Lesson 7: College and Career
Adapting to College or Work
While many parents are confident that their unschoolers will adapt well to college and work life, some parents worry about how well their free-learning children will adapt to such a structured environment. But they need not worry. Unschoolers, having taken personal responsibility for their learning, will have no trouble taking responsibility for meeting the expectations of college or work.
“For unschoolers, the break between adolescence and adulthood–between life largely supervised by others and life on their own–is not as abrupt as many traditional high school graduates find it to be. They’ve been making many of their own decisions for several years, gradually becoming more and more independent. Many begin taking a course or two in particular subjects of interest at local community colleges at fifteen or sixteen, and already have a good idea of what college-level work entails. They are in a better position than many of their schooled peers to decide whether they want to pursue a college education immediately, delay it for a while in favor of travel or work, or choose some sort of technical or other specialized training.” - Mary Griffith, author of The Unschooling Handbook.
One of the most common problems unschoolers encounter when they enter college is the difficulty of understanding why other students don’t enjoy learning as they do, and don’t value it for its own sake. Many unschoolers are surprised to discover the many shortcuts and alternatives to learning devised by other students in order to pass their tests and courses.
How can an unschooler continue his unschooling practices in a college setting? Unschoolers have intact their natural curiosity and love of learning. This will, of course, carry over into the college or workplace experience as into the rest of their lives. Unschoolers have the creativity to find enjoyable ways to learn the subject material they are required to learn. They know that they need not be limited to listening to lectures, reading textbooks, or other ways of learning offered by the college. Unschoolers know that there are many books and people in the community to learn from in addition to the materials presented in school. If unschoolers attend their local college, they are probably already know their way around the college library and bookstore.
“As a dedicated unschooler, there are two things you can do. First, begin researching college options early. There are many non-traditional and traditional colleges that welcome unschoolers. The non-traditional schools run the gamut from being typical residential colleges to colleges which offer degrees via "distance learning." The unschoolers in our family, dad included, have used traditional and non-traditional colleges to earn bachelor degrees and a doctorate. Secondly, you might consider the plan our daughter devised. She is an adamant unschooler who fiercely adhered to her unschooling roots throughout her ‘high school’ years. Her plan: try one college course during ‘high school,’ as an eighteen-year-old take more college courses. At eighteen she enrolled half-time at the university and half-time at the local technical college. Doing so, she carried a full academic load and completed a full year of college work in one academic year. Having aced her courses, she then transferred into an out-of-state university to further her studies. She still considers herself to be unschooling because, ‘I'm choosing to do this.’ - Alison McKee, former unschooling mother and author of From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschooled Experiences into College and Job Portfolios.
Whether homeschoolers attend college before work, or whether they go straight into work, employers will likely highly value a person who can successfully teach himself anything he needs to know as he needs to know it. Employers know that regardless of whether an employee holds a degree, he will have to learn on the job in order to do the work. Resourceful homeschoolers often have an easier time self-learning than do their schooled peers who learned to passively accept teaching and learning instructions from someone else. Homeschoolers confidently expect to learn what they set out to learn and take personal responsibility for that learning.
“Unschoolers, because they learn how to evaluate ideas from a variety of sources, are usually less likely to automatically accept someone else’s word as fact. They are critical thinkers who look for consistency and sense in what they hear and read.” - Mary Griffith, author of The Unschooling Handbook.
An unschooled person has lived a life in which he has taken responsibility for teaching himself. He knows how to solve problems on his own, when to ask for help, and where to find that help. He is more than capable of continuing this way of life into college and work. His love of learning, and his lack of a learned dislike of assigned work (like schoolwork), will aid him in college and career success.
