What is Worldschooling?

Have you Heard of Worldschooling?

When we first decided that travelling with the kids would be a great lifestyle choice for our family and a phenomenal way for the boys to get an education, I invented a term “travelschooling“.

Not much further down the road I discovered that somebody had already named what we were doing, it was worldschooling and it was actually a fairly commonly used term.

Unschool, Homeschool or Worldschool?

I’m not one for labels and divisions, we do some unschooling, some homeschooling and a whole heap of worldschooling. I think a lot of homeschoolers are that way.

In Australia we tend to use homeschooling as an umbrella term to cover all methodologies, in the UK they prefer to use home education, rejecting the “schooling” term altogether.

I don’t really care what you call it, we do our own thing, ignore the school system, and the kids get a great education.

Have a look at our 1 year of homeschooling highlights to see just how much learning happens, naturally, out in the wider world. One teacher commented that our style of learning was what schools try to reproduce in the classroom, and fail

For the uninitiated, here is a brief run-down of the usual terms in the alternative education world:

School-at-Home is doing what they do in school, at home. I don’t personally know anybody who does this. I think this is what homeschooling is taken to mean in the UK. These children will probably be fitting back into the school system at some point, maybe taking the usual exams. Many people believe that home educated children are “taught” by a parent. In reality, this rarely happens.

Unschooling is a 1970s term John Holt used, he was never happy with the term, but it stuck. He prefered the term “life”. Unschooling invoves a complete rejection of the school system and trust in the children to learn through their own interests and curiosity at whatever pace they prefer. Parents and other human beings are involved as key facilitators of that learning.

Radical Unschooling takes the unschooling philosophy even further to include all aspects of life. Sandra Dodd came up with this term and it totally rejects any disctinction between educational and non educational activities. Radical unschooling removes limits and allows children to make their own choices in all areas of life. I’m no expert, if you’d like to know more try Sandra Dodd or Dayna Martin, both are extremely prominent unschoolers.

Worldschooling is difficult to define. Some class it as a type of unschooling, some children are world-schooled as they’ve been home-schooled.

I love this post by a world schooled teen on how her education has ruined her life.

There are whole blogs written about worldschooling. Worldschooling Adventures explains their approach to education on the road in this post.

Lainie of Raising Miro is an unschooler who also worldschools.

It seems that worldschooling can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Is it Possible to Worldschool and Not Travel?

If you take the simplest definition of worldschooling that I’ve found, then of course you don’t need to travel. Worldschooling is learning from the world, we are all in the world, just some of us see more of it than others. That sounds more like a definition of unschooling that worldschooling, I think.

Eli Gerzon claims the term worldschooling as his invention. He says

“It’s when the whole world is your school, instead of school being your whole world.” 

His definition seems to take travel out of the worldschooling scenario completely.

What Does Worldschooling Mean to us?

When I first started educating my children I was, like most new homeschooling parents, very school-at-home. I thought that was what you had to do, I had no experience of any other way of learning. Every day we became more and more unschool as I saw how the learning was actually happening ( this is called de-schooling).

Before we left Australia I was happy to call myself an unschooler and totally embraced the term and the philosophy. We were, of course, worldschooling in our tropical home in Far North Queensland, the reef and the rainforest made a great playround and classroom for all of us, not just the kids.

 

Over time, elements of school-at-home have crept back in. When we aren’t actively travelling, like now, in London, we use workbooks and our favourite online learning program, Studyladder. A new introduction to our educational arsenal has been the Minecraft Homeschool course, the boys are getting a lot out of that one. Kids audio guides, tours and talks slot into our life easily and are becoming more and more important as the boys get older.  At the moment we’re doing written maths and English and I’m using a science work book as a sort of check list to see if my 10-year-old does actually know what he would be expected to know if he were in school in the UK.

He does, he has the same knowledge base as any child leaving a UK junior school should have. I say should, because of course, many won’t, a year before the school kids would be expected to be at that level.

It’s reassurance for me and a sneaky way to get him writing and spelling, he enjoys science, like his mum, writing, not so much.

At the same time we’re still worldschooling, homeschooling and unschooling, we’re learning from London, her museums, zoos, history, geography and culture. The kids are making new friends and seeing how British children live. The boys and I are going to Forest School for 2 hours per week because it’s fun and a good way to experience nature while meeting new people. We’re learning from the world, just as we always have, but a time will come when we feel we’ve absorbed all the learning we need to from this corner of the world. Then it will be time to move on, to find a new environment, a new set of experiences and a different culture to learn from. We’re planning our next move already.