Illustration by Cate Andrews
My daughter Lily bounded off the bus on a sunny Friday in March, ebullient: No school for two weeks! She ran ahead of me toward home, throwing her backpack aside at the front door. Day by day, we began to realize there would be no going back at all, as the pandemic spread, businesses closed and the concept of normal got stretched to its breaking point. Eventually, I tucked the backpack away in a closet so it wouldn’t remind her of what she was missing, namely the end of her second-grade year and time with other 8-year-olds.
We converted our front room to a makeshift school. With no online classes and only the most basic suggestions for schoolwork from Richmond Public Schools, we were on our own. For the next few months, we broke out the Little Passports packets and Kiwi Crates — mail-order activities covering geography and STEM skills — that had been accumulating in Lily’s closet and actually did them. We wrote letters to friends who lived a few blocks away, just to practice putting pencil to paper. We went on so many walks, we grew sick of walking. And before we knew it, the school year had unceremoniously and officially ended. The summer, limited as it was, was upon us.
All summer, as we veered unsteadily toward the fall, one question kept coming back: What are we going to do about school? It’s only now that I see how, for those first three months, we were unlearning the programming of public education and readying ourselves for where we are now — “unschooling.”
Unschooling is a type of home schooling that gives autonomy to the learner, allowing them to glean what they need from the world around them without a curriculum. It relies on the belief that learning happens everywhere all the time and that letting children explore independently creates a lifelong practice of self-driven investigation.
Home schooling a child who has previously been enrolled in RPS requires sending notice to the administration and providing a “curriculum” of whatever subjects your home school will cover. Because we’re unschooling, there isn’t a curriculum — that’s the whole point. But I could assume some of the subjects Lily would be exploring, because I know what she’s interested in: science, reading, cooking, knitting, art and coding. So I wrote something along those lines, sent it off in the mail and received an acknowledgement a few weeks later. Just like that, we were unschoolers.
Talking about unschooling can be harder than I would have thought. I feel simultaneously judged and judgmental. I’ve gotten the question, “But what is unschooling, exactly?” numerous times. It’s nothing! It’s everything! It’s learning from the world around us because the world around us never stops teaching! When Lily gets excited about something, like buying a lemon tree for her room, we look up information on lemon trees online and create a plant care journal so she can chart its progress. There’s no “unit” on lemon trees, just authentic curiosity and inquiry. The tree might shrivel up to nothing. I certainly won’t be watering it for her, but whatever the result, it’s Lily’s lesson to learn, not mine.
The pace of our day is leisurely. Lily practices knitting and playing her recorder, and she hones her discussion skills during online Outschool classes on various “Star Wars”-related themes. Our family’s beloved parenting coach and nanny, MegAnne Ford, comes three afternoons a week, and the two of them record and edit a podcast and come up with creative ways to practice reading and writing together. But mostly, she plays — board games, backyard games, computer games, hours of building with Lego.
So far, it’s been the right choice for us. As someone who adored school and reveres teachers, I’m surprised that it can feel so easy. The opportunity to home-school Lily is a gift. With the untethered schedule of a freelance writer, I make my own hours. I know this isn’t the reality for so many people. It’s a privilege, and I’m grateful for it.
Whenever I happen to see my friends these days, the conversation drifts toward the idea that the pandemic has stripped down the facade of everyday busyness and has given us (for all the many things it’s taken) a chance to think and act differently. I think about how that applies to formal education, that holdout of implicit biases and antiquated hierarchies. I count myself among the many mothers who never thought she’d do anything like home schooling, but who now wonders if she hasn’t stumbled onto something that fits our family better than what we were used to.
Someone asked me the other day if Lily would be ready to go back to school after a year of unschooling. It feels like such a loaded question. Will she be ready academically? For the most part, I’d say yes. Will she be ready emotionally and psychologically? That’s for her to say. When that day comes, I’ll ask her, and maybe we’ll dust off the old backpack for another year of in-school learning.
A fine-dining chef in a former life (the one before kids), Stephanie Ganz is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Bon Appétit, Eater, Garden & Gun, and The Local Palate. She is an organizer of Fire, Flour & Fork and a Birdhouse Farmers Market board member. In her free time (lol), Ganz is an insatiable reader and a somewhat clueless but well-meaning gardener.
