Freeschooling, or a Free School, is an in-a-school-building-with-other-students version of unschooling. Some other terms for freeschools are democratic schools, and Sudbury Valley Schools. Unschooling is a homeschooling philosophy based on John Holt’s seminal work on educational pedagogy. The over arching premise of unschooling is that children are inherently curious and driven to learn, without coercion. When given a rich and supportive environment, children want to grow and stretch, just as infants and toddlers learn to walk and talk. They try to do the things they see others doing around them, and as they grow they continue to explore and learn naturally. They have an innate curiosity and drive to learn which persists throughout childhood and throughout life, unless quashed. Adults can consider themselves life-long learners as well. 

There are other terms used to name unschooling, as people have had different ideas of what it looks like over many decades. This is a list of other names it might go by, though none perfectly describe the learning philosophy:

• child-led learning
• self-led learning
• natural learning
• whole life learning
• life-long learning
• world schooling (often associated with unschooling)
• consent-based learning
• radical unschooling

If you’d like to explore more about the various names of this model, here are a few websites that discuss it:  everlearning.ca and sandradodd.com.

As a parent, trusting this model of learning can be… unsettling, to say the least. In a freeschool, there are no artificially imposed grades, curriculum, courses, evaluations, or deadlines. The Mentees (students) are free to explore any interest that they value, to whatever depth they wish to explore it. They learn in a mixed age environment. Mentors (teachers) are like guides… like docents at the museum, or librarians at the library. They help ground the mentee’s learning by guiding them toward resources the mentees may not have known existed or been able to obtain without help. They introduce cool new things into the space (this is called “strewing”). They provide advice and feedback when a Mentee asks for it, and this can look like a regular check-ins. 

Mentees, and even moreso parents, often need a period of what’s called “deschooling” to adjust to this new way of learning. When we are used to an outside structure directing our learning, as in a typical school, it can take time to adjust and notice the curiosity and drive to learn emerging. In general, unschoolers believe it takes about a month of deschooling (think… gelling, doing nada, relaxing, vacay…) for every year of formal school that a kid has gone through. So, the first year at Alpha II might be very relaxed in terms of seeing your child taking time to relax and adjust into unschooling, and into a new community. This can make parents nervous – along with not seeing test results and grades to know how their child is doing. 

How do parents see how their child is doing at Alpha II?

There are parent-mentee-mentor meetings a few times a year. There are weekly newsletters that go out by email to the entire community. There are portfolio nights (where students display what they’ve been working on), and a culmination of this at the end of year event called Coffee House, where students present and perform.  Examples of the types of work displayed include musical & dramatic performances, table displays related to aeronautics, to visual arts, to a maple sugaring off, and many more. Some students who are creators also display their works for sale.