Unconventional ideas for teaching and learning.

...is not whether there are limits but how much choice we have within those limits... ...The idea of limits is not of itself opposed to the idea of freedom. The difference between a free community or society and a tyranny—this is another way of saying what I tried to say about structure—is not that one has limits while the other does not. It is that in a free society you can find out where the limits are; in a tyranny you can never be sure."

Holt's point is beautifully restated, and acted upon, by the people at North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, a resource center in Hadley, Massachusetts. They have composed a document entitled "Seven Principles that Inform Our Work at North Star" and one of their principles captures the essence of this statement: unschooling doesn't mean lack of structure or goals; unschooling just has a structure that supports self-directed learning. As North Star writes:

"Structure communicates as powerfully as words—and often more powerfully. It's not enough to tell kids that we want them to be self-motivated, or that we want them to value learning for its own, if the structure of their lives and their education is actually communicating the opposite message. Voluntary (rather than compulsory) classes, the ability to choose what one studies rather than following a required curriculum, and the absence of tests and grades all contribute to a structure that supports and facilitates intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning."

Be aware and proud of the structure and freedom you are providing your children. Tell people who say you are not providing a disciplined, structured environment for your children to learn in that you are, indeed, creating a structured environment for your child, one that allows intrinsic motivation to flourish; that it may look like a circus or private meditation is part of the process, not the goal. There are some educators, and a growing number of unschooling families, who know that the process of self-motivation and self-regulation can take a long time, even years, to take root. Ironically, a lot of the time it takes for self-motivation to take root depends on how much time a child has been in conventional school, but that will be a topic for another day. Patience and awareness are the keys here, not results and judgments. As John Holt wrote in Freedom and Beyond, "Every time we try to manage the lives of young people, we give up the chance to see how they might have managed their own lives, and to learn what we might have learned from doing it."