 Many parents with families and people planning their families have realized that there are many alternatives to the mainstream schooling system Whether it be homeschooling, unschooling, Waldorf or Montessori just to name a few options There are so many out there. Today, I'm going to introduce you to my friend Lucy at Life Without School And she's gonna share six reasons why she chooses to unschool her children. Here she is. Hi everybody, I'm Lucy. I live in New Zealand in a year with my two children Ramona who is nine and Juno who's seven And my partner Tim. One of the more radical parts of our life is that we live a life totally without school In fact, we live a life totally without any curriculum whatsoever. Some people call this unschooling, some people call it whole life learning, but it's really just living as humans have lived for Millenia, which is learning by doing and learning within your community, learning from those around you Simply experiencing rather than sitting behind a desk being taught stuff that you're not really that interested in. It's really a paradigm that exists totally outside of mainstream education and today I wanted to share with you six of the main reasons that we do it There's actually loads and loads, but I've tried to distill them into six. When we became parents One of the main things we wanted to do is to provide an environment for our children where they could just blossom into who they were inside without any of our Moulding or shaping of them. I don't really think that that is the job of the parent I think the parent's main role is to make space for this unique human that has been brought into their life For us unschooling is really an extension of that philosophy We just want to support our children and the way they want to learn and what they want to learn Without them feeling any need to conform to what we expect or what we think arbitrarily they should be learning. So the number one reason is that we want our children to be able to learn in a way that is free from shame. So you know 85% of adults have had an experience of Shaming in their school years that so affected them that it impacts their adult life. That's 85% that's a huge majority of people and that's because mainstream education uses shame and punishment as a way to get Such a massive group of kids learning what teachers think is important. Shame can have a pretty Catastrophic impact on your ability to really be yourself So we wanted to provide an environment where our kids didn't experience that like even when they were learning in a way That seemed like pretty random or messy We could just make space for that learning and and how they wanted to do it I think because of the mainstream education system We've made shame and punishment quite an everyday part of the human experience We've kind of normalized it and that has been done to the detriment of our ability to create a fair just and beautiful world Okay, number two unschooling is curiosity based learning and we embrace that because all of the studies show that Learning that is done where there's self motivation or a kind of seed of curiosity is One much more effective for learning the actual thing that you're trying to pick up But also activates parts of your brain that makes it easier for you to learn Anything that is coming up while you are in that state and also thirdly studies show that curiosity Allows learning to be stored in your memory. So the learning when you're curious is like a long-term thing I can imagine that quite a lot of you watching this understand that on some level because how much of your schooling Do you actually remember for me? It is very little I'm like a rider and I have to Google the difference between noun and adjective on quite a regular basis The third reason that we are unschoolers is because we want to create a learning environment That's totally stress-free just like learning without curiosity learning in a stressful environment is Such a waste of time stress has a huge impact on your amygdala Which essentially ends up sending information to the wrong part of your brain not to your higher brain where you can Rationally look at the information and create a learning journey But it sends it down to the fight or flight zone when you're in stress So you act your brain actually doesn't know what to do with information when you're in a stressful state There's some statistics about this saying that 65% of 12 year old school children are stressed because of their school environment So obviously that has a massive impact on what they're actually taking in what information They're actually taking in while they're in the classroom But also huge impacts on their mental health and their physical health I just think that trying to raise children in a constantly stressful environment because of testing And competition because of shame and punishment. It's just a super unhealthy thing So typical day of unschooling might involve us hanging around here It often involves us meeting up with friends and and doing different unschooling groups and exploring the wild It's always fun. There might be conflict But there's space to figure out the conflict so that it doesn't become like a Genuinely toxic or stressful scenario with joy seekers rather than Stressed out learners for we're unschooling because we believe that you're learning all of the time Learning doesn't begin at five and end at 18 when you leave for more education But most parents get this right you don't kind of try and teach your child to walk or talk You just know that they're gonna pick those things up by being in a walkie-talkie Kind of environment and we just believe that that continues on nothing needs to change when they turn a certain age So our kids are seven and nine now and they're reading writing Doing art creating making things doing heaps of mass like genuine love of mass and they're just doing it by Living there has never been a sit-down formal class for my children They've always just learned through their experience of being human and actually as adults We do this all the time if we want to learn something new as an adult We will just find a way to access it So in the last few years, I've taught myself how to play the ukulele. I've taught myself how to make Electronic digital music. I've built a business I've done absolutely loads of things like moving almost into mastery of some of those things simply by Accessing the resources that will help me even doctors do this when they get presented with a case that they don't Really know what's going on. They might ring some colleagues. They might look up online They'll delve into their books In order to get to the bottom of this new illness or this new case That is really essentially unschooling. It's learning through doing the fifth reason We are unschooling is because we just trust our children and we want them to learn that they can trust themselves So our children know that their instincts are good that their urges are good that their needs are valuable Whereas I think actually mainstream education can really undermine a child's trust in themselves They're told to learn this in this moment and in the bell rings and they're told to switch their mind over to the new thing and learn That thing they're told to mistrust their body's desire to move when it wants to move we even ask children Through schooling to kind of ask our kids to trespass on their own boundaries both mentally and physically Quite a lot through mainstream education and through unschooling. We kind of do the opposite of this We say what you're feeling is good your needs are good I trust you and you can trust yourself and that leads me to the sixth reason that we're unschooling and that's all about world change When I first began this whole unschooling thing I just thought yeah, we're doing this because this is what works for our family and this is the path We've been called to but the more that I'm immersed in this world I've actually come to believe that unschooling and other forms of alternative education are really the embodiment of The just and peaceful loving world that I think is possible I believe that mainstream education as it stands with its shame punishment Testing competitive nature, you know ranking kids against each other I believe that that is like the seedbed of some of society's most problematic issues. We're coming into this understanding that we're actually not born Competitive we're born cooperative. That's our kind of like human nature I really believe that but I think through the schooling system We pick kids against each other and that bleeds into the rest of society There's almost like a collective societal wound from our school days and it makes itself known in Individuals in a different way. So some people are people-pleasers Some people are afraid of authority or afraid to rock the boat a lot of people feel that they're just not Intrinsically good enough a lot of people struggle to rest and play and this is all stuff that we learn through our Schooling years when we're being shunted from one activity to the other with our minds placed in somebody else's hands these days I tend to think that mainstream education is one of the strongholds of capitalism Raising people who are so unhappy and mistrust themselves so much with so much mental anguish that we have to consume and Fight in order to feel okay. Oh got a little bit heavy there For me, that's what makes sense when you place children for like 15 or more of their Formative years into an institution. That's kind of what you get So those are six of the reasons that we've chosen unschooling I'm super happy to answer any questions that you have and the unschooling world is very friendly So if you want to jump on board this ship, we would welcome you with open arms. That sounds a bit weird and culty It's not really like that. There's too much anarchy for it to be culty. I Hope that you got a lot out of that time with Lucy if you did make sure to subscribe to her channel Where she shares a lot of valuable information on teaching children in a home setting and make sure to subscribe to this channel as well For a lot more great videos to come. I love you all very much and see you again real soon