Review: The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith
As personal as homeschooling is, the method of unschooling is even more so. Unschooling families vary widely in their approach. Some use a few select curriculums for a few select subject; others use none. This makes writing on the subject of unschooling difficult. I know. I’ve read several books about it, and most have difficulty putting down on paper exactly how to use the method. The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child’s Classroom
Author Mary Griffith takes on the subject of unschooling in a very relaxed, open-minded way. She introduces the subjects in chapters like “TV or Not TV,” “How Can You Tell They’re Learning?,” “Reading and Writing,” “Math and Problem Solving,” “Changes As Kids Grow Older,” etc. and then lets each unfold with several examples from unschooling families.
For the person who already leans toward the unschooling method of homeschooling, this will feel natural, but to the person wanting to understand exactly what do to, it comes across as vague. Griffith uses several examples of families to illustrate the unschooling method, but the examples are so different that it’s hard to know which are effective and which aren’t. And some really left me questioning the method all together. For example, one parent said:
“We have no restrictions on television watching… I don’t feel there is any point to restricting their viewing. I want them to learn to self-regulate, not be dependent on me to tell them what they should do. Also, it would be antithetical to my unschooling philosophy to prescribe or proscribe any source of information.”
Another said, “I think the time to step in and help is when we’re asked for help. We [the parents] might suggest that this would be a good time to work on a particular subject that we think they’ll need, but we can only suggest; they are free to refuse (and frequently do!). I think that to have a good, respectful relationship with our teens we need to be sensitive to their right to choose what they are learning and how they want to pursue it.”
That kind of laissez-faire approach made me uncomfortable, but I admit that this may very well be my inexperience with this method showing. I would have liked to see more in the way of statistics and research to support the method’s effectiveness. Instead, the attitude displayed in the book is “trust us, it works.”
Other parts of the book encouraged me. Griffith’s sidebars “An Unschooling Week One, Two and Three” gave the best insight into how unschooling works. They allowed the reader to see what a typical unschooling week looks like for three different students, and they showed how subjects naturally flow together, which is a big part of the unschooling method.
My favorite parts of the book were the resource guides at the end of each chapter. Because unschooling doesn’t often include curriculum, these were mainly real life examples—books, videos, websites and other tools. Those alone make The Unschooling Handbook useful and are great resources that anyone could use to enhance their homeschool.
However, if you want to better understand the philosophy of unschooling, you would do better to go back to the beginning to Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling
Yes, my review of The Unschooling Handbook is mixed. But then like I said, homeschooling is personal. As with any book, it’s useful to take what works for you and discard what doesn’t. That’s what I took away from this book. I’ll use some of the suggested resources and continue to ponder many of the family examples. I’ll incorporate what fits with our family’s personality and ignore the rest.
If you have read The Unschooling Handbook and found it helpful to your homeschool, please leave a comment and let me know what you gleaned and how it affected you. I would love to dialogue about this method and this book. Happy homeschooling!