“The first parental meeting seemed like a theater of the absurd to me,” Ksenia My friend shares her experience, the mother of four unschoolers. Her eldest son Viktor is a sought-after programmer, her daughter Asya is a line producer on one of the TV channels, the youngest is only 12 and 8 years old. she told us in detail how many cells children should retreat in class work. “Why don’t you write down ?!” she barked at me. “I don’t see the point in this,” I answered, and even with genuine joy later found out that my her lessons continued to write "incorrectly". Then, talking about how the day went, the son increasingly began to say to his mother something like: "And today I started writing a new computer program in history class!" Ksenia went to the school principal with a statement that her son will now study as an external student.

"10 months a year he was engaged in programming, and in just 2 months he took the course of the next class and passed exams for transfer to the next one. That is, he did what he liked, and not what was" necessary, "said a friend. When she daughter Asya was born, Ksyusha decided to work at home: “But there was never any control: I do my job, the children do theirs. And they grew up a little - they began to help me in my work (I'm a translator) - to cross out extra letters after the decimal point, for example - for which I gave them pocket money. This also stimulated them to study: the pay depended on what they knew, say, learned some words. Asya went to school until the end of the second grade, but then she decided to stay at home, and I supported this. " The 22-year-old girl herself explains her step differently: "We moved. They didn’t want to send me to the rural eight-year-old school, it was far away to take me to the previous school. In principle, this suited me. "In the third grade, my grandmother was still studying with Asya, and then she studied on her own - non-systemically: she played computer games, did housework, nursed younger children, and she wanted to sit with textbooks. "But we had enough communication with a head,” says Asya. “Not with a randomly created group of classmates, but with those people who were interesting to me,” recalls Asya.

"When my kids' friends found out they weren't going to school, they were delighted to tell their parents that it was possible! Those parents explained that it was only for 'some' and you are 'normal' so forget about it." - says Ksyusha. But later it was she who insisted that her daughter ... study at a medical school. Like, to prove that "unschooling" does not mean an empty head. And Asya did! But only for my mother: “I was instilled with skepticism in relation to education all my life, but here it is! I was not ready for the university, I discovered fatigue and lack of sleep, putting a block of information in my head took me more time and effort than classmates."

But the fact remains that Asya has succeeded both as a professional and as a person. "My intellectual development happened not because of, but in spite of my mother's educational system." True, when asked if she regrets that it all happened, Asya, without hesitation, blurts out: “Regularly. I’m not saying that knowledge can only be obtained at school, it’s just that if you decide on“ homeschooling ”, then you can’t let everything take its course, how "unschoolers" do it.My mother, as a true supporter of this movement, still believes that if a child is interested in something, he will find out himself.