The short answer to this question is: They are the same thing.
However, there is a common misunderstanding of these two terms, that is being repeated with an increasing frequency - meaning that a longer answer to this question is necessary.
In various pages online, we see the idea presented that there are two separate branches of unschooling philosophy: “Unschooling” (understood to consist of giving children freedom and autonomy in their academic learning), and “Radical Unschooling” (which extends freedoms to other areas of life such as food, bedtimes, TV and video games etc.).
This presentation of the difference between “Unschooling” and “Radical Unschooling” is a recent creation (by Dayna Martin, in around 2011). It does not reflect either term as they were originally introduced and used for decades before. It is also problematic, in ways that I will explore below.
Let’s start by looking at where these two terms came from.
Unschooling
The term “unschooling” was originally coined by John Holt in the 1970s, and referred primarily to a non-coercive approach to education. While he began by looking at the sort of learning that happens in schools, Holt clearly saw that learning opportunities exist throughout life, and that in order to offer children freedom in their learning, we should offer them as much freedom across their lives as we can.
For example, when he visited Summerhill school in the UK, one of his criticisms was of the fact that children were not free to leave the campus, and walk into town; and his later writings such as “Escape from Childhood” are full of concern for the rights and freedoms of children, going far beyond what is traditionally thought of as “education”.
In other words, John Holt’s original vision of “unschooling” was about far more than simply academic freedom.
Radical Unschooling
As the homeschooling movement grew, John Holt’s concept of unschooling was gradually diluted by parents who adopted some of his ideas around academic freedom, but could not see the value in offering broader freedoms. By the 1990s, the term “unschooling” was being used to refer to such a diverse range of approaches to home education, including some that were semi-structured or project-based, that the term was becoming virtually meaningless.
Writing on AOL message boards at this time, Sandra Dodd, Joyce Fetteroll, and others, started to use the term “Radical Unschooling” to distinguish their undiluted approach to unschooling from some of these other, more diluted, approaches. They have kept the term to this day, and others have adopted it too.
But “Radical Unschooling” isn’t, and never was, something fundamentally different from the plain, vanilla “unschooling” that John Holt advocated. It consists of the same broad ideas, applied to the same areas. If you read Sandra Dodd or Joyce Fetteroll, you will see that they often use the term “unschooling” without the radical modifier, and they do so in many contexts, including those that concern aspects of “life” as opposed to “learning”.
For them, as for John Holt, plain, vanilla “unschooling” is about all aspects of a child’s life.
A shift in terminology
In the last few years, Dayna Martin has started using the term “Radical Unschooling” to describe her approach to education and parenting, and succeeded in generating considerable publicity around it. Again, there are individual differences from other unschooling writers, but there are many similarities between her ideas, and those of John Holt and Sandra Dodd, so it’s reasonable that she uses the term “Radical Unschooling”.
What is novel, however, is her understanding of the relationship between “Radical Unschooling”, and plain old vanilla “Unschooling”. In a major break from previous writers, she presents a position in which “Unschooling” and “Radical Unschooling” are two distinct philosophies, the first concerned only with academic learning, the second with broader lifestyle choices, including TV, food, bedtimes etc.
Dayna Martin’s profile mean that her definitions now feature prominently in google searches for the term “Radical Unschooling”. As a result, her idea that “Unschooling” and “Radical Unschooling” represent distinct philosophies is starting to gain ground, and to be repeated elsewhere. It is noticeable that many people who have learned about unschooling within the last few years understand the “radical” modifier to indicate a shift in scope from “just learning” to “all of life”, whereas those who have been unschooling for years are often quite unfamiliar with the terms being used in this way.
Why is this a problem?
This shift in terminology is unfortunate. It creates the impression that there is a separate form of unschooling, consisting of “Un-Radical Unschooling” or “Education-only Unschooling”, under which parents could give children academic freedom, but continue to impose strict controls on their children in other aspects of life. Indeed some may imagine that this was what John Holt’s ideas amounted to, and that the extension of these ideas of freedom to the rest of life was the invention of Sandra Dodd, Dayna Martin, or some other recent author.
The problem with “Education-only Unschooling” is not that such an approach to raising children is wrong in itself (that could be debated, but it’s a different topic) - but rather that it fails to incorporate some of John Holt’s most fundamental insights about children’s learning, and as such really cannot be described as a form of “unschooling”. For unschoolers, learning is inextricably linked with life, and this means that it is not possible to give a child freedom in their education, without also giving them substantial freedom in terms of what TV they watch, what games they play, what they eat, and how and when they sleep: to restrict or control these things is inherently restricting and controlling their learning.
Parents do not have to accept these ideas - many do not - but if they do not, they are rejecting a major part of John Holt’s thinking, and would therefore be wrong to describe their approach to education as “unschooling”.
Unschooling is - and always has been - about the whole of a child’s life. There are no boundaries within which learning happens: learning happens all the time, and out of myriad different influences.
The UK Unschooling Network believes in the value of giving children choice and freedom in all aspects of their lives. Everyone who identifies with these ideas is welcome.
