What's an Unschooling Family To Do When a Kid says "Make Me Learn"?

 So, fellow unschooling folks, help me with a thing here, if you would, please? To me, one of the tenets of unschooling is that the people who are learning choose their method of learning. We’ve held to this over the years. For example, when the oldest kid, Daize—as always, an alias—who is now 9, thought that kindergarten in public school, might be her best way to learn, off she went. When she decided, four weeks later, that she had changed her mind, I spent the better part of a day taking public transit around San Francisco getting her unenrolled.

So, like I say, we take this roll-your-own  aspect of unschooling seriously, but last week, the middle kid, aka Towser, aged 8, asked me a thing… He asked me to force him to read and write. And, what am I supposed to do with that? (This is where I need your help by the way.)

Can Towser be forced when he doesn’t want to be forced? In a word, No! I know this because I learned it as part of my unschooling journey. Frankly, it would have been easier for me if Towser had learned to read years ago. He would have know where the restroom was with without his older sister, Daize or I showing him. He could have started learning bus routes earlier. He could have read signs that indicated he was in danger. In short, he could have been more independent than he was.

Don’t get me wrong though, he was in fact, very independent. I know this because when I made inroads into teaching him to read, the answer was an emphatic—if not always explicit—No. I’d show him letters, asking him what they were. Sometimes, he’d disdainfully lower himself to my petty attempts saying what a letter or two were. Other times, he’d look into the distance away from the letter, guess a different letter, and say that one instead. In short, the kid was not going to be forced to read. He wasn’t going to be coerced. He wasn’t even going to be leaned on.

Taken from Sandman #1 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

Then, about a year ago, deciding that reading held the key to further independence—riding the bus by himself when he turned eight and whatnot. He announced to my partner and  I that he wanted to learn to read, and that we were to teach him. We tried. We tried the ways we had before. They still weren’t really working. He still wasn’t really interested.

Until—few months ago—it finally occurred to me that I’d been  trying to teach him reading in a different way than he and I had been successfully working together on math. I’d been trying to do the ‘school’ thing, (at least what I’d done in school), including memorization, starting from the very, very basics, when in our math talks we used all the big words—binary, number base, additive identity, multiplicative identity, and the lot. I changed our reading talks to the same. We talked about diphthongs, we talked about combinations of consonants, parts of speech, and the like. The kid started to show some interest. 

Then, last week, Towser told my partner and I—again—that we had to teach  him to read and write. This time, I had the presence of mind to ask, “But how? What would work?”

And he said, “You  need to force me to learn.”

And here we are. And, I have to say, it’s been working.

Here’s what I’ve been  doing. I informed him that he and I were going to practice reading three times a day for ten minutes at a time. He could memorize words, he could sound words out, I frankly didn’t care how he did it, but we’d read. I talked to him about strategies. We could read the same thing over and over, or we could read further into the story. So far he’s opted for the over and over, viz a vis memorization. He’s considered backtracking on his request, “Dad, when I asked you to force me, it was more of a suggestion,” but he hasn’t backed away from doing the reading.

And, it’s working. He’s memorizing some words, he’s sounding out others, and he’s starting to read on his own. We’re having fun  at it, we’re joking around, we’re talking about the sound of different letter combinations, and we’re talking about how a computer algorithm might do what he’s doing; it might try a letter by itself, make the sound, decide it makes no sense, back up, and try two letters at once, looking for combinations. Tuhhh-he making no sense for the word ‘the’, but th-eeee making all the sense in the world.

So, let me roll back to my original question. I think the regular practice thing is working, but when unschooling rolls into the territory of “you need to force me to learn” is it still unschooling? I think it is, but I’m curious to hear what other  folks think.