correct?

Yes, yes, so your job is the facilitator. So your role is to get your kids things they can’t get themselves, things they need. So if your son wants to build a 3D printer, say they’re 13, they don’t have any money, they can’t get the parts, that’s your job is to get out there and and shop with them and help them get those things. For younger children, it looks a lot different. It looks like a Saturday in June in July, pretty well, that’s what your house looks like. Your kids get up and maybe they decide they’re going to open a potion shop in your kitchen. So they get on the counter and they start mixing spices and things in a dish and they and then they get the cash register and they decide to sell you potions, right? So they’re learning math and science and that’s what unschooling looks like there. Sometimes it involves mess, sometimes it involves a little bit of cost, but not so much. Young kids use whatever’s around the house. They’ll turn a bunk bed in sheets into a puppet show and sell tickets for that. They tend to be very entrepreneurial very early, but you know and they’re learning, they’re learning social skills, they’re learning English on how to write how to make tickets, those kinds of things, and through their play. So it’s it’s so much fun for kids. So for example, this is my oldest son, and he this is him in kindergarten and he nagged and nagged and nagged me. He wanted to know if you could grow an egg tree. So I know and I’m like, “Oh wait till you take bio 30 and you’ll learn all about eggs then.” And then I thought, “Well, maybe I don’t want you to learn about those eggs.” But he wanted to do it. So more and more when he was in school, I found I was after-schooling. So he’d come home and then he wanted to learn what he really wanted to learn, he was nagging me. So finally we went out and planted some eggs and and he learned experientially that maybe you can’t grow an egg tree, right?

So, for the most part, it’s less work for parents because the kids start owning their education and they take responsibility for setting up experiments or doing whatever they want to do in their play. But it’s also a lot of work because you don’t just do a half an hour of homeschooling a day and then you’re done, put the books away, done, checked it off. It’s constant. It’s 24/7, it’s 365 days a year. It’s it’s life, it becomes your lifestyle, learning. Yeah, so another example was we went on holidays and we were traveling and we stayed with some relatives and they wanted to know how toilets in England worked, so we took the toilet apart, right? It’s it’s constant learning and helping them get what they need.

How would you create the unschooling environment for a child who really likes horses?

That’s a good example. So for a child that really loves horses, they’re going to be passionate about it, they’re going to want to know everything about it. So you might start off by going to the library and getting books out, picture books if they can’t read yet, and you go to the toy store and buy toy horses, figurines that they can play with. And then if they can read, then you get more books out that they can read about horses. So there’s your language arts. You could buy a zoo pass so that you can go to the zoo and visit horses every day, if you know you’re that nice. And then they they can watch the zookeeper care for horses, they can see what they eat, they can talk to the zookeeper, and the zookeeper tells them all about the science of animals’ needs and horses. And then they might want horseback riding lessons. See why we need more funding? Yes, because those are pricier than workbooks and textbooks. And so then you you sign up for horseback. There’s actually classes where they don’t even have to ride, they can just learn about horses. So there’s classes you can sign, and classes are not for boredom. If if children really want classes and lessons, that’s unschooling as long as it’s their desire and not your desire. So then they would learn about math. They would learn about maybe they want to buy their own horse, so then they learn budgeting, how much do they need, where can they um leave the horse or, you know, house it, all those things tie into it. So then they’re learning math skills, they’re learning science, they’re learning English language arts, so they’re learning all the courses through their passion.

And I’ve witnessed that too with my kids. They they loved video games. They grew up when Nintendo was exploding, right? Pokémon, Kirby, Zelda, all those, and they were passionate about it and they would they would learn language arts and math and maybe a little bit of science and things like that through their video games because they play the games and then they go write a story about Kirby and then they go make a puppet about Yoshi, those kinds of things. So you can’t stop a child from learning. They will nag you to learn more and help them to learn more.

Would you say a unit study approach is along the lines of unschooling?

Yes, a unit study is, but the difference is it’s not pre-planned. Everything in unschooling tends to unfold as it happens. So we get up in a day and we have no idea what’s happening, what’s going to happen, what the kids are going to learn or where the day is going to take us unless other than, you know, we have a dentist appointment at three o’clock. That’s it. And that’s what’s really hard for the educational system to wrap their heads around in that. And same with adult education, I mean, we we have learning outcomes that we try and go. So it’s a little different for educators in that you just let the day unfold and then you watch what the child’s learned and then you record those things kind of in hindsight and retrospect. You don’t plan them in front, you record them behind.

Can you illustrate the difference between facilitating and teaching, using the three-legged stool illustration from your book?

Okay, so teaching is when, say, you pick up a curriculum and the curriculum’s laid out for you that this day you teach this. Let’s take Grade 8 math, I know that. Well, it’s the only math course my kids took. So you teach multiplication and then you teach division and then you teach fractions and then you teach decimals. So then you sit the child down and then you say, “Okay, here’s here’s how fractions work,” and you teach the concept and then you give the child practice because you need output to prove that you’ve taught, to prove that the child’s learned something. So then you hand in you mark the sheet after your child’s done the worksheet, you mark it and then you give it, put it in your file for the facilitator visit or whatever you want to do with it. So that’s teaching.

Facilitating is getting your child into the kitchen to make cookies or make dinner and fractions unfold, but you’re creating an environment where they will learn about fractions but not in a sequenced, orderly way. So that’s what unschooling is, is creating environments that are full of learning but the child hits, misses things, whatever they want to learn. So unschooling basically is just giving your child lots of unstructured time, free time, free play, absolutely free, and then you being the facilitator. So you could work and they come in and say, “Hey, Mom, we’re out of peanut butter, I’m making cookies,” and then you can help them find more peanut butter or something else. Or they may come in and say, “Okay, we I’m not too sure, I’m trying to triple a recipe so I need three times 1/3, how do I do that?” And then you show them. You take that teaching moment and because it’s what they want to know, their brains are so ready to get that information and they’ll stick. Yeah, that’s what you do. You just have resources, you have a lots of free time for your child and you are the facilitator, help them get things. Unschooling is so simple, it’s those three components, but people think it’s really hard to do. It’s really easy.

What if the child doesn’t know what they want to learn or their passion is just video games?

Well, I want to open up the time to everyone who has joined us today to ask some questions. If you have a question for Judy, feel free to unmute yourself, you can even be brave and or see your video and yeah, just ask your question of Judy. We’d like to hear what you’re thinking. And they could write in the chat box too if you don’t want your video on. For sure, you can write in the chat box. Yeah, and Brett maybe you could monitor that. Sure, I can’t see it. Okay, okay.

I have a question about if your child, if you’ve given your child the choice of what they’d like to learn but they really don’t know what they want to learn about. Like, I know that sounds like a weird question, but like I’m like, “What do we do today for school? What do you guys want to learn about?” and they’re like, “I don’t know.” So where do you start when you have children that don’t know really what they want to do or they they don’t really their passions for my, I have four boys and their passions are all video games, and I am so not a techy person and not into video games and I’m not even into computers or phones. So I have a totally different way of how I want to school compared to maybe the way that they might want to school. What’s your advice on that? Good question.

Oh, that is so true. I’m the workbook queen. I am such a type A person and I would be so happy if my kids would sit down, do their workbooks, and we’re done. So happy. But didn’t happen because as you know with four kids, they’re all different, different temperaments, different personalities, right? So one thing I think I want to, so video games are very good for learning. My blog, I have a blog called unschooling to university.com. I talk about, there’s a blog post on why playing video games is better than doing homework, but I just want to show you, this is a common concern: what if they play video games all day? They learn so much from video games. They learn cooperation, commitment, teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and innovation. Now these are soft skills and they’re necessary, right, very much. But they also learn from video games things that spur them to other stuff. So when my kids and I, all five of my kids are gamers, they still are, probably because their dad’s a gamer. I I’m not a techy gamer at all. But so you can see here, these are Zelda costumes that they made. They sold, now sewing requires math. What better way to learn math skills and measurement than making a costume? There you go, Brett, there’s your unit studies again. Right? But but we didn’t set out one day and said, “Hey, we should make costumes today.” Our day just unfolds into whatever, maybe it was a day we just went to the beach. But your child, if you trust them and give them free rein over their learning, they will find things to learn, whether it’s through video games or those video games spur them on to something else. Absolutely, they will learn.

A lot of parents say, “Well, my child doesn’t, isn’t learning anything,” and what they’re saying is, “My child’s not learning anything that looks like math, English, science, or social studies.” But we say, “Yeah, your child’s learning. Learning is something your child does every second of the day, but what are they learning? What medium are they learning through?” Right? One thing I want to say is, there are no recommendations anymore from the health people on screen time for school-age children. They took them away because we’re all moving more towards digital learning, right? And no matter if if a child is raised in an environment where there’s nurturing relationships and and um really good steady, normal family life, no matter how many hours they play video games, they will not develop an addiction. So the science is out there. I just want to show this slide on learning. So a lot of to address that question, like what do kids learn all, okay, so this is learning in action. So these are neurons and they’re going to connect with other neurons. So these are the axon terminals that send neurotransmitters over to the dendrites of a neighboring neuron and just oops, I’m, oh, there we go. See, there’s that neurotransmitter coming down that axon and it’s going across that gap which is called a synapse right there. So every time your child is learning, this is what’s happening in their brain and this is what’s happening whether they’re playing Call of Duty or they’re working out how to multiply fractions in a workbook. This is what’s happening in their brain right now. If they don’t use fractions a lot, they’re going to lose that learning by teenagerhood, because a lot of memory is acquired in the teen years. It’s probably why we can’t remember what we learned in grade three science but we can learn our biology class, we can remember that in high school because most of learning is the content they learn in junior high and high school years, not so much in grade school or preschool years. But the benefit of learning in those years is that it builds those brain connections and they strengthen and the ones that aren’t used are going to be pruned, but the ones that are used regularly grow and strengthen. Okay, so so if your child’s playing a lot of video games, they will grow, they will grow their brains, they will be amazing when they find what they want to do or one topics they want to pick up and understand more about.

What about children who don’t have a passion or know what they want to do?

Thank you for that. Yeah, I was just thinking about even the university years, like my one son’s going into university, well hopefully next year, and he’s just, I mean I homeschooled him to Grade 7, now he went into school till Grade 12, but he still is like, “I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” and like he plays video games all night long when he gets home from school and I’m like, “How am I going to get this kid, you know, into life, you know, and not just stuck in the basement all day long?” So I guess that’s another kind of question I have, but he also has a more of a, like he has some learning disabilities and high functioning autism possibly, so those are some other things that I’m also dealing with with him. So yeah, like, do you have any advice for that? Like, how do you find that way to university when they don’t really know what they want to do and nothing is really, you know, they don’t haven’t developed a passion for anything? Yes, yeah, sounds like my 18-year-old son right now. And that’s the thing, we all own our education, so at some point between ages 13 and up, we have to hand over their education to them whether you’re unschooling or homeschooling or your child’s in school. At some point it has to become more important to them than us, right? Now, if they don’t if they finish Grade 12 and they don’t know what they want to do, best thing to do is get a job because jobs, you learn more about yourself. You learn about your place in life, what you want, what you value, if you like working with people or not. Jobs are excellent, and there is no rush. I went to university at age 25 and I’m so glad I waited because then I was ready. I was ready to be motivated. The worst thing is going to university at age 18 and not knowing what you do and party, and in university marks accumulate, so if you messed up that first year, that’s on your record for the next 10 courses. So you don’t want them to go until they’re ready and they want to go and they’re motivated to go, otherwise you’re just wasting your money and they’re wasting time and they’re wasting their money too. That’s good. A job’s a good idea. Yeah, it’ll make them realize what they don’t want to do the rest of their life, right? Yes, absolutely. And it’s never too late. Like my my one son, he graduated high school and he just had basic math, science, and he had social enough social and LA to graduate, and he decided he wasn’t going to be a helicopter pilot, he wanted to be um, he wanted to be a nurse. So and then he’s like 19 years old and he has no math or science. But you know what, he was motivated then, he wanted to do that. He took a year and a half of some was self-study, some was upgrading, one or two was an online course, so however he learned each subject the best, he did it that way and he got it all done in a year and a half. He paid for it, and he was motivated, and he got into his program. So it’s never ever too late to do school, never to do post-secondary.

How do you handle a child who prefers video games to chores and is not being productive?

I’ll jump in with a question from our text chat area, and this one is a long is similar to what I believe Bridget was saying but it has a bit of a a different perspective as well. She writes, “One of my one of my children prefers video or anything electronic to family chores, et cetera, to the point of hindering family life and not accomplishing anything. This is a teen. Even laundry and basic expectations are a battle if it hinders, you know, gets in the way of that child’s screen time.” So how, I guess yeah, how how do you as a parent kind of invade that child’s world when you see it? Like, and I have the same, I had a similar thought or question in my mind as well as I was reading your book and and then even before. Like, how how do you get in there and insert yourself as parent when you see a student being irresponsible with their time? They’re not being productive. They’re actually hindering the family dynamic as well. So how do you balance that with the overall philosophy of child-directed learning?

Okay, and that’s good because it does tie into that whole how much structure do you have, right? A lot of people view this as very permissive. Now there’s a thing called radical unschooling which extends the enabling children the power to learn into the family realm too, of enabling children the power to decide when they go to bed, what they eat, whether they eat, that kind of stuff. I’m more, and I talk about this in the book, there’s educational unschooling and then there’s life unschooling. I tend more on the educational unschooling. So my kids can learn whatever they want, doesn’t matter to me whatever is good. But still, our family of five kids and two adults still has to function and run and we all have needs. So we still have structure in our family life, our weeks even though we still have structure like Monday nights we go to the library, Thursdays we go to the science center with the homeschooling group. We have built-in structure, and the kids built in their own structure, especially ones that love structure. The older they became and the more their prefrontal cortex developed, the more they develop that structure and that self-control in themselves. But your family has to run and your needs are important too. A child can do their own laundry at age 10. I would stop doing laundry, give them a laundry basket, and say, “This is yours. Just like your laundry is yours, your education is yours. You take it on because the more you let go of it, the more they will take it on because if you hold on to it, they don’t have to do anything about it.” Meal times, we we would encourage kids to take a meal to each make. We did chores in our family, everybody pitched in on a Sunday afternoon to do chores. Yes, we there were many years we had to fight kids on this, they didn’t want to. But you keep at it, you keep at it. You problem-solve everything. So I’m the queen of no punishment. I’ve never punished my kids. So I believe in problem-solving everything as a family unit and working it out so that everyone’s needs are met and nobody has their needs not met. It is possible, it takes time. My blog Judy now.com has a lot of how-tos on problem-solving. So don’t let go, let, um, and and kids need to feel part of the family. They need to be feel part of the the contribution level too and it builds their self-esteem if they are because we say you need to do chores because you’re part of this family, you’re part of the mess and we need to work together because we’re a unit. And don’t let go of that, just keep at it.

By the time this chart kind of shows the development of the executive function and self-control, and by about age 17, they take that final leap of development in self-control and you can tell your 17-year-old, “I’m going out shopping, I need the kitchen cleaned up when I’m done,” or by the end of the day, give him some choice there, and they you should expect it to be done. And if you keep at that, keep at that routine of what your expectations are, they will realize that you have expectations and they want to please you. They do, they love you. So just keep at it. It’s work keeping at it, but it pays off later.

I want and just while Brett gets another question, I’m just going to explain this slide that these are all things kids learn without being taught at different age groups, and it’s all related to brain development. So the brain develops from the bottom to the top and from the back to the front. So this is what babies have, very well-developed brain stem and cerebellum and the occipital lobe. And then preschoolers are more the back brain, and toddlers are the inner brain with all their feelings and tantrums. And then school-age children are the frontal brain development, and that is where self-control is. So a six-year-old, you have to nag to do chores. A 10-year-old, you have to nag but they’re more willing to do them especially if you keep up with the routine. But a teenager can do everything you do in your life, from changing a tire to cooking a meal. If you hand off those responsibilities, they may need some scaffolding and some help doing it, so they may make mistakes. But that’s a good time to do it, before they’re 18 and off to college and making mistakes because then they’re a lot more expensive. So so it’s all about development and handing over those responsibilities.

How do you handle a child who says they don’t have an interest area to pursue?

I have a question, actually several questions, and they all follow a similar theme, which is what if the child doesn’t, I’m not sure the age but I guess this would apply to any any age really, but your response might be different according to the age. But what if your child says, “I don’t know what I want to do,” I don’t really, or at least says he or she doesn’t have an interest area that he or she wants to pursue? So like you’re throwing things like the saying goes, you throw spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks. Like, what if nothing’s sticking, or at least the child claims, “I’m not really interested, I don’t know what I want to do,” and they just default to sitting there and looking at you with this stare and you’re thinking, “Great, now what?” So how do you handle that situation?

So that’s a that’s an interesting question. So I pulled my son out at Grade 2 and we’ve never had that problem. I mean, there are days that kids are bored, and then you give them a chore, and then they find something to play with, right? But what a lot of unschoolers suggest is to go through a period where you deschool, and they suggest give your child a month for every year they’ve been in a school where they have been spoon-fed information and things that they have to do. So for a 14-year-old, you may have to give them a year and two months to deschool and decide that they’re going to do what they want to do for their learning and find their passions. Now, no child ever does nothing ever. Like you can see from this slide, brains constantly are in motion and learning is constantly in motion. It behooves me when the government, you know, gets on the news and says, “Children’s learning has been affected.” No it hasn’t, it’s a biological process that happens every second of the day. You cannot stop a child from learning. Every day they wake up and they progress and they learn something and their brains send those neurotransmitters down the path every now and then. Kids are natural players. Let them play, right? Don’t don’t get up in the day and say, “Okay, what do you want to learn today?” It’s kind of like asking your child, “Okay, what did you learn at school today?” and you’ll get this “nothing.” Just let them be. Let them get up, let them gravitate wherever they want to gravitate in your house, whether it’s video games or whether it’s a Lego box or whether it’s a craft station. And that’s having an interesting house is good, but kids have so many toys, your house is fine. You can’t if you if you can trust a two-year-old to play, you can trust that kids are going to get back their desire to play. Now, I have noticed that around age 12, 13, kids no longer play with toys. They don’t bring out the Legos, they don’t bring out the blocks of the Barbies or Bionicles anymore. They play online, right? So they research things on Reddit or they they might start a blog or they make a video and upload it to TikTok. That’s where they play and it’s very creative. Spend a day just watching your child play and write things down so that you can be assured that they are doing things. They are developing interest areas. Maybe they don’t tell you what they think they want to learn, but they are learning. You just have to trust it. And by the end of a deschooling period, that’s when they come out and say, “I’m sick of playing video games. I want to learn about horses. Can you buy me a horse?” And that’s when you teach a little bit about math.

Do you have any advice on dealing with criticism from people who feel that unschooling is just letting kids do whatever they want?

Alright, well, great. Let me move on to another question here. This question, “Do you have any advice on dealing with criticism from people who are who feel that unschooling is just letting kids do whatever they want?” Right, you have that the judgment that we even homeschoolers for sure feel. I know in my life experience, and then she goes on to say, “You know, two of the the three, two out of three of her children are on the spectrum and the other has high anxiety, so homeschooling has been amazing. However, I find so much judgment in society over what we allow our children to do.” So do you have a quick, you know, 20-word or less response that is pretty effective in kind of shutting down that type of judgment?

Well, you’ll get that judgment no matter what you do in parenting or if you homeschool or if you unschool. It’s going to come. So my favorite answer is, “Thank you for your concern. I have a great book you can read. Here’s a book. When you’re done that book, let’s have a conversation.” And after a while, it’s funny because my relatives, my in-laws, I I actually didn’t didn’t tell them about unschooling, but now they know about it. But um even homeschooling they were very skeptical about and it it becomes the elephant in the room that nobody talks about. They they talk about school but they don’t ask you, “Oh, how’s homeschooling doing?” They it just doesn’t get talked about. But yeah, so that’s the best I can do.

How do you handle younger children who need to learn to write without traditional learning?

Okay, another question with younger children who need to still learn to write, how do you handle this without traditional learning?

Okay, so back to my brain slide. You will see under age 6 to 12 that children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic without being taught. Now, everybody’s skeptical because they say, “Well, wait a minute, you know, we send our kids to school to learn to read, we send them to learn to write.” That’s not true. Reading and writing, just like toilet training, every child from age 10 months to 4 and a half years, that’s the range, learns how to use the toilet. They learn how to talk. They learn how to walk. They learn how to read without being taught. It’s all a matter of brain development. So the average age of learning to read is age seven. So that’s when that parietal lobe and the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe all work together seamlessly in language recognition and cracking the code. And the worldwide average to learn to read is seven, but the range is anywhere from four years old to 12 years old. Right now in school, children are pressed to learn to read fast, but it’s it’s a skill you cannot rush no matter how many phonics workbooks you throw at them or writing workbooks. Children will learn when the brain is ready and when they perceive a need to do it, absolutely. So my kids all learned to read between ages four and 10, so I had really two late readers and a year later they were reading books this thick. You couldn’t tell who was reading at four and who was reading at 10. All children get literacy skills at some point between age four and age 12. So you don’t have to teach them to read or write. They will learn it. But your job is facilitator. So if they want to learn if they want to sit down and say, “I need to write a letter to Santa,” you can dictate it for them until they’re ready to do the letters. And we don’t correct. Unschoolers never correct. They’re all going to write their letters backwards, they’re going to write strange things, and you don’t want to correct. You want to encourage them and say, “Wow, that’s beautiful.” They will notice themselves that their B’s are backwards and they will correct them themselves. They learn grammar through writing. My kids wrote so much on Reddit or getting into debates and arguments on online forums and they learn to write really good arguments. It just comes naturally. Yeah, and same with math. Math, I found that, I don’t know where the math slide is. Oh, here we go, yay. Okay, so math. So none of my kids did any math because math is the last thing unschoolers want to let go. So let’s just talk about that. Math kids learn through play, absolutely through and play, right? They learn through everyday teachable moments, and I don’t have the cheesecake here, but anyways, so for example, this is x
2
+4x+3. That’s how they learn math is through everyday things. So for example, coordinates, they learn that through playing Battleship. They learn temperature by watching the news. They learn Roman numerals by reading about Asterix and Obelix comics. They learn all those things through their play and experiential. So then at age 13, that’s when they get that abstract thinking skills in the prefrontal cortex. So if anyone seen that movie, Disney movie Inside Out, you know, at age 13 she gets that whole new brain circuitry installed, it’s really cute. But by then then they’ve had that experience of playing Battleship and coordinated pairs, now they can put it on paper and now they can learn eight grades in one year because they know how the math works. They just need to know how to add fractions on paper or how to work out the Pythagorean theorem, right? And they learn it really fast because their brains are ready. So my kids between Grade 6 and Grade 10, they all did Grade 10, 11, 12 in math because four went into are going into STEM careers. They needed that pure math. But they did one or one course in junior high just to to get them up to speed on math on paper. So yeah, that’s how they learn, you don’t have to teach your kids things. The other point I want to make is that when you look at your eight-year-old, you really can’t imagine how capable they become when they’re teenagers and how much they learn without you, right? About here this development of their prefrontal cortex, they will learn things you can’t teach them anymore. Like my math ends at Grade 8, but my kids self-learned math in high school because they had the brain ability to do it and they had the motivation to do it. So they could sit down, my son right now is doing Grade 11 math, and he’s reading the textbook and he’s teaching himself quadrilateral functions or something like that, ew ew. So you can’t stop your child from learning, they’re going to go and learn no matter what.

How do you support a child with a specific interest in math when you can’t help?

Let me pick up with that example then with this other question which is, “Let’s say your child has a big interest in math and you, like you’ve said, and I join you there, I might be good for maybe Grade 9 but I’m with you there, like beyond that I’m like yeah it’s a stretch even though yeah it just it didn’t stick with me, I didn’t pursue it in my career, I just had to do it jump through the hoops, forgot it as soon as I wrote the test.” Right? “So let’s say my child is pursuing math, wants to get into the higher level physics and calculus and those kind of things and I just can’t really help at all and the the child is kind of stuck. So is he really stuck? Like what would you what what which resources would you bring into play and still in keeping with the unschooling approach?” Because I think with this question, I I’m not going to read the whole thing because I think I think I’ve got it well communicated and for the sake of time, but I think with unschooling people might be thinking that like tutoring or like you’ve even mentioned online courses, unschooling doesn’t mean you don’t use structured resources. It’s just correct me if I’m wrong, and maybe I’m answering the question, you’re using whichever resource the child is pursuing, if it’s a structured resource like an online tutoring course, great, like you don’t discount it just because it’s structured, it’s just you’re not forcing it. Is that correct?

Right. That is a key is that the motivation to learn is coming from the student, right? They may not perceive the need to do higher math until they want to get into software engineering or something like that, right? So yes, the need has to come from the student, not from you. And then when they want to do, they want to learn physics, they want to learn biology or math, like I had a son who wanted to take all three sciences, bio, physics, and chemistry for fun, and yet he didn’t graduate high school until second-year engineering at university, right? Because he was missing one credit because you couldn’t use a third science for a CTS course’s credit. So, but I couldn’t stop him. He was fascinated. He he took out a physics textbook from the library when he was only 13, he wasn’t even in high school yet, and he was reading it for fun at the beach at a homeschool picnic. I’m like, “Wow, wow, that’s really that’s can you bottle that and and market it,” that motivation. And so if they want to do these things, that’s your job as facilitators: help them find the resources. So if you go to Learn Alberta under the “T” for “T,” there are all the high school online courses that you can do self-paced. There’s no teacher teaching, there’s no teacher marking, but the content is there for your child. If they get stuck, you give them the link to Khan Academy and you let them find the video that explains velocity in physics, right? They can do that, they’re good at researching the internet. They’ll find it faster than you by that point. So we’re talking teenagers, we’re not talking 10-year-olds. Teenagers are very capable of finding what they need. Believe me, they’ve found all those what my kids have found on the internet. My son knows how to get into the dark web. So and if they can’t find that, then you can say, “Well,” and that’s where your job as facilitator comes, “is, ‘do I need to hire you a tutor?'” So you can hire a tutor, right? Anything they need to get through and write the diploma exams. So a lot of unschoolers just bypass that whole K to 12 system. They get their kids the Grade 12 textbook, get them the keys, get them the workbooks and get them a tutor, get them through the Grade 12 courses, get the marks, write the exam, they’re on their way, right? That’s how they do it. They maybe in math they need Grade 10, 11, and 12 math because math does build. Chemistry builds, physics builds, biology. Social studies and English language arts, you could just do the Grade 12 course and write the exam, the diploma exam. So so there’s lots of ways to get those credits. Not necessarily a high school diploma. All the major universities across Canada do not require a diploma to get into their STEM programs. They require math, English 30-1, they require and depending on the program either physics or chemistry or biology.

How do you show a homeschooling facilitator that you’re unschooling?

Let me jump in there and give a plug for THEE because we definitely support the unschooling approach through what’s called the course challenge, and a course challenge is offered through Alberta Education. And if you read if you were to read the the Guide to Education, you’d see that offering a course challenge is actually required of every high school but not every high school does because it takes extra work. So but we we provide it. That’s one thing that I believe we do that’s distinctive, makes THEE distinctive in this area. So we provide course challenge opportunities, challenge exams, portfolio-type things. So, yay THEE for doing that. I want to bridge, yay, I want to bridge to the next question. Use this as a segue because somebody asks about um, I mentioned portfolio, and this is going to be part of my answer because this person asks, “What and how did you, Judy, maybe personally, how did what did you present to your homeschooling facilitator to show her or him that you are home um unschooling? Was it, you know, ‘here’s what we did’?” I’m thinking as a facilitator, I I was a facilitator for eight years. The families who are homeschooling with THEE, who whom I served, presented a a portfolio. It wasn’t, yeah, no one has to provide a structured set of anything at the facilitation visit. As a matter of fact, the most fun visits I ever had would be at the kitchen table. I can think of one in particular that stands out. And this little guy, well, he’s not so little, I guess, but um, let’s say Grade 6, anyway, Grade 5. He had set up on his kitchen table a tour for me to walk around, and it’s like a station. And and over here were a collection of rocks. His dad’s a geologist for one of the oil companies, and so these rocks signified something geologically, I don’t remember what, but right. And then the next station was a a ribbon that he won for public speaking. And then the next was a trophy he won for an RCM Conservatory, you know, performance he gave. And the next was a certificate. I mean, he just walked me around the kitchen table, and it was so amazing. That was it was so indicative also or illustrative of what he had done and it made it so fun too. So as an unschooler, you know, be creative in how you how you present it. The facilitators typically are quite open. I say “typically,” I would say all of them are quite open to all kinds of creative ways to see progress and achievement. So you’re really not limited or restricted in how you show progress. It can be anything.

So how did you show your facilitator the things your children were learning?

Well, when my kids were in high school, they um, they made the facilitator lunch and served a glass of wine with the um, the wine they made through science. And mostly, we ran through pictures because I’m a real picture person. I love taking pictures. So every time my kids make something like a sugar cube castle or um, you know, a a Comic Fest costume, that or for special projects, for anything, I took pictures. And they would just sit down and then they show the facilitator their pictures of what they did and and that’s what we did. And then the facilitator made notes. So it was um, very much loose until we went for the credits for high school, right? That was a little different, but from grades one to nine that’s what we did, we show pictures. And that would be absolutely fine. As a matter of fact, it’s fun. It’s way more fun to watch as a facilitator, it’s much more enjoyable to see photos and things like that. Yeah, because we’re not, most homeschool facilitators who, well, another plug for THEE, our facilitators are former, either former or current, home educating parents themselves. So, you know, we’re not, oftentimes, I’m not gonna want to speak for all the facilitators, but, you know, we’re not huge fans of workbooks either and we like to see creative things. So be creative. You don’t, you know, you’re not stuck in a box with what you have to show your facilitator. Photos are are wonderful. Yeah, photos and videos because you’re gonna take them anyways. Like I I love going back now and looking back and showing my kids, “Hey, here’s this, you know, puppet for you made,” and they’re like, “Oh no, gotta show them at their wedding.” That’s right.

How do you support your kids’ different interests if you have multiple children?

We have another question here, “How do you support your kids’ different interests if you have multiple children?” Let’s say one wants to learn about your example of horses but the other has no interest in horses. If you’re going to the zoo but one child doesn’t want to go to the zoo. I’m talking more, so you have younger children and the other and you can’t just leave them at home. The ones who aren’t interested, you can’t leave them at home, you gotta bring them with you. So how do you, some are willing and some are not?

Oh, that was really tough because a lot of the younger years where I um couldn’t leave them home alone, my husband worked in Peru so and we didn’t have family here so I had to bring all four kids to one kid’s bowling on Saturday morning. Well, it was a nightmare. They would fight, it was just just awful. And then I I got some secondhand Game Boys. Oh, saved my my voice. But yeah, you just have to there’s ways to work it out. Try and get into a homeschool babysitting co-op where you could leave the youngers with. We did that. And if you don’t know of any babysitting co-ops, start one. Start one with other homeschoolers that you could drop off and share playdates that you want to, you know, just concentrate on one child or or so. So yeah, just kind of find ways to work it out because and that’s the beauty of unschooling, is if one child loves horses, you don’t have to impose horses on everybody else, right? They they can when you’re at home, they can learn their different things, but it’s hard when you’re doing outings. Yeah.

What is the next step for someone interested in unschooling, and what if a spouse is skeptical?

Okay, anybody else would like to ask a question either through the video chat or text chat?

I’ll jump in. So Judy, just for anyone who’s thinking this sounds interesting and they’re open to it, like, what would you recommend to be their next step? And let me let me answer real quickly, what I would say is look up, go to YouTube and just type in “Judy Arnall unschooling” and you’ll find several videos and interviews, all kinds of resources that from Judy from either recorded interviews or just recorded anything on this topic. That’d be one place to start for sure. But Judy, what would you tell somebody who’s interested in pursuing it? And let me add another little question to that, part B: what if one spouse is interested but the other spouse isn’t so interested? One spouse is thinking, “No, it’s got to be structured,” one spouse is like, “No, Judy said play.” Right? So how do you what’s the next step in those scenarios?

Okay, so I would say yes, watch some videos and I would include your spouse because men tend not to read books, so a one-hour video that they could watch would be really, really helpful. They could, do I, Brett, you’re right. I’ve been doing a lot of conferences. The Arrow Conference, the Global Learning Conference on Unschooling, unschooling STEM, that’s um, and and and just join our Alberta Unschooling Families Facebook group, ask questions, try and get together with unschooling families and observe them. You need a support group for sure because there’s days where the kids are fighting all day and your partner’s questioning your your methods and somebody at Costco tore your strip out off you because your child’s doing something. You’re going to have bad days and you need support. Absolutely need support. If your partner’s not on board, maybe have a conversation about why it’s important to you. Do you want to just try it for a year? You could try it for a year, see how much the kids are learning and progressing because they will progress by the end of the year and then re-evaluate it the next year. Right? My my kids all on their own accord wanted to go into school at some point and they lasted anywhere from two days to two weeks. They all came home again because they thought, “This is taking too much time and I want to learn what I want to learn.” So maybe just approach it that way. Usually it’s the moms that do put more effort into researching education methods and and things like that. So it I I pulled that on my husband because he did not agree with homeschooling but he didn’t really tell me until 10 years later just and now he’s the biggest supporter. Like he didn’t even know we were unschooling and he’s the biggest supporter now because he has the the privilege of hindsight and now he tells everybody about it. But he was very skeptical of even homeschooling. And you never say “never” in parenting. I was so skeptical of unschooling, like I said, I was I thought it was really flaky and new agey and but then when you see your children learn things that you’ve never taught them, it builds your confidence, absolutely. And my book by the way is in all, you can request it from your library. You don’t have to buy it. Libraries have it, Chapters have it, if you want your own copy. But read lots of books about unschooling. There’s it’s a growing field, so there’s more and more out there.

Conclusion

Alright, well, I think that’s going to do it for today. Judy, again, thanks so much for giving us your time today and for especially allowing us to record it for other people to watch later on, so I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you, Brett, for hosting this and I’m it’s so nice to see school boards embrace different learning and education styles and methodologies. So it’s thank you for hosting it today. I I hope it was helpful for people and and I’ll take questions at any time too, just email me. So that’s great. Thanks.

Well, one thing, you know, speaking about being open, when I was reading in your book and just seeing the statistics of dropouts and and even those who don’t drop out but they’re just they’re there in body but not in mind or spirit, um yeah, definitely want to look at all these other options because it’s not a one-size fits-all, it’s not an assembly-line approach. And we don’t hear about the problems with the current approach because certain institutions have a vested interest in not revealing those problems. So I’m I’m a big fan now, so I definitely want to get a choice to families and parents and let them know that they’re able to do it. It it sounds daunting perhaps, but I believe it’s doable and just want to empower those parents. Thank you so much, Brett. Alright, I’ll look forward to.