unschooling

A recent article in Outside magazine “We don’t need no education” touted the virtues of unschooling as a growing movement. These parents believe a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set ’em free. Amy Gates and her husband Jody have two kids, Ava (10) and Julian (7). They didn’t start off as an unschooling family, but evolved into it over the course of a few years. Although homeschooling had always been in the back of her mind, her kids started out attending Waldorf preschool. Then her oldest, Ava, went to kindergarten at a public school but Amy knew in her heart that that wasn’t what she wanted for her, but didn’t feel she was in the best place mentally and emo...