When you explore unschooling, I imagine you wondered about structure, right?
What is the best unschooling structure?
How do unschoolers learn structure if adults aren’t telling how to manage their time?
How will unschoolers learn how to manage time and tasks if they just do what they want, when they want?
The answer is that they don’t *find* structure, they create it, and then they develop the personal leadership skills, IN PARTNERSHIP with willing adults, to refine that structure where needed, but mostly to support the structure.
The thing about structure is that there’s a myth out there that adults are organized and that by the time we all get to adulthood, we are pros at organizing ourselves. We know how to manage our time, and our money, we are responsible, and our personal leadership skills are on point.
SAY WORD?
The truth is that many of us, grown as we might be, are still figuring out how to manage ourselves. Our personal leadership skill-building has been consistently overshadowed or suffocated by all the forced structure; all the do what I say, no need to think about it, b/c I already told you what to do messages we got as children, and all the here’s what to focus on from 9am to 3pm in school, or 9am to 5pm at work.
You and I had very little practice using our actual interests and curiosities to dive into, design and develop, and refine a way of spending our days in deliberate studies. The truth is that we’ve mostly experienced structure as a tool of oppression, not as a personal leadership tool, and certainly not a tool of liberation.
So, then, what are tools of liberation? How can we turn the commitment to raising free people, into daily practice?For me, it happened through witnessing emergent structure in Marley and Sage, my children.
Sage joins me this episode to talk about structure in unschooling.
