OAK PARK - There is no such thing as a "typical" unschooler.

"Unschooling means we don't use a curriculum," said Winifred Haun of Oak Park, an adherent of the method of homeschooling practitioners call "unschooling."

"We follow the interest of our children and let them learn that way, when they get excited or interested in something," she said.

Unschooling families rarely use schedules, lesson plans or have formal instruction. Some unschooled children learn to read very early; some very late. Children follow their own interests as long and as deeply as they like, while the parent simply guides and provides resources, rather than "teaching."

Sometimes, Haun said, people think "unschooling" means letting the children do whatever they want and making no effort to guide them or their learning. That's not so, at least in her family.

"It's not a free-for-all around here," Haun said. "There's order and structure to our day."

The 8-year-old has never been to school, but she's learning algebra from her father, a scientist, though she struggles with reading. Meanwhile, the 3-year-old is already writing letters.

Karen Gibson has her own Web site, LeapingFromTheBox.com, devoted to home education. Through trial and error, she said, her family discovered that "total, radical unschooling" is what works for them, with the child, not the parents, leading.

Some children will naturally keep up with their schooled peers; others will leap ahead in some areas, lag behind in others, or skip entire subject areas that hold no interest for them. Gibson says that's OK. The hardest part of unschooling, for the parents, is trusting the child to learn what he needs to know, not what you think he needs to know.

"I see the confidence daily in my children and the way they meet life and I am awed," Gibson said. "I'm wondering why it took me literally decades to recover that confidence that public school and its rigid methods of learning squashed out of me."

Professor Richard Prystowsky, department chairman of math, science and engineering at College of the Redwoods in Eureka, Calif., has written several articles on homeschooling, and he and his wife homeschooled their two younger children. Because they had chosen a family-centered lifestyle, neither felt comfortable in sending their children to strangers to be educated in what he calls an "impersonal" system.

"I am not opposed to public education," he said. "I am opposed to the systemic nature of public education. That's a crucial difference."

The current system of schooling, he said, developed with the industrial revolution and is too autocratic. If teachers and children had the freedom to be creative, to let students take the initiative, and if standardized tests and curriculum were abolished, public schools could better serve students' needs.

He's especially critical of segregating students by age and expecting small children to sit at desks and all learn the same thing.

"What in the world could be further from the real world?" he said. "People talk about socialization, but is that how you want to train somebody, segregate them by rank and age and pay attention to one thing for 42 minutes at a time? What professional do you know who spends his days like that?"

School reform, he said, must begin with completely changing the current system.

"Reform that does not address the systemic nature of the problem is not going to address the problem," Prystowsky said. "I want to see teachers in public education free and creative to do the work they need to do. I want to see students free to help direct their own learning path."

If all children weren't expected to learn the same material at the same rate and could instead pursue subjects they were truly interested in at their own pace, he said, there would be far fewer discipline problems.

"In my tradition, the Jewish tradition, we have an important teacher, Rabbi Hillel," Prystowsky said. "He used to teach that you begin with the learner, where the learner is. You go to the learner and you start (teaching) from there."

Valerie Wells can be reached at vwells@;herald-review.com or 421-7982.