Episode One: Holly Lepley ‘The Glass Shattering Moment’

Unschooling means ‘parents allowing their children as much freedom to explore the world as they can comfortably bear.’ (John Holt) Welcome to Unschooling: Learning Without Rules, the podcast which helps you let your children take charge of their own learning. I'm Jackie, a retired homeschooling mum of four and I followed the unschooling approach with my children. I felt compelled to start this podcast because home schooling is very much in the news often negatively and I wanted to share my insights into how it can be a joyful and empowering experience for the whole family. For episode one, I speak to Holly. When Holly, mother of three children under six, discovered unschooling she says: ‘It was like one of those glass shattering moments… now I can’t see us going back.’ In this pilot episode Holly talks us through how it was for her and her three children when she decided to deregister her two oldest a year ago. Her six year old son had started to dread going to school. Holly thought ‘You’re only six, you shouldn’t be counting down to the weekend,’ so she did some research, took the plunge and took them out. She is a primary school teacher herself and she found a lot of overlap with her teacher’s training. She finds that being at home with them enables her to follow the true philosophy of teaching which supports child-directed learning as a first choice. ‘You cannot stop a child learning’. She describes unschooling as: ‘living and learning without school and putting joy and connection at the forefront.’ We compare experiences around socialisation, coping with the lockdown, and we express our outrage at the media’s portrayal of these lockdown months as creating a ‘lost generation.’ We compare how our unschooled families fill their days, the best resources we have found to support us and what it was like when my own children chose to try school. She quotes Walt Whitman: ‘We were together, I forget the rest’ and talks about how natural it feels to have them at home all the time. When making her decision she had challenging health issues which was a worrying factor in all this and she discusses how she faced that. She advises unschoolers to ‘find your tribe’ and do lots of research online and follow blogs, podcasts and youtube videos. Her final advice is: ‘Trust in your children and trust in yourself - you can do this.’ RESOURCES: - The ‘disco circle’ website: www.discolearning.com for a support network - Holly's favourite podcasts are: The Motherkind Podcast by Zoe Blaskey and Exploring Unschooling by Pam Laricchia. - Holly's favourite unschooling book is Peter Gray’s Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Please email me if you have any questions, comments or would like any kind of support. I’m Jackie at: [email protected].