What is unschooling and why is it stirring up TikTok?

A fringe group of parents think following your child’s learning instincts, rather than setting them a standard educational pattern, is the best way to foster their growth 

The trend, known as “unschooling,” proposes a complete abandonment of standard curriculum. Gone are the days of regular math and literature classes; these parenting influencers insist on only following what the kid expresses curiosity about. But the trend has proved highly controversial, with critics suggesting the approach flies in the face of research on effective education techniques. 

What is unschooling?

Unschooling demands parents homeschool their kids, but not follow standard teacher-student principles. Rather, the parents stay with the child throughout their day, responding to queries they may offer about the world. 

Many in the unschooling community are frustrated with the traditional education system. “Homeschool is you’re still using the schooling curriculum to teach your child, and you still have to turn in paperwork to the government,” influencer Kelsey Rhae said in a TikTok. “You still have to check boxes, which is what I don’t want to do.”

Influencer Mami Onami offers a good look at the pedagogy in action. One of Onami’s TikToks shows her child asking what “et cetera” means, after they’d witnessed Onami using the term on a call. Onami walked her child by using a color analogy. “Unschooling isn’t no education, it’s education in response to a kid’s interests,” influencer Onami said in the video. “Small children have a lot of them.”

Some viewers weren’t impressed: “This is not unschooling, this is a conversation,” commenter @Ruskbn wrote. 

But not everyone is convinced. Teacher influencer Mr. Williams, for one, said that while “learning can be happening during [unstructured] activities, it should be paired with more intentional learning and objectives.”

Indeed, one 2011 study published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science found that homeschooled children whose parents employ an unstructured approach scored significantly worse on letter-word identification, passage comprehension, social sciences, humanities, and calculation than their structured homeschooled counterparts. 

Alternate schooling is all the rage

Unschooling isn’t the only trend challenging traditional education systems. Microschools—that is, schools with a student body of around a dozen or so children and class sizes of sometimes even just three or four—have grown in popularity across the U.S. By now, at least 1.5 million kids are being educated not in traditional school buildings, but in churches, libraries, community centers, or even backyards.

Many of these trends are in response to the pandemic, when traditional education moved online. From 2020-2021, 5.4% of children were homeschooled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That compares to just 2.8% in 2019.

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