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.

Trust

I was talking to my sis last night, and our conversation turned to be about being young and "how does society support and value adolescent people." (My hypothesis being that society didn't really do a very good job at honoring young people, especially adolescents.) In conversation, we came to realize that we are both have been going through a sort of remembering.  After all this searching for who we are and what we want in life, we came to realize that when we were 11, 13, 15, we knew more about who we were and what we wanted than we did for the following 20 years.  We are both experiencing a sort of returning to our selves, our loves and preferences. Our young selves knew...before societal and cultural pressures pushed us around and made us doubt that we knew who we were or made us believe that we needed to be more or different or like someone else.  The message that we were "too young to know what we wanted in life" was played over and over and how were we to know any better?

 So here I am with the same dream I had as a child.  Now, my job is to trust myself.  Because that person is the person who wants to trust my daughter. 

Just Ask

My upbringing led me to believe life was about struggle, the world is full of mindless droids that follow the status quo, there will be resistance waiting at every turn and I will have to fight to achieve any sort of positive change or success, even personal success.

Naturally, when I realized our assignment sheets from the charter school were having too negative of an effect on our love of learning and life, I was ready to go in with my tail bristled, to fight. I wrote our overseeing teacher an email about how the coerced reading, repetition, static assignments and worksheets have negative effects.  She wrote back asking what did I think would work. I wrote her about child-led learning, free-ranging, spontaneity, teachable moments, and integrated lives. Learning happens in every moment, at every turn. I wrote about how difficult it is to fit Ramona's mind into the public school package, how her backing off from subjects is often a preliminary to a breakthrough in that subject...

Later that day I head into the meeting triweekly meeting, I have that tinge of pre confrontation anxiety. After we go over her work from the last few weeks, the teacher tells us that, instead of writing our assignment sheet for the upcoming 3 weeks, she would like to write it at the end of the three weeks.  Basically, she is going to write the assignment sheets retroactively from now on.  My job is merely to jot down what learning activities we do and then she will filter that into a form that will please the powers that be. Wow. Sometimes I forget that I might be able to have my cake and eat it too (I don't like that saying, but I used it anyway), at least a little...

It's true: when you step out of line the are cards stacked against you. It takes a lot of finagling to homeschool children.  And it is MUCH harder than it was before compulsory schooling came along.  Children's culture has moved into the classroom, and it's extra work to find child spaces during daytime hours.  But things are changing a little, especially here in Sonoma County.  Montessori and Waldorf Public Schools, Independent study schools with non-compulasary classes...exploding numbers of homeschool families, along with groups meetings, activities, and support is growing.  Things are changing.

A society where the average parent feels that not sending their child to school is a viable option is a society I would love to live in. I homeschool because it is part of my utopia. I envision the future I would like to see, and then I live it right now. Living our future now is the only way I know to get there. The more of us that do this, the easier it is to move on to that future.

So, no more reading drills - we get to do reading on the fly. We changed our maps workbook into a study of culture and environment.  We're still going to do math by the book, its easier that way...I cross of pages whenever she does math activities on the computer or otherwise. We are free...freeish anyway.  The more the better.

So, I guess the lesson here is...ASK. You never know. The system may be against what you are doing, but the people in it are...people.  Not droids. At least not all of them. Some folks are in education cause they actually value education and they might envision a future not so different from you and I.



PS: In other news, I want to change the name of this blog. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Your house will look like its lived in

If a home is bustling with life, education, creativity and children... it probably won't be a very clean house.  It won't sit empty and alone all day, waiting for the family hubbub that comes at 3pm, or at 5:30 or 6 or 7.  It won't be like some homes, meticulous arrangements, as if a display case, showcasing it's inhabitants.  We have our art tables, hula hoops, a trampoline, and carpentry projects in the living room.  We've got a comfy chair in the dining room, so we can relax, cook, and chat all at the same time.  Sometimes R's room gets cleaned spic and span, but after focusing all that cleaning energy on one room, the rest of the house shows the neglect.

It's us too.  I need to work with R, but of course she is six and I am one (person that is). I was also never taught to clean as a child. I was taught to keep my mess in my room.  Our mess is always from 100 different places.  The legos go for a space ride and end up under the table of veggie starts, someone needs a crayon to write a note, and they leave it on the dining room table next the the hair tie I just pulled from my hair.  And R doesn't like clothes, so often strips in the middle of whatever activity and the clothes get forgotten...

If you spend half you time at schools and offices you have a maid or a janitor to clean up after you.  You also have your learning and work materials in another place.  The bulk of creation happens somewhere else.  Homeschooling, work-from home, artistic people have the cards stacked against them.

A creative mess is better than tidy idleness, as the meme says...below is R explaining about her messy room.  Not sure it qualifies as a "creative mess" or just the messy sort of mess.

In other news, I changed my mind about the Montessori school for the moment.  R made it clear to me that she doesn't want to go.  I tend to question her a lot.  I am always trying to make sure that I am not influencing her decision too much. I don't want her to think school sucks just cause I think it does.  I hope she learns to trust her inner compass.  She wants to talk when she feels like it.  Morning is her mellow time, not thinking time...  But I still wonder if she would be happier with  Public Montessori education.  I hear it's inspiring.

Dying Easter Eggs

Our first venture into natural dying with Easter Eggs seemed a simple way to get introduced to the world of natural dying.  (natural dying...noooooo..IM NOT READY!) Anyhow, didn't come out quite as we hoped. We learned a lot though, and I don't say that in a sad sort of way; we had a good time and really did learn a lot.  And hell, that's what we are here for. Why waste your time learning beforehand when you can learn during the process?  That's how we fly.  (I wonder if that is why it takes like 25 years for us to finish our projects???)

There are a ton of articles about dying Easter eggs naturally. And since I am not an avid product buyer, I decided to use what was around the house and in abundance mostly.  I tried some cranberry cocktail and grape juice, with some vinegar (they said it would work).  They say 2-3 tablespoons of vinegar per liter of water when boiling ingredients, so I just added vinegar to the juice.  I wonder if boiling would have made a difference.  When the cranberry juice looked to be failing at its job, I added a bit of red wine.  The juice dyes both came out grayish-lavender and grayish-purplish shades, perhaps leaning more towards gray.  Luckily we decided to decorate the eggs with crayon first to make them a bit more festive and interesting.  However, we were hungry when we were dying, so by the time we finished dying there were only 8 of the dozen left.

For green we debated grass or spinach.  Grass is abundant so we ran outside with our scissors and a basket.  For yellow I boiled the skins of oranges and lemons.  Finally for blue I boiled red cabbage.  The red cabbage dye came out the fastest, and we even ate the shell pink cabbage (now that all the blue had been boiled out).  It's interesting, cause when I have clothing made of natural dyes, blue is always the first to fade. Blue is so transmutable. The red cabbage blue was by far the most vibrant color. I boiled it for about 15 minutes in the water and vinegar mix and then let it cool.

The orange peels on the other hand boiled for more than an hour and didn't dye at all.  The grass boiled the same time and after soaking ALL night, turned the egg a greenish, orangish yellow.

Next year I will go with beets for pink, those things work.  When I was a kid, working in the blueberry fields at a neighboring farm, I would come home each day and eat two Ramens for lunch.  I always threw in a little slice of beet, so I could have pink Ramon.  Beets are the king of pink.  I have heard red onion skins are great for vibrant color as well.  I think I might try blueberries for purple, since they stain.  Turmeric for yellow....cause it stains too.  Maybe spinach for green.

I also want to try boiling the eggs in the pot with the dye ingredients.  I guess the drawback to that is that any crayon drawn on would be melted off.  Over and out.

Control

Unschooling is my main approach to homeschooling.  Sometimes its hard to give up that kind of control.  Unschooling requires that I have faith that my daughter will learn what she needs to, with out coercion.  Societal hang-ups tell me I need to "develop" her academic talents.  Like the West tries to develop the "under-developed" of the world into its own image.

R has taken on the academic with ease and always been "ahead" of in the race (that leads to the rat race); it seems I have set the bar at that level, always ahead.  The fear of average has set in.  I don't want to be average. I was an "advanced" child, I really had a lot of potential. Now I am just average. That's the mantra that plays in my head.  And I blame my parents.

Homeschooling shines a bright light on the structure and state of the relationship between a parent and child. And also how that relationship is intrinsically intertwined with the parent and the parents' parents; the whole ancestry and family history of rearing children.  Homeschooling has been demanding but rife with opportunities to grow as a person and give up pride, control, the need to be right, and the need to know how things will be. It presents the opportunity to embrace humility, self-discipline, right speech, trust, and hope. Because I am in contact with my child so much more I can't hide from our relationship. There is a real depth of work here. Choosing to interact mindfully with your child is a discipline. It's work. And it's rewarding. And then I will get it wrong and I try to shrug it off and try again with a sincere and open heart.  I just hope I start getting it right more often.

But yesterday was really hard. It feels like we don't like any of the same things. We are marching to different tunes these days. We have had a couple break-downs the last couple weeks due to her not wanting to do what we are doing.  So I try so hard to find something that works.  And I think it does...for a minute....then she balks and all falls apart. Or I fall apart.  Unfortunately I have had to work the last two nights, in the middle of the night.  I'm not rested.  Maybe her life is boring.

I called the Montessori charter school. I made an appointment to attend an information meeting. The next step would be a tour.  I asked if I could bring my daughter to the tour, and they said children do not attend the tour. Could I really take her education so far out of her hands that she wouldn't even be able to tour the school where she would potentially be spending the next 8 years?

I swallow my  pride and start anew.  I try something different. I tell her that I won't make her do anything, but that I need her to follow through. She says she will.  Will she be able to do that?

I remember when she was 2, and 3 and 4 and all I expected of her was that she be herself and I loved that self so much. She learned so well then, she never ceased to amaze people with her maturity and great personality.   Then I got tired, she felt pressure.  It started with this independent study school. Standards. Assignments. But I don't have a choice.  I need the support.

Today I feel I have it more together.  I am going to go to that informational meeting.  Maybe even the tour. Maybe it will instill in me once and for all that full-time institutionalization is definitely 100% wrong for her. Maybe it won't... Just for today we are homeschooling. I love our time together.

Second guessing.

Who protects the seed? 

Wouldn't it be nice to send Ramona away for the day, not have to think about where she is or what she is doing? To be absorbed in myself and what I am doing.

Shouldn't I go out and have a life? Find some adult love? Work full-time in the non-profit industrial complex so my student loans can be forgiven in ten years and I can have more clout in the activist world. Shouldn't I be making art (MY grown-up made-in-isolation Art)? And wouldn't I be so much hotter if I could go out and do all that hiking and biking and yoga that I would do if I didn't have to take care of my child so much?  The child that I invited into this world...shouldn't I be sending her away to be educated and molded by really nice strangers?

I have been second guessing myself a lot over the last year or...since R was born.  Fortunately, I've learned to live with it.  It's normal to have doubts when what you are doing is outside the norm, because living outside the norm is always work. People will rally against you or make you feel like you are just being silly. I second guess myself for fear of not a being a success, leaving a legacy, missing my chance while I am still young, not living up to my potential. We connect mothering with sacrifice.  It is self-sacrifice, but some amount of self-sacrifice in life is oh so tantalizingly fulfilling.

Success (with a capital S) is a sham.  Its part of a system that pits us against each other while leaving those who love the most and give the most in the dust. Success in our narcissistic culture is based on competition and happiness is based on consumption (or so they say). Are famous people more important than normal people? Are they more content or happy?  Do they commit suicide, do drugs or get divorced less? HA!

Unfortunately, though many are quick to blame the mother every time there their children end up "damaged" or "criminal;" we don't honor parents enough for their important, amazing work. The children don't belong to their parents, they are a gift to the world from their parents. While most of the country struggles to earn more buying power, parents are spinning the future.  And in many cases, schools are.

I want a life full of meaning and grace.  I want to live my deepest motivations and values. My heart and my intellect know what is best for Ramona and me...usually.

Success is happiness, meaning, love and the co-creation of a beautiful future. I plan to experience the richness of my life...it might be the only one I have.  I will experience the richness of motherhood, in everything I hope that it is...be alive. Deeply, happily, painfully and amazingly alive. And I am.

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Howard Thurman