from Life Learning magazine, November/December 2005
Principles Not Rules:
Living & Learning in the Real World
by Robyn Coburn

Recently on an unschooling e-list, someone asked, “How does a person who has no rules to follow as a child cope with life as an adult in a world filled with rules?”

There were several replies addressing the idea that a home without rules does not mean chaos, but instead can be a world of principles. And that made me muse on the possibly startling notion that the regular adult world is actually far less filled with rules than the world of any ordinarily parented child.

I look around at the adult world and I don’t see a world full of arbitrary rules. Instead, in a civil society like ours, I see a world of customs and laws. Most of the time, the customs and laws of the adult world make some kind of apparent sense, being based on some principle, and they engage the reasoned co-operation of most of us.

Moreover, our freely living and learning children are not isolated from the real world, but living in it, and have the opportunity to see the purposeful nature of real world customs and laws. They are subject to the customs and mores of society. This is in contrast to the notion of adult freedom from rules that permeates the longing daydreams of restricted and limited children.

Rules are a two sided, oxymoronic coin – on one side the expectation of automatic compliance, on the other side the punishment for breakage. Rules for children are often not designed to be useful in themselves but function as molds, designed to teach some idea, especially the idea that rules must be followed, without defiance or even contemplation.

Children who live surrounded by rules, instead of learning about principles, end up becoming adept at getting around rules, finding the loopholes in rules, disguising non-compliance or deflecting blame for non-compliance (i.e. lying about what they did). These are the skills that they then bring into adult life.

The few rules in a child’s life that might be useful, such as “don’t turn on the stove when Mommy is out”, can be simply and easily converted into principles that can allow for empowered exploration and make real sense to a freely living child. These only reiterate how ineffective and inefficient . . .

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This essay has been included in the book "Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier.

Robyn L. Coburn had to start calling herself an “unschooler”, despite her daughter’s young age, in self-defense against the numerous early academics pushers surrounding her in her neighborhood and local support group. Unschooling with someone as vigorously determined to make her own choices as Jayn has been so much easier than any other “imposed teaching” method could possibly be. In her past life Robyn has been a set, costume and lighting designer in the theater, and a production designer and set decorator in film. She enjoys reading, swimming, sewing, the kind of electronic games that involve puzzles instead of finger drills, classic cinema (i.e. old movies), various crafts, traveling and an intermittently-attended-to nascent interest in screenwriting. Robyn is also co-owner, with another Life Learning contributor, Danielle Conger, of the Always Unschooled discussion group on Yahoo, and a fairly regular poster on several other Internet unschooling lists. She also write the "Crafting for a Greener World column for Natural Life Magazine.