As part of the process of writing a memoir called It Hasn’t Shut Me Up (my 10th book, to be published when it’s done), I’ve been examining the roots of my radicalism – especially as it relates to education. Like most other people, my upbringing and my schooling in the 1950s and ‘60s taught me to accept what I was told by my parents, my teachers and everyone else in my life. I did that well. I was the only child of working class parents living in a mid-sized industrial city. My parents had waited out the Great Depression to get married, only to have difficulty conceiving, so they were 41 and 48 when I was finally born. I was a good little girl who got good grades in school with little effort. That was, I imagine, thanks to good test-taking skills, which were grounded in my strong reading and writing abilities. One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. (Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called “learned incompetency” and a fear of not being able to do things “right” the first time.)
Nobody in my family had gone to university and nobody suggested I go there either. My dream was to be an airline stewardess as we called them then. But I had not been encouraged to go after my dreams; instead, I was supposed to know my place. And, in my mother’s mind, school was my place. In the 1960s, teaching was thought to be a suitable job for a woman and, as I realized much later in life, it had once been my mother’s own dream. So, as a relatively naive 19-year-old, I went to teachers’ college. I was a good little girl there too and got good grades once again. I did especially well at lesson planning and bulletin board decorating. And, bolstered by my winning of public speaking awards in elementary school, I actually got quite excited about the prospect of standing in front of a class and filling those adoring and adorable little heads with important facts.
When I graduated, I got a job teaching working class kids in my old neighborhood. What disappointment and disillusionment to discover that I was spending most of my time yelling at ten-year-old boys to keep them from swinging from the lights and jumping out the windows! They were not interested in my carefully planned lessons and colorfully decorated bulletin boards. In fact, they didn’t want to be there at all. And, I quickly realized, neither did I. So, contrary to everything I had been taught, I terminated my career as a school teacher.
Then I did what I should have done while I was attending teachers’ college: I began my self-education about education. I started to think about how people learn…as well as what they need to learn and why – and what gets in the way of learning. I decided that all those lessons I had so carefully memorized in teachers’ college about how to motivate students to learn were absolute nonsense. I realized that people learn things better if they are not compelled and coerced; if they are given control over what, when, where, why and how they learn; and if they are trusted and respected. I realized that until schools get in the way, children do not need to be forced to learn…because curiosity about the world and how it works is a natural human trait. I realized that memorizing material for a test (which I had done so well in school) isn’t real learning.
Fortunately, around the same time, I met and married a man who somehow intuitively knew all of this, although he hadn’t articulated it before. In the early days of our relationship, Rolf and I spoke often about how and why we would not send our future children to school, not quite understanding yet what a monumental decision that was. While I took my first tentative steps towards believing in myself as a writer and change-maker, he and I started a family. When I was pregnant with our first daughter Heidi in 1972, I fought anger, frustration and sometimes despair at the state of the world into which I would bring her. As it does for many women, motherhood was focusing my early political consciousness. It was helping me understand how the choices I make in my personal life are linked to those I make on a larger scale.
Propelled by a desire to create a better world for our children, we decided that Heidi and her sister Melanie, who was born 18 months later, would grow up not only absent from school, but unfettered by many of the assumptions people make about children’s subordinate place in the world. (Although the phrase was not in use in those days, our lifestyle would today be called “radical unschooling,” a term I dislike and prefer to call “life learning.”) And so, Rolf and I began to create a life that would affirm the rights of all members of our family. And I embarked on my life’s work to advocate for children’s right to be raised and educated with respect and without the “isms” – sexism, racism, classism, ageism, consumerism and other elitist or destructive social influences and hierarchies.