I wrote this guest post for Peter, over at The Unschooler Experiment. But I wanted to share it here as well:

Question: What happens when a grown homeschooler doesn’t feel self-motivated?

Answer: She feels really guilty instead.

(source)

When I’m defending homeschooling, or just plain talking about how great it is, I almost always cite self-motivation. Sometimes people make comments like, “I couldn’t have been homeschooled. I was too lazy.” And I go, “Ah, how wrong you are!” And then I deliver this expertly crafted little speech about how the bifurcation of the concepts of work and play creates boredom and laziness. I say things about how you don’t feel bored when you’re doing what you’re interested in, and you learn from everything anyway, and you don’t put things off when you are passionate about them. And unschooled kids are passionate about things because they have time to be. And because they can follow their interests. And because they aren’t taught that learning is lame and separate from the rest of living.

It’s kind of a long speech, actually. And it might not be that expertly crafted after all. I wrote a post about these ideas here.

Self-motivation and homeschooling go hand-in-hand. As a kid, I always had a project of my own design that I couldn’t wait to get back to work on. In between all of the other things I was doing, I was always writing a book or working on a series of paintings or writing . . . → Read More: Homeschoolers are not always motivated every second of their lives