So here is a snapshot of what I thought I knew when I sat down to write this one day not too long ago: Some people don't know what unschooling is supposed to look like.

If I went to the flea market to buy a torque wrench but I didn't know what one looked like, I would have a pretty hard time just finding one by looking around. It probably wouldn't be on a table with clocks made of cross-cut cedar. Looking through a tray of cassette tapes wouldn't help. It would be especially difficult if I didn't even know what a torque wrench was for. I might look all through those wirey-boards and steel boxes computer-repair guys brought. I could look for hours through cloth and paperback books and come home saying "Going to the flea market for a torque wrench doesn't work."

I used to go to the flea market regularly, pre-motherhood, to buy medieval- and Renaissance-suggesting things to re-sell in the SCA. It was fun. I used to make enough to pay our way to tournaments by setting up my little homemade tent and some tables covered with pewter and silver-plated bowls and plates, cast aluminum tankards or goblets, hand-blown glasses from Mexico, fur collars, little wooden jewelry chests, old-looking jewelry, leather bags, brocade curtains (without fiberglass or rubber), interesting little knives, wooden trays and bowls, and so forth. I'd sell them cheap, too. I learned a lot doing that, and had fun.

They scan their children's lives every day for schoolish things. They're looking for spiral notebooks and they ignore sunsets. Looking for a 50-minute session of history to prove attention span, they miss a pioneer dress-up game and an attempt to build a catapult.

As a final stop before giving up, some come and declare their failure to those who told them about unschooling. They tell us it didn't work for their family, and that after all, they are the experts in their children, and so they know that their own family is not creative enough to unschool, and their children crave structure. Sometimes it seems they think those who say "Unschooling is So COOL!" are deluded nuts who don't care much about their children. Other times I think they see our children as brilliant and theirs as dullards.

Now I have come to believe that they just ignored the million things looking for the five or six.

They thought if they left the kid alone for a month he might spontaneously create a four-subject routine, with some music, art and sports put in for extracurricular balance. They envisioned that their child might say, at the age of fourteen (give or take a few) years, "I'm ready to learn biology now," which would be the beginning of nine months of study, with three dissections and some tadpole measuring, maybe some plant genetics. By May they should declare whether they were more interested in botany or life sciences (step one in "do you want to go to medical school?").

When a science-minded kid loves to take the dog down by the river and look for wild berries and snakes, some parents say, "My kid just wants to play. He's not interested in learning. He'll never learn science just playing."

Each little experience, every idea, is helping your child build his internal model of the universe. He will not have the government-recommended blueprint for the internal model of the universe, which can look surprisingly like a school, and a political science class, a small flat map of the huge spherical world, a job with increasing vacations leading to retirement, and not a lot more.

Unschooled children can organize their knowledge in free and better ways. They never need to feel they are through learning, or past the point that they can begin something new. Each thing they discover can be useful eventually. If we help provide them with ever-changing opportunities to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, move and discuss, what they know will exceed in breadth and depth what any school's curriculum would have covered. It won't be the same set of materials - it will be clearer and larger but different.

"How will they learn everything they need to know?"

Do the best of the high school graduates know everything they need to know? No, and at some point, ideally, they start learning on their own. Some fail to get to that point, though. Unschooled kids have a head start. They know how to find what they need to know, and they have not been trained to ignore things that won't be on the test.

When parents see how and what their children are actually learning instead of just scanning for the half dozen school-things, unschooling will make sense to the parents. If you wait for school to congeal from a busy life, you'll keep being disappointed. If you learn to see everything instead of just school things, unschooling will start working for you. When you see it you will believe it.