Unschooling Rules is a book organized around what the author deems as the Seven Cs (Curricula, Content, Coaching, Customization, Community, Credit, and [Day]Care) of Education. It has 55 mini-chapters that detail his research for the best practices that should be adopted by homeschoolers and unschoolers.

The book is a straight-to-the-point short read. I keep one in my library as a reference book. I would highly recommend reading it to understand the reasoning behind many of these ideas. For those of who firmly believe that the traditional education system must change, many of these ideas make a lot of sense. For others, many of these may seem radical.

Below are the 55 chapter titles. While not always, the chapter titles typically summarize what to expect from the chapter (though I highly recommend reading the book, especially if you want to learn more about any of these in particular).

Curricula

1. Learn to be; Learn to do; Learn to know

2. Focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic

3. Learn something because you need it or because you love it

4. Twenty-five critical skills are seldom taught, tested, or graded in high school

5. Don’t worry about preparing students for jobs from an Agatha Christie novel

6. Avoid the academic false dichotomy of “The Cultural Literacy Track” or “The Vocational Track”

Content

1. Throughout life, everyone unschools most of the time

2. What a person learns in a classroom is how to be a person in a classroom

3. Sitting through a classroom lecture is not just unnatural for most people, it is painful

4. Animals are better than books about animals

5. Use microcosms as much as possible in learning programs

6. Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests

7. Include meaningful work

8. Create and use periods of reflection

9. Embrace all technologies

10. Listen while doing

11. One computer + one spreadsheet software program = math curricula

12. Have a well-stocked library

13. Read what normal people read

14. Is it better to be “A Great Reader” than “Addicted to Computer Games”?

15. Formally learn only what is reinforced during the next 14 days (you will forget everything else anyway)

16. Build more, consume less

Coaching

1. Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership

2. Expose more, teach less

3. Biologically, the necessary order of learning is: explore, then play, then add rigor

4. The ideal class size isn’t thirty, or even fifteen, but more like five

5. One traditional school day includes less than 3 hours of formal instruction and practice, which you can cover in 2

6. Homework helps school systems, not students

7. Every day, adults are role models of learning (whether or not they want to be)

8. Avoid the Stockholm syndrome

9. Schools are designed to create both winners and losers

Customization

1. In education, customization is important like air is important

2. There is no one answer to how to educate a child. There may not be any answers

3. Be what schools pretend to be, not what schools are

4. Fifteen models that are better for childhood learning than schools are

5. Feed passions and embrace excellence

6. Children learn unevenly, even backwards

7. Five subjects a day? Really?

8. Maturing solves a lot of problems

Community

1. Socialize your children. Just don’t use schools to do it

2. Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea

3. Minimize “the drop-off”

4. Increase exposure to non-authority figure adults

Credit

1. Tests don’t work. Get over it. Move on.

2. The future is portfolios, not transcripts

3. Keep a focused journal

4. Use technology as assessment

5. College: the hardest no-win decision your family may ever make

[Day] Care

1. Outdoors beats indoors

2. Walk a lot

3. Under-schedule to take advantage of the richness of life

4. Parents care more than any institution about their children

5. Children should be raised by people who love them

Conclusion

1. The only sustainable answer to the global education challenge is a diversity of approaches