Clarification regarding free time versus unschooling 👇🏼
Listen to audio ☝🏼by Ratnesh or read the article below 👇🏼
Some parents say that we are new to unschooling, homeschooling, please guide us.
I would like to tell them a beautiful secret.
Hi, I am Ratnesh from Aarohi Life Education, here to share my learnings over the last 27 years of being with children.
So when you say that you don’t have much knowledge about unschooling, then that is not really true because all of us, every single child and every single family, practices unschooling or homeschooling, whatever name you want to give it, or open learning.
The thing is, whenever the child is not doing anything which has been given by the school to be done or, let’s say, given by the parent to be done, but the child is choosing to do something, let’s say the child could be doing crochet or playing a board game or cooking or baking something or watching TV or playing catch-catch with his sibling and so on and so forth.
All of that is decided by the child, done by the child and maybe even relished or got bored by the child.
So the whole thing, from beginning in terms of deciding to ending in terms of reviewing the whole thing, is done by the child. He may change or she may not do it again tomorrow or do more of it and so on and so forth.
That, in a nutshell, is unschooling, which all of us do. We do it during weekends, holidays, even during weekdays, whenever whatever small time we have, which is usually called as free time by people.
Now, if you think about that your child spends some free time, or people call it free time, it is not really free. The child is investing himself or herself into it.
Now, if you take that time and say some hours in a week and convert then that into all the hours in the week except for the sleeping time, then that becomes open learning or unschooling or homeschooling, where the child is then deciding throughout the week what the child needs to do, including, let us say, household chore, self-care, exploring things, reading something, researching, playing games and so on and so forth, going out, meeting people, socializing, engaging with larger projects, doing small, small, small, many things in a day.
All of that does not matter, it is the child’s choice.
Obviously, these choices are influenced by the parents or by the siblings or other friends and relatives, much the same way as our adult choices are also on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis influenced by spouse and other relatives and colleagues and so on.
So, in some ways, we are all parents, adults, grandparents, children, all unschooling in that sense, just the amount of time may differ.
Once you realize this, then you already have the secret of unschooling or homeschooling or open learning, which is: decide what you want to do, then go ahead and do it, and then later on review, hey, how was this?
Hope this insight into yourself helps you in kick-starting your unschooling journey.
Obviously, a lot of more value addition can be done, a lot more enrichment to the child’s journey can be done by the parents, and if that is something that interests you, then we have multiple initiatives to support you in that journey.
Otherwise, your child is the best leader of himself or herself and you the best support.
This is to further clarify that when a child does something for a small time, in the sense the child decides what I want to do, does that and kind of thinks about it later on, how good it was or how not good it was, if it’s done for a small amount of time in a day or week, then that’s called the free time.
However, when we start doing that as 24/7, as in all the seven days, the child takes the responsibility of deciding the whole week, what all will I do.
Obviously, discusses with parents what our parents need, who else needs, world’s needs, child’s needs and wants, and based on then decides and does.
Obviously, the child misses some, does some, not able to do some and so on. That’s part of the journey.
Then we call it unschooling or homeschooling or, according to us, a better term is child-based education.
No more, come join our Saturday orientation and you can understand it better.
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if you have any question or comment.