I was so excited to get my hands on a copy of Dayna Martin’s Radical Unschooling: A Revolution Has Begun. Martin is one of the leaders in today’s unschooling movement and is someone I would love to meet (and perhaps be counseled by!) someday. Her blog, The Sparkling Martins, is one of my favorites, and I have no doubt that she and her family do, in fact, sparkle—but not the weird, creepy kind in the Twilight movies; the magical, wonderful kind of sparkle that my grandmother had, that kind that all really fully living people do every day.

The book is a great source of information for people wanting to move beyond unschooling as just an education choice and into unschooling as a lifestyle choice. Respecting each individual child as a person, relying on patience and predicting what children will need to prevent conflict, being facilitators rather than teachers, and many more topics are included. I would not call this an introduction into unschooling, however; I would refer people to The Unschooling Handbook for something like that. This book, instead, would serve well to build upon an introductory text.

I know it’s a book about unschooling, so any deviation from the “normal” form of printing is, of course, welcome, and symbolic of the meaning. That said, the strange structure of the paragraphs, particularly in the example boxes of Unschooling Moments, did make the book—which is really short and easy enough to read in one evening—a bit distracting and harder than it should have been to concentrate on. I would have loved to have seen more photos, too, though I’m sure that would have been more costly.

Also, there were plenty of places in the book where I disagreed with the material. Since Martin is an unschooler, however, I think she would wholly welcome disagreement and every family’s choice to unschool in their own ways. For example, though I will help my daughter clean her room, I won’t do it all by myself since she is old enough to help, and we all work together as a family to keep our home comfortable. That said, I also don’t require it to be sparkling clean, since that is her space and she should get to enjoy it how she prefers to herself. All I ask is that there is room to walk to prevent danger. Also, we are all allowed to make as many messes as we want—from glitter to forts, piles of toys to taken-apart appliances—as long as we pick up after ourselves afterward. I work full-time from home and do not have time to pick up after everyone, nor should I have to. We are all old enough to clean up after ourselves. (Of course, if anyone asks for help, they usually get it—and since most of the time our messes involve most or all of us, we all pitch in anyway.)

There’s also the fact that Martin insists that children’s wants are their needs. I disagree here, because my daughter wants a $10 Zooble every time we go to the store. We are a lower middle class family, if you can even call it that; my husband is laid off and we scrimp to buy a loaf of bread sometimes. If we are heading to the store for such things, we don’t have enough to buy her toys, or her wants. She also happens to have dozens of such toys—so many that her room ends up overflowing often—from friends, family, parties, etc. She doesn’t need more.

Continue to Part 2