My "schooling" was much like the education I enjoyed as a toddler. The only change was that besides blocks and dolls, my parents started giving me books and arithmetic problems, and with the same lack of pressure. A book never came with the message, "Read this, or you're in trouble." Nor did they use any of the more subtle and usually unspoken versions of pressure such as, "Read this, or you're a bad girl," "If you read this, you're a good girl," or, "Read this, and we'll be so proud of you." The only message was, "This is interesting and good to know." And so it was.

Much as I enjoyed the science books, the history books, the math worksheets, they were the least part of my education. Most of my learning was indistinguishable from the rest of my life. For one thing, I never outgrew the habit of asking my parents questions about anything and everything. One could say that the long talks that followed these questions were "schoolwork," for they taught me a great deal about school subjects (and often lead to hauling out books to look up what my parents couldn't answer; by this time, they were usually as curious about it as I was). I never thought of them as "schoolwork," though. I was just getting my questions answered.

I've always loved to read, which led me to ask which of the many books I read during my school years could be called school books. Perhaps only the classics. Little Women is a classic, but I read it for fun, just as I would a non-classic. Would writing a book report on it have made it "schoolwork"? What about non-fiction? Were unschooling guru John Holt's books "schoolwork"? Probably not, for education isn't a high-school subject. Susan Faludi's Backlash on sexism in American society might fall under "social studies..."

Then there were all of my other day-to-day activities. When I went to the grocery store and helped Mom compare coffee prices, I was learning arithmetic, but was I "doing schoolwork"? "Home ec" is a school subject. Did making a casserole count? Watching a favorite TV show was definitely not schoolwork, right? But what about all I learned about traditional school subjects (political science, social studies, economics, science, history) from my favorite show during my teen years, Newshour with Jim Lehrer? Perhaps watching the show wasn't schoolwork, but looking something up in the encyclopedia to better understand the show was.

I may be taking the wrong approach to this, though: in searching for my hours of "schoolwork," I am looking at the times when I learned. What about all the time most kids spend doing "schoolwork" without learning anything at all? Should I be listing all the times I was bored or confused? If I do that, I won't come up with half as long a list as a kid in school would. And what about test-taking, all those tedious, nerve-wracking hours spent not on learning or even on trying or pretending to learn, but on attempting to prove that one has learned? Perhaps I had better consider all the time I spent demonstrating my knowledge to those who are skeptical about homeschooling.

Just what does the word schoolwork mean? It covers a great variety of activities that seem to be unified in only one way: they are what one is ordered to do in the name of education, regardless of whether one learns from them or is even expected to learn from them. Take away the orders, and schoolwork means nothing at all.

The final test of this word's relevance came in this past year. If the books and conversations and casseroles were "schoolwork," shouldn't they have ceased when I finished "school"? They did not. Indeed, there is nothing that I stopped doing when I officially graduated. There's something that I started, college, but it was only a temporary addition to my unschooling, not a replacement for it. In college and beyond, I have continued to go through life learning and experimenting and pursuing what I find meaningful. Unschooling is not a twelve-year program that I have completed. It is a way of life. I didn't merely do unschooling; I was and am an unschooler.