Unschooling Four Kids in the 1990's (w/ Robin Alpern)

On this episode, we are joined by Robin Alpern, a 65-year-old white woman who narrowly missed a career as an elementary school teacher. Instead, she and her former husband unschooled their four children to college. This was largely in the 1990’s, and since there weren’t many resources for unschoolers, Robin co-founded the Tri-County Homeschoolers network, which, as we’ll hear, helped Gina when her own family unschooled. Robin, Gina and I talk about the challenges and benefits of unschooling in the ‘90’s, the diverse ways her children learned, and much more. Enjoy.



1:46 - Robin’s Decision to Unschool in the 1990’s: “We knew we were pioneering something. I mean, none of us had grown up with anything like this.”
6:44 - Robin’s Children Learning by Living: “As homeschoolers, we weren’t actively shutting down his learning processes, so he did what you do: he learned. ”
14:33 - Struggling to Let Kids Make Their Own Choices: “She had spent the whole year when she was six begging to go to school.”
20:30 - Benefits and Challenges of Unschooling: “It was hard having neighbors and people in our community who felt that we were actually abusing our children for homeschooling them.”
24:26 - Unschooling When Few Others Were: “This was pretty much an experiment, and who knew what was going to happen?”
32:33 - Robin’s Children Go to College: “She kind of had to learn over night the things that other kids were learning all along, like how to take notes in class.”