When I was a kid, I think I tried every single day to somehow get out of going to school. All I wanted to do was just stay at home and watch Sesame Street, or read a book that I actually enjoyed.

Perhaps if my parents had let me do just that, I wouldn’t have detested school so much. And maybe, if left to my own devices, I would have learned all that stuff they tried to force me to learn anyway.

That’s the philosophy behind a new wave of home schooling. It’s called “unschooling,” and it’s completely fascinating. The basic structure is this: there is absolutely no structure. Kids are left on their own all day, every day, to do whatever they can dream up.

At first glance, it may sound absurd to the classically schooled person. One wonders how much any kid will be inclined to learn if left on his or her own. Parents and teachers assume that because kids are usually trying to get out of going to school, they must not want to learn. The reason, however, that they’re always trying to get out of going to school is that being forced to learn subjects you’re not interested in with people you don’t like by a teacher who is annoyed by kids half the time is not a desirable place to be.

As college students, the vast majority of us have jumped through the hoops of traditional schooling. We’ve taken those classes we thought were totally bogus. And the result of our scorn was that we didn’t pay too much attention, didn’t do too much work, and, well, didn’t learn too much. If we’d been allowed to explore subjects as they interested us, perhaps we would have retained all those little things we didn’t think mattered at the time.

If we’re left to teach ourselves, we’re not going to adamantly refuse to learn. Our curiosity will get the better of us, and maybe we wouldn’t detest those subjects that we were required to learn when we really had no desire to learn them (I know that if I hadn’t been forced to take calculus as a junior in high school, I may not cringe every time I hear the word). And eventually, we’ll want to know about all those subjects. Sooner or later, we’ll seek them out.

According to ProLiteracy Worldwide, 87 percent of American adults have less than a “proficient” reading level. Evidently, our educational system isn’t foolproof.

A couple in Connecticut, Luz Shosie and Ned Vare, let their son learn on his own. They never so much as suggested what subjects he should learn or told him how to teach himself. He passed his GED with honors, and went on to graduate Magna Cum Laude from college. Mary Hopkins took her son out of conventional school because he was diagnosed as autistic. Once she started to let him learn on his own, he actually began to be interested in learning, and his social abilities improved markedly as well.

There isn’t much data concerning unschooling because unschoolers don’t approve of the idea of standardized testing. In a recent New York Times article, Karen Tucker, a parent of an unschooler, said of test scores, “If you attach a number to your child, your opinion of the child changes, good or bad.” I can’t argue with that.

This concept of learning is gaining momentum because it seems to be working. It’s not churning obtuse kids who are completely unprepared for the “real world.” It’s producing people who truly love to learn, because everything they know is the result of a desire to know it.

And face it: it’s better than holding the thermometer up to the light bulb and coughing a little while trying to look really pathetic so your mom says you can stay home today.