It’s probably no exaggeration to say that home educators have done more to advance the scientific understanding of the nature of learning than a century of research based in schools. Home educating families do not have to adhere to the conventions and traditions that have grown to surround learning in schools. Instead, they have the freedom and indeed the compulsion to custom design an education that suits them, their children and their lifestyles. Nowhere is this freedom clearer than when it comes to unschooling where the philosophy of the classroom is abandoned as learning ceases to be a separately definable part of life. The result is a form of education in which the theories which support professional education in school are contradicted and questioned at every turn.

Where home educators lead, researchers have to follow, trying to unravel how this learning actually happens. Unschooling, at least from the outside, can easily give the impression of a higgledy-piggledy mess in which the subject matter of the conventional curriculum fails to feature significantly and indeed parents themselves sometimes struggled to be specific over what and how their children were learning. Certainly there is currently no satisfactory academic understanding of the kind of informal or natural learning demonstrated by unschooled children at home. Our recent research described in our book How Children Learn at Home seeks to begin the job of filling this theoretical black hole.

We talked to 26 unschooling or autonomous families about their lives, the things their children did and how they themselves saw their children’s learning progressing. We began with some practical questions – looking at what different families do, what works for them and why. First we sought to explain what children learnt in terms of the everyday world around them. Children at home are surrounded by the artefacts and skills of their culture and by ongoing demonstrations of how to use these things by more experienced members of the culture – everything from how to use a door handle to driving a car. Although it is not set up for learning, separated from the real world, broken down into tiny sequential steps and pre-digested as it is in school, this information is readily available and already in working context for children to explore. Second, we come to the role that children themselves play in their own learning. Young children are naturally motivated to explore, to play, to be with their parents, to imitate and experiment. They join in life around them at all levels from simply being there through watching and listening to talking, thinking about and practising what they observe. Learning in these ways is not only effective but also enjoyable so that learning is a by product of naturally motivated, intrinsically rewarding behavior. A given for pre-school children, extending on these natural ways of learning is also sufficient for children through the so-called school years.

Overall, three things stand out for us. The first is that academic learning is not set apart as a separate entity as it is in school. The skills of trial-and-error and hypothetical-deductive learning are applied equally to finding out how to cook, tie different kinds of knot, or work out complex family relationships as they are to learning mathematical relationships and scientific principles. Second, and perhaps even more telling is that learning does not have to proceed in a linear or sequential fashion. Unlike school it is not possible to demonstrate the course of learning as it happens. For a start, much of it is simply hidden from view and can only be guessed at by looking back over weeks or months or even longer. Third, it seems that children impose their own logic on their learning and that curiosity, boredom, motivation, forgetting and remembering are part of a whole and highly efficient learning system.

The Next Stage:  Learning to Read

The individuality we have found so far in learning to read stands in stark contrast: (i) to the one-size-fits-all methods of teaching reading in school, (ii) to the assumption that almost all children have to be painstakingly taught to read and (iii) to the professional conviction that children not reading by the age of seven will be at a big educational disadvantage. We found that it does not seem to matter how or when children learn to read, they almost invariably emerge as fully fledged literate people.

In the next stage of our research we are focusing on this fascinating topic. How does learning to read appear through the eyes of children? What makes it appealing or otherwise? Why is there such a big age variation in learning? How do children actually get to grips with reading when they seem to do so entirely by themselves?

If you have a child or children who have learned to read at home, either wholly or in part, whether from a structured scheme or in any other way, we would very much like to hear from you and learn about your experiences, good or bad. We have posted a short questionnaire on our website where you will also find contact details if you would prefer to get in touch directly. Whatever you have to say will be fascinating and valuable to us.