Brief interview, "Mornings" show

I didn't hear it on the day, but in the recording I can hear that the interviewer was about to suggest that my children sounded gifted. Their biggest gift was time to develop in their own way, in an enriched environment, with lots of parental attention. 

One of the interviewer's comments was interesting, but not really fair or true: "Your point was that you were an educator, you were taught how to educate your kids at home…" I was taught about classrooms and groups of kids, about record keeping and assessment. Those things aren't useful for unschoolers.

It's true that the open classroom method is what unschooling is, only without the limitation of a classroom or a schedule, but it's NOT about teaching. It's about providing resources, answering questions, facilitating their learning. For some people, having been a teacher is detrimental to their ability to be good unschooling parents.

Some of the very best of unschooling parents have zero "teacher training" or classroom experience. It's not at all required, nor helpful. But it IS true that there are many unschoolers who were once teachers. More than anything else, their common knowledge is that learning all happens inside the learner.