In 1980, following the birth of our son, Christian, I returned to work as a special education teacher. A friend, looking for the perfect kindergarten for her son, mentioned an article on homeschooling by John Holt, an author who had been on my college reading list. That article changed my life forever. For the next two decades - as our children, Christian and Georgina, schooled themselves at home - we lived what we came to call “unschooled lives.”

This path was not easy. Trying to follow the deceptively simple admonition, ?Show me the way? - a prayer often repeated when faced with unanswerable questions, deep concerns, and nagging doubts - led to unexpected transformations of the heart as we watched our children learn to become successful, well-educated adults.

For example, when he was 14, Christian found himself in an acute state of boredom and uncertainty over what to do. He finally settled on fly fishing! Although I was relieved he was no longer moping about, I was starting to worry about whether he should be spending so much time studying fishing. I soon saw that my discomfort arose because fishing didn’t resemble anything like a school project. My husband, David, reminded me that this was the essence of what we had been striving for ever since we’d taken up unschooling - a child immersed in something that fascinated him and had real meaning to him.

(Following is a brief excerpt from my book, Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves, p.92)

David read to me from some of Christian’s trout fishing books - about the ancient origins of fly fishing, dating back to the time of Cleopatra and Caesar; about the simple life cycle of the mayfly and the complex life cycle of the caddis and stone flies; and about all of the Latin genus and species names of various flies that Christian had learned and used in discussions with David about entomology and ichthyology. David shared with me a second book, devoted to a discussion of stream and river ecology and ‘reading’ the water. This was reassuring: now I could see that not only was fishing a study of biological sciences, it also included natural science, history, mathematics and foreign language. As I realized this, I understood that Christian had discovered, on his own, the deep interconnectedness of subject matter that I, as a schoolteacher, had been trained to think of only as isolated segments.

As Christian and Georgina followed their singular interests, David and I had to learn again and again how to let our children ?show us the way.? That they were quite different from each other helped us see that they needed to find their own individual path to a well-rounded education - and let us appreciate even more the difficulties all educators face as they try to accommodate differences among students. The unconventional schooling our children have had has given them great self-confidence and self-motivation. Christian is a recent college graduate and Georgina is now a college freshman; so far, we think our experiment in ?unschooling? a success. I like to think of unschooling as the most natural and fail-safe way to educate children whose learning begins the day they are born and knows no limits.

Alison McKee is the author of several books and her newest, HOMESCHOOLING OUR CHILDREN, UNSCHOOLING OURSELVES is now available . Order it from any bookstore or by sending your request along with $22.00 ($18.00 + $4.00s/h) to Bittersweet House, PO Box 5211F Madison, WI 53705.