Democracy without curriculum: how unschooling contributes to a home education rooted in democracy and agency for young people

Abstract

It is widely accepted that young people’s lives are more complex than ever before and this complexity is making classroom life difficult for many. In response, around 30,000 Australian young people are choosing home education (Moir & English, 2022). While many consider home educators to be ideologically inflexible and religiously fundamental, this stereotype does not reflect the Australian home education movement (Moir & English, 2022; English, 2021a, 2021b). Indeed, many parents are making a “choice without markets” (Aurini & Davis, 2005), attempting to address the top-down, centralised and inflexible curriculum increasingly found in schools (English, 2021a, 2021b, Van Galen, 1991). This paper explores the democratic potential of unschooling, a widely adopted, but frequently misunderstood, approach to home education that has, at its heart, a democratic educational approach rooted in agency (Romero, 2018; Riley, 2021). Unschooling moves beyond civics and citizenship to a lived experience of democracy for young people. Through an analysis of extant home education literature as well as data from the inquiry into homeschooling from the New South Wales upper house (Select Committee into Home Schooling, 2014) we propose that the greatest threat to democracy for change in curriculum is too much regulatory control over home education while the greatest benefit of unschooling is its emphasis on participatory democracy and agency for young people.