Unschooling as a Social Movement

I read an interesting article in the Guardian recently, explaining how children are raised ass-backwards in Europe and the US. I shared it with the local unschooler listserv, creating quite a discussion.  Though it wasn’t about unschooling, the views and concepts expressed in the article made fundamental connections to the heart of unschooling theory and practice.

The article begins by illuminating the paradox of mainstream parenting and its forte for “crying it out” as babies.  That “logic” preaches the virtues of separateness and stringent personal boundaries in order to keep the child from imposing its will on the parent (rather than vise-versa) and to foster independence. In short: control tactics. Conversely, nearly every other culture we know of, including our own (not so) distant past, keeps its children close for the first years of life, letting them bloom into their own self-assured and (hopefully) competent independence.  At a very young age, children around the world are cooking meals for the family, wielding machetes, and spending all hours of the day roaming free of adults' compulsion to structure and plan their entire day. The “developed” world favors leaving babies alone when they need us the most and planning their every hour when they probably need space to experience life on their terms.  The article basically berates “modern” child rearing practices for being so darn controlling, arguing that relative freedom is the historic norm - what humans have evolved with - and that lack of freedom is at least in part responsible for the high level of unhappiness in children today.

No one likes to feel powerless, and children tend to thrive when given freedom of choice in a safe environment.  On a personal level I agree with the article and actively practice what I hope is a better why of initiating a soul into this world. I know I need to make sure my daughter is safe, and when it is important, yes, my choices thwart hers, but I also treat her with the same respect I treat all humans.  I respect her as I want her to respect me.  And sometimes her choice thwarts mine, but it isn’t about her “winning” some kind of battle for control. It is about two people who live together and are dedicated to being as happy a family as we can be.  When I am with adults, I don't try to make everything to go my way all the time either. 

Unfortunately, most of us are born into one of the most hierarchical structures on the face of the earth: the typical American Family…and children are smack dab at the bottom of the totem pole. I feel for them. Hierarchy: where orders and violence flow down and respect and riches flow up, UGH!  

Ultimately, our society has created a very specific (controlled) track for children’s lives with the advent of compulsory school and competitive child rearing leaving children with very little agency over their own lives. It’s very challenging, lonely and sometimes alienating for individuals and families to take another path. The perceived danger of the world keeps our children locked up when they are young, and as they get older they become the perceived danger themselves.  There is little room for a child to develop his own ideas or for children to create children’s spaces and culture.

A question that emerged from the email exchange was whether the free-range and unschooling movements are part of a potential push in another direction for children in our culture. 

Free-ranging is nothing new; it’s quite similar to how most of today’s adults were raised, free to roam after school and on weekends, save a family event here and there.

Unschoolers take the same philosophy of autonomy into the realm of education. Children are hard-wired to learn and “unschooling philosophy argues that confining children in a school is an inefficient use of the children's time because it requires each child to learn a specific subject matter in a particular manner, at a particular pace, and at a specific time regardless of that individual's present or future needs, interests, goals, or any pre-existing knowledge he or she might have about the topic.” Children are learning everywhere, all the time and very important multi-disciplinary, living, hands-on, community-based, spontaneous, and real-world experiences are missed when education is confined to today’s schools, after-school programs and home-work, with little respect for a child's passions and talents.

These movements have the potential to bring children more and more into community. Children who are granted autonomy and freedom to roam find themselves an anomaly and with no one to hang out with. As people begin to turn away from segregation and the fast track to the rat race for their kids, children will begin to re-emerge and hopefully we, as a society, will once again learn how to interact with children as important members of the community.

Maybe we ARE part of a push in another direction for society as a whole…because the truth is that children are the future manifest.  Social change is a fundamental change in the people, the grassroots. What is a better way to change the people than changing their childhood, their foundation in life? Reconnect children with community, life, freedom.  In many indigenous and traditional cultures children are seamlessly incorporated into community and life, free to learn and participate at a much more meaningful level that we are comfortable with in this country. 

The people at the top of this societies totem pole are pushing the other way. As schools fail to meet governmental guidelines for a properly educated child, our leaders, i.e. Obama and Arne Duncan, think that the answer is eight hour school days.  Of course students object (even Obama’s own two daughters), but their opinions and ideas on the matter of their education are completely disregarded. 

Our leaders try to solve every problem of youth through the school system, and that system fails. The school system fails mostly because children don’t like school. People don’t thrive and learn well in settings that make them unhappy.  Studies show that children are the less happy when they are at school than any other situation that they find themselves in regularly. And schools themselves, regardless, of how they perform, remove children from the public, effectively creating separate adult and children’s spaces. We loose our knack for community and tolerance, and children are rarely taken seriously or  accepted in the “real world” with their “emotional outbursts,” their limbs hanging from trees, their basketballs accidently bouncing off of hoods of cars and their messy habits.

Education in the western sense has become more and more synonymous with conditioning, programming, brainwashing.  Children are removed from everyday life, and taught about the world that they want us to believe in, tested on it, and then released to perpetuate it. I hope we can let our children experience the world on their own terms and come to some new, more useful conclusions.

Social Change is a process, and a slow moving process at that. As we begin to remove children from the conditioning of the past, we prepare them for a better tomorrow; the one every loving parent hopes to live to see their children find.  I don’t want to see children becoming the victims of our backwards culture, but rather as the change-makers they are capable of being.  Children are the most able to change.  They are the real, long-term revolution.