We began our unschooling journey with a simple yet radical word: ‘we’. 

Not ‘I chose this’ or ‘they needed that’. ‘We’ imagined something different, together. It was a journey into imagination and co-creation.

Deregistering our boys from school was not an act of rebellion so much as a celebration. A celebration of liberty, of possibility, and of what we can imagine when we choose to learn together, side-by-side, beyond the walls of the classroom.

For whilst we saw education as unquestionably good, we found ourselves asking a necessarily disruptive question: What if school is not?

What if school is a place where a child is anxious, where a child is bullied, or is in sensory overload? What if school is a place where you just don’t fit, where you don’t feel safe, where your talents go unrecognised, where you are quietly assured every day, through grades, systems, and expectations, that you are not good enough?

What if the problem isn’t learning, but the schooling box in which we contain it?

Now, imagine living, learning, growing without schooling.

I actually began this imaginative journey as a child myself. Perhaps you did, too. But when we allow ourselves to imagine differently, as parents, and involve our children in that imaginative process, something shifts. We begin to envisage an education built not around rigid curricula but around our children’s interests and the everyday encounters woven through our life together. 

Rather than asking, “Will we limit our children’s opportunities by leaving school?” we begin to wonder if the school walls might be limiting some children far more. Not just the physical walls of the building, but the constraints of the curriculum; the predicted grades scrawled on the front of exercise books revealing expectations narrowed by testing rather than expanded by curiosity; the necessity of spending so much time indoors, sitting down and being quiet; the disconnect from the natural world, from workplaces, elders and people of diverse ages.

For our family, unschooling flipped the script.

Far from isolating, our days became woven with community as we learned in the real world, with real people going about their business. Our children’s social world grew, becoming broader, deeper, and less age-restricted as they found like-minded people to share their questions and interests with, who helped them gain skills. We learned to see the whole world as our classroom, and the community around us as our greatest resource.

Children are born learners. They don’t need to be coerced into curiosity. Unschooling taught us to trust the flow of intrinsic motivation, to lay a feast of opportunities before our children, and joyfully expect them to run ahead of us into the unknown, pursuing answers to their many questions. We accept we do not have all the answers, we learn alongside them, lifting them on to our shoulders so that they can see further than we can. Sometimes, they need us by their side, to guide, facilitate, resource, and support. And sometimes, we just need to get out of the way so their learning is not limited by our preconceived ideas, our limited understanding, targets and time constraints. 

Real learning always starts with the learner.

In traditional systems, learning is often prescriptive, completed for extrinsic rewards: grades, stickers, prizes, certificates, praise. But as John Holt, an unschooling pioneer, famously wrote: “The ignoble aim of such incentives is the satisfaction of feeling we are better than someone else”. So, as some succeed, others fail, by design.

In our unschooling home, learning became something richer: self-directed, meaningful, real, intrinsically driven. It became a conversation, a relationship, an adventure we walked together. We slowed down, we listened, we spent a lot more time outdoors. We watched ideas spark in unexpected ways. We observed our children making connections, building a web of understanding far more complex and beautiful than anything we might have planned. And each member of our family, so unique, opened up their way of seeing and engaging with the world, helping us to notice and to celebrate diversity. 

I still believe unschooling to be a profound, quiet, grassroots revolution, an act of humanity, a shift towards seeing every person as an independent and capable lifelong learner. In a world transformed by technology, where information is abundant and opportunity is flexible, we no longer need imagine learning as happening only in one place, under one system, between specific hours. Instead we can imagine tinker spaces, learning hubs, mentors of all kinds, children following pathways shaped by interest, curiosity, and real-world relevance. We can imagine young people equipped for the future, not through compliance, but through confidence and problem-solving. We can imagine learning communities which are vibrant, intergenerational and connected. We can collectively imagine taking education out of the narrow schooling box, together.

When we consider the mental health crisis in our young people, the increase in childhood anxieties, the rising numbers struggling to attend, we might call school a failed social experiment. But the answer isn’t fear. It shouldn’t be sanctions or blame. It should fuel an exercise in imagination, shared imagination.

Unschooling doesn’t happen in isolation. It is a journey, an adventure, we embark upon together, choosing presence over pressure, curiosity over conformity, relationship over routine. It is a long-term, values-driven vision of the future. For us, school became one possible resource among many. Self-directed learners may choose to use it, or not. That’s the beauty of autonomy. What matters is that we recognise the value of every learner, of every community member, and every child’s right to an education shaped not by fear or force, but by curiosity, connection, and the joy of being fully themselves, giving them an appetite for life and for learning. 

I still believe this is the power of unschooling, the power of imagining differently, together. Some years ago, I gave a TEDx talk at the University of Warwick on this theme. You may enjoy watching it here: https://youtu.be/GFg-4Ez_AKU?si=NEzLMKPhfzMJ5_D-

About the Author

Alice Khimasia is a one of the core team here at Streams. She is a home education advocate, writer and researcher who has been unschooling alongside her four sons since 2010 and shares their journey through her website, Organic Education. She has given a TEDx talk and her work has featured in The Guardian, The Times, The i, and a BBC documentary on home education. Alice recently completed an MA in Childhood in Society at the University of Warwick, where her award-winning dissertation centred children’s voices and challenged the idea that school is where learning primarily happens.