Back in the 1970s and 80s when my daughters were young, they learned by living their daily lives, through experience…both that which found them and that which they sought out. They reacted to a need or an interest by exploring, researching, asking questions, listening to others, testing their ideas and putting them into motion, getting feedback, making mistakes and correcting them, and so on. Along the way, they learned how to read and write, how to research and communicate effectively, how to do math and think strategically, how to dance and play guitar, and about science, history, geography, art and computers and many other things. Nobody had a plan for their learning and nobody taught them what they learned, although many people contributed to their store of skills and knowledge. Nobody examined their knowledge or measured it against someone else’s idea of what was appropriate for them to learn, although it was tested daily by the success of their various projects.

At first, we didn’t give much thought to what this lifestyle was called; we were too busy living it. Their dad and I did know before our daughters were born that they wouldn’t go to school (until they were old enough to choose), that we wouldn’t separate how they learned from the rest of our life as a family, that trust in learning and respect for our daughters was a priority, and that we would be modeling learning behavior. (And, indeed, we were feverishly learning about how to publish magazines and books, how to garden, how to buy and sell real estate, how to relate to extended family, and many other things two twenty-somethings needed to know to live our lives.) In the late 70s, when I began my career of public advocacy for learning without school, labels and other descriptions became necessary to describe our parenting choices. And, of course, when talking legalities, the choices can usually be boiled down to school or homeschooling. So in those days, that’s the term we used. And it worked as well as any other for us, although I chafed at the misunderstandings it created because we weren’t home a lot and when we were it looked nothing like school.

Today, as the number of homeschooling families has grown and the collective experience has broadened (and the Internet has allowed us to chat about it endlessly), the vocabulary has become richer and more diverse. We have home-based learning, self-education, autonomous learning, relaxed homeschooling, eclectic homeschooling, natural learning, unschooling, radical unschooling, whole life unschooling, life learning (which my husband Rolf has been using for thirty years and after which this magazine is named) – not to mention Christian and secular versions of each! And that’s just the unstructured end of the spectrum.

As a confirmed label-hater, all of this drives me nuts. As I wrote in my editorial for the March/April 2008 issue of Life Learning, I have a hard enough time being “the person who’s learning to be human!” I’ve also never been comfortable with other categories of self-description like “environmentalist” or “feminist,” although I probably fit into both. In some ways. And that’s the problem: Part of being human is having an individual identity, not slotting oneself into various categories filled with millions of other people and – for me – not following someone else’s rules. Furthermore, one of the debilitating aspects of school that I determined to avoid forty years ago is that wearisome slicing, dicing, slotting, categorizing, labeling and rule making that they do there.

I realize that we all need to find our “tribe,” to connect with others of like mind, to find support on our journey. And if our use of some of these labels helps us do that, I’m happy. But then, let’s get on with living and learning. And, in the process, let’s try to avoid creating new boxes. Where’s the value of thinking outside the box if it only leads you to create a new one?