Quotations About Life Learning / Unschooling
As any unschooler / life learner and many homeschoolers know, there are many benefits to a self-directed education. However, I have always been surprised and pleased by how many writers, thinkers and doers from various times in history have also known and written about the folly of school and the importance of a learner-directed education. Surprised because school still dominates our society and pleased because my work for the past three decades has been about overturning that domination in favor of self-education.
Recently, we began a collection of quotes on this subject and have posted it on the Life Learning Magazine website. Feel free to use these in your own writing and speaking, and to contact us with your additions to the list. (I have made an effort to include quotes by women and by people who are still alive, because both are under-represented on many such lists.)
More Than the Absence of School
A number of people have recently asked me questions about our family life back in the 1970s and 80s. And I realized that, in all of my books and articles over the years, I haven’t written much about that. So here goes!
When Rolf and I got married in 1970, we had already decided that our future children wouldn’t go to school. So when Heidi turned five in 1977 and Melanie turned five 18 months later, we didn’t send them off to school. (In fact, we didn’t send them off to babysitters of any sort.)
In those days, that was called “homeschooling.” I was never comfortable with that word, because we weren’t schooling and we were seldom home! Today, lots of other terms have been invented to describe the way we lived, such as “unschooling,” “radical unschooling,” “whole life unschooling,” and (one Rolf coined many years ago) “life learning.” However, they all still seem inadequate because they all focus on learning, which most people think of as related to academic education. But there was so much more about our lives that was different from the norm than just the absence of school. In the same way that our daughters learned autonomously, they decided for themselves what to eat, what to wear, when to go to bed and other life issues. They were self-regulating…with whatever guidance they sought from us, of course.
Our lives weren’t full of struggles to get our daughters to follow the rules – because there were no rules or restrictions, and no coercion (although there were some guiding principles, which I list below, and some basic safety considerations). As babies, they were breastfed when they indicated they were hungry and slept when they were tired; they weren’t “sleep trained” or put on feeding schedules. They self-weaned and self-toilet-trained (learning the latter, I think, by example). We didn’t worry about the age at which they began to talk or walk, in the same way we didn’t create a schedule for their learning to read or do math.
Similarly, as they got older, we didn’t dictate their bedtimes; they went to bed when they were tired, rather than when we wanted to get rid of them. They got up in the morning at whatever time they wanted. They kept a somewhat regular schedule and they understood (from experience) that if there was a need to get up early the next morning it worked out best if they went to bed earlier the night before.
They ate what and when they wanted. When they were young, we mostly ate together as a family, at times that worked for all four of us. What they ate was, of course, dictated to some degree by what was in the house – fresh, vegetarian, often home-grown, whole foods – but they had complete autonomy as to what of those foods to eat, when, and how much. They valued the food at home because they had helped grow, bake or cook it. But we weren’t dietary purists; we ate out often at friends’ homes and restaurants, and they experienced their share of candy and other food that I would have considered “junk.” Like most kids, they would go on “food jags,” where certain foods were scorned and certain others favored. But, through experience, they learned balance and to make good choices.
They also chose, from a very young age, what to wear each day. Like everything else in their lives, this was a learning situation and they often changed clothes several times a day, experimenting with various color and other combinations. The results were often eccentric and sometimes entertaining but, when it mattered, they were mostly sensible – coats, hats, and mittens in the winter, cooler attire in the summer.
They didn’t have assigned chores or rewards for completing them. The tasks that support daily life – cleaning, food preparation, gardening, clothes making, laundry, car maintenance, yard word, and so on – had to be done. But their “help” was never required. Consequently, as they grew to an age at which they became aware of the need for such work, they naturally, and without complaining, participated. Or, I should say, they didn’t complain any more than the adults! Most of the time, they were eager participants in whatever was going on at the moment: personal or business work, fun, conversation…. As they got older and able (and wanting) to contribute meaningfully to our home-based publishing business, they were paid.
Our family was always welcomed into the homes of friends – including the childless ones – because the kids were generally well behaved (meaning they participated in the visits without demanding to be the center of attention or trashing their surroundings.) Inappropriate behavior tended not to be an issue because we tried not to put them in situations they couldn’t handle or that weren’t suited to their needs. When that inevitably wasn’t possible, we found that they would look to us for guidance to deal with new situations. Perhaps because their needs were being met and they were being respected, they were patient with and even enjoyed the times when they were the only children around, and happy to be part of the conversation, or at least listening, watching and learning.
This way of life seemed to evolve naturally and wasn’t modeled on any “experts” or books. In fact, it took awhile before I was able to distill all of it into a “parenting style” or even figure out the common threads. But, like Heidi’s and Melanie’s education, our lives were guided by a few basic principles, which I’ve written about in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, the other books to which I’ve contributed, and my articles in Natural Life and Life Learning magazines. In summary, these are:
- trusting that children know what they need and that they will create a structure that works for themselves
- respecting children and adults alike enough to consult and not wield power over each other
- modeling appropriate behavior
- communicating (which includes listening)
- understanding that each one in a family has a different perspective, which results in a lack of judgment and expectations
Melanie recently told an interviewer that she doesn’t remember a hierarchy, coercion, or control as she grew up. She said that although, in retrospect, she feels like she had a really wonderful childhood, at the time, “it wasn’t my childhood, it was my life, our family’s life. I never felt like I was living under my parents’ roof; it was our family’s house. We didn’t have rules or restrictions and I wouldn’t have done anything differently if I had lived on my own.”
For the record, she and her sister are now fully functioning adults (Heidi is a financially secure self-employed graphic artist and Melanie is a conservation horticulturalist who runs a native plant botanical garden). And, yes, they are well socialized, dress well, eat well, get enough sleep, and keep their homes clean!
Life Learning – the book
Last year, we published a book of essays from Life Learning Magazine, which has been a great hit among unschoolers as well as those who are curious about unschooling. Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier demonstrates how families are embracing this learning lifestyle – and making it the fastest growing segment of the homeschooling movement. It also demonstrate how it’s way more than an educational philosophy or homeschooling method; instead, it’s a way of life…a way of being with children and young people in the world.
Academics, parents (and some academics who are unschooling parents) and life learning young people describe why non-compulsory, non-coercive, active, respectful, interest-led, family- and community-based learning from life is growing in popularity and will displace prescribed curriculum, standardized testing and the other regurgitation-based relics of our outmoded school system.
They describe how this innovative way of learning through living not only fosters intellectual development and academic achievement, it allows children and young people to develop an understanding of themselves and their place in modern society so they can create a better world.
We’ve just created a Facebook page for the book and invite you to become a fan in order to help us spread the word about this important set of essays.
You can also visit our Natural Life Books website and purchase it. (Buy directly from us helps support independent publishing!)
There’s No Right Way…So Let’s Lose the Insults
For many years, I have taken it for granted that people know what the term “unschooling” means. Truthfully, I really haven’t paid much attention, since I dislike the word…and labels in general. Since many people seem attached to it, I just happily play along, using it when necessary – as a web keyword, for instance – and quietly trying to seduce people to use other terms, like “life learning,” which my husband Rolf coined a long time ago and of which I’m particularly fond (both the word and my husband!). But recently I’ve been realizing that I was wrong to assume that everybody has the same understanding of the word “unschooling”: There are, in fact, many misconceptions about the word among non-unschoolers. And unschoolers even disagree about what it means.
Misconceptions among the general public can be problematic on the public policy level. Disagreements within the tribe can be divisive, when the movement needs some cohesiveness in the face of opposition. What’s worse, I’ve been noticing a lot of negativity, arguing, and insults within the movement. (This is, I think, part of a bigger issue, about which I’ll be writing some more – probably on my personal blog.) Many people set rules for various categories/styles of homeschooling and put a lot of effort into judging other people’s lives. One blogger unhelpfully coined the oh-so-clever name “unschooloonies.”
So why do some homeschoolers of one persuasion attack homeschoolers who do things differently? I think it boils down to an understandable lack of confidence. Not sending one’s kids to school is still seen to be unusual at best and misconstrued to be abusive at worst, in spite of the many millions of homeschooling families around the world of all persuasions. So it’s no wonder that many homeschoolers feel a little defensive about their chosen path. And some secular homeschoolers feel further marginalized within the homeschooling community. I just wish people could either keep their feelings to themselves or channel them into something more positive. Something of the “live and let live” variety.
If you want to help your kid learn math in a certain way and you want to call it “unschooling math,” then be my guest. It’s an inaccurate use of the U Word as I see it, but I really don’t care. Nobody owns the trademark (not even John Holt), although it’s probably only a matter of time before some enterprising soul tries. And there are no rules.
Likewise, if you want to extend the child-centered philosophy that many people understand to be “unschooling” to the rest of your life (as my family did) and call it “radical unschooling” or “whole life unschooling” or even “radical XTREME unschooling” as one critical blogger calls it, again, be my guest. I don’t know how you can avoid applying the principle to the rest of your life with your child, but there are no rules.
As a matter of fact, if you want to set a classroom up in your spare room and teach your kids using a curriculum – evolutionary or otherwise – be my guest. I personally can’t imagine why you’d want to do that (and think it defeats the purpose of not going to school and would be happy to chat with you about what I’m sure is a better way…). Just don’t abuse your kids and I have no problem. Yeah, I have strong opinions on the subject, but they’re just opinion, not rules. There is no right way.
The one thing on which we all should be able to agree is that homeschooling/unschooling/autonomous learning/whateveryouwanttocallit is a continuum. Aside from having No Rules, it is a learning process that families undertake together. As I’ve been telling the media since at least 1979, there are as many different ways to do it as there are families doing it. There’s nothing wrong with that and, in fact, autonomy and independence are part of what it’s all about. If one family’s way of doing it bothers you and you can’t find a way to learn from it, please move on. Minus the insults. Would be nice if we could give up the labels too, but that’s probably asking too much.
Unschooling from a Father’s Perspective
Life Learning Magazine’s publisher Life Media also publishes a small selection of books under The Alternate Press Imprint, founded in 1976. Our most recent book is For the Sake of Our Children by Leandre Bergeron. This book is unique in many ways.
One of them is that it’s a natural parenting memoir written from the perspective of a father who stayed home to unschool his three daughters. For the Sake of Our Children is a powerful memoir of a life led respecting and trusting children, from the naturalness of home birth and breastfeeding on demand, through learning by living and working together on a small farm and in a natural food store. The author’s passionate ruminations about his strongly-held philosophies of attachment parenting and self-directed education are woven throughout a series of journal entries describing the daily life of a family of three unschooled teens.
The result is a wonderfully warm, sometimes funny, always wise potpourri of advice and inspiration about natural parenting and unschooling. Bergeron writes, “I believe I have broken free from my complicity with other adults. I have chosen to remove myself from this adult world to side with children.”
His book provides both rationale for and proof of the wisdom of choosing a path that is so little trod upon in our world…the path of freedom, of respect for our children, of trust in them and belief in their ability to regulate and educate themselves.
Renowned author and homeschooling advocate John Taylor Gatto wrote the preface. And he fell in love with the book, recently telling us that he thinks it’s “the best of the breed” and asking how he can help promote it.
This book is a real unschooling effort. It was translated from the French by an unschooling mother and the cover was designed by her teenaged formerly unschooled daughter. And Life Learning’s editor Wendy Priesnitz wrote the introduction.
You might want to become a fan of the book’s newly created Facebook page in order to learn about updates, reviews, info about the author, and more.
Beginnings: It Hasn’t Shut Me Up
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.
On Homeschooling and Child Abuse
I’ve been putting off writing about the difficult topic of child abuse. My time is at a premium right now. Abuse is a difficult topic. And it isn’t a life learning topic. But some people keep trying to make it one. So I have posted my thoughts and some background on my personal blog.
What finally pushed me to write about this is a concern that the homeschooling situation in Britain may be crossing the ocean. The unfounded accusation of child abuse has been used there by the government to create draconian and paternalistic regulations for homeschooling. And I’m wondering if that could happen in North America. When my family was unschooling in the 1970s and 80, we were accused of abusive behavior by people who hadn’t bothered to understand our lifestyle. And that is still too common.
Attitudes among unschoolers vary widely in regards to government participation in their lives. But I don’t believe home inspections and the like are a viable solution to the child abuse issue. Nor do they ensure quality learning. Nor are they acceptable in terms of human rights.
I am not allowed to walk into my local school and interview a student for hours about the quality of her treatment and education in that school. Nor should school or welfare authorities be allowed into the homes of home-educating families for that purpose.
And you can be sure that schools wouldn’t agree to having the quality of their instruction measured against some definition of “satisfactory,” “equivalent” or other standard concocted to judge home-based educators. And if they did, would all those who didn’t meet the standards be kicked out of school and ordered to learn at home?
It’s long past time that home-educating families got the respect they’re due – as a legitimate minority group and as people pointing the way to a more enriching educational experience and to positive social change. The time for discrimination and allusions to abuse is over.
Unschooled Teens Are Different
There has been some discussion lately about (and by!) teenaged life learners. All too often, teens are collectively discriminated against or looked down upon due to their supposed bad behavior, moodiness, etc., etc. However, I think much of that is due to the way they are treated in our society…and people’s expecta…tions of and respect for (or lack of) them. So we went digging in the archives to find this article from Life Learning’s September/October 2007 issue by the mother of two unschooled teens.
Ann Leadbetter had written a couple of previous articles in Life Learning about her unschooled daughters Kate and Molly. And when the decided to go to college, she updated us. In this article, she describes how they prepared for, applied to, got accepted by, and began to thrive at college…without having attended school.
And, in a sidebar, she comments on the myth that the teen years have to be unpleasant for families, with surly, rebellious young people straining to get away from parental influence. And she describes what many other life learning families have experienced (mine included): What we, in North America, experience as adolescence is quite different when young people are used to interacting with and being respected by adults, rather than being age-segregated in disrespectful, coercive environments like schools.
What’s Wrong With the Schooling Mentality
The marketplace of ideas has become monopolized by corporations and institutions, and our coercion-based education system is used to create a society of consumers rather than one of thinkers.
For almost twenty years (since he resigned from teaching while he was New York State Teacher of the Year), John Taylor Gatto has been writing and speaking to anyone who will listen about how this “mass child indoctrination by force” came about and why it continues in our schools.
In a new article published in the current March/April 2010 issue of Life Learning Magazine, he elaborates on that process and suggests way to resist it. Here’s a link to a short excerpt from the article.
John is now almost 75 years of age, has a new book in process and maintains an active speaking schedule. His politics and his outspoken nature make his work controversial – even among homeschoolers and life learners. But his anti-compulsory school and pro-self-directed learning message is an important one and I am happy to have been able to disccuss the issues with him over the years, and to publish some of his work.
There are links here to some of his articles published in Life Learning Magazine. And go here (scroll down to his profile) for links to some of his earlier articles published in Natural Life Magazine. He also wrote the foreword to this book, which we recently published.
The Dark Side of Influence
A recent blog post by a dad with kids enrolled in a Sudbury Valley type school (SVS) has prompted me to think once again about how life learning parents relate to their children in a unique way. The blogger was comparing unschooling to the SVS model because someone had once used the oxymoron “unschooling school” to describe a SVS. He came up with two differences between the two: SVS students can “pursue their interests in a context that’s free from any form of (subtle or overt) parental influence” and the SVS structure is democratic in a way that families presumably aren’t.
I should note that I’ve challenged the writer on both points, which I believe are inversely related, but the discussion has yet to unfold. Aside from the jaw-dropping, head-shaking notion of kids needing to be free of (subtle or overt) parental influence, I don’t mean to pick on SVS, since there is much to admire in this school model. However, attendance is compulsory at these schools, which seems to contradict the notion of democracy. In fact, it is a faux-democracy where children have the democratic experience of organizing their school and their school days, but within the broader context of coercion. How can one understand freedom unless one is free? I learned (with disappointment) about this idea of required attendance from one of the founders of the original SVS Mimsy Sadofsky when I interviewed her in 2004 for what was to be a feature article about SVS in Life Learning Magazine (but turned, instead, into an ironic sidebar to an article about this very topic.) The idea is noble: to help the kids make a commitment, to foster cooperation and relationships, and to help them learn about consequences. But, in short, it’s about adults enforcing something on kids because it’s assumed they won’t learn the stuff on their own, that they don’t know what’s in their own best interest, that we have to make them do stuff “for their own good.”
And that brings me to the idea of “influence” and its relationship to democracy, coercion, and freedom. The foundation of life learning (or wholistic unschooling, or radical unschooling, or whatever label-of-the-day you wish to give it) is respect for and the empowerment of children. We aim to nurture and, ultimately, to trust in children’s ability to make their own learning and other life decisions, to be competent human beings. SVS, on the other hand, by requiring attendance, aims to influence children while removing parental influence. Either way, we’re substituting adults’ choices for children’s choices.
Now, clearly, a child’s “choice” to run in front of a truck should not be honored. Preventing that has to be part of the custodial responsibility of parents – and teachers, if/when parents give them that substitute role. We must (and most willingly do) provide shelter, food, safety, love, education (or at least support for development) and so much more. Adults need to protect children, right? Maybe sometimes, but protection can be disempowering and counterproductive if it’s restrictive and paternalistic. Life learning parents try to balance the protection and provision of needs with recognizing their children’s rights, abilities and responsibilities.
That’s not easy in our society, because we tend to drastically under-estimate the level of decision making and responsibility that our children are capable of. And so we think they won’t learn to make commitments, to cooperate with others, or to learn about consequences – much less to keep themselves safe or learn to read – unless we force them into situations designed to create those outcomes. We think we need to influence them (and argue about whether parental or school influence is better). Influence seems like a relatively benign and gentle act. But most definitions of the word “influence” include the idea of power over someone else. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, for instance, defines influence as “the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command; the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways.” Sounds creepy to me!
We all have our own expectations of ourselves and our kids; we all have our own hang-ups, boundaries, and comfort levels in terms of how our kids interact with each other, their surroundings, and society. But I think there is a better way to conceptualize the relationship between members of an unschooling family than “parental influence.” And it revolves around those words I keep using: respect and trust. They’re not easy to actualize, but they’re crucial for those of us who are committed to a style of non-coercive parenting that allows children their right to authenticity and autonomy, as well as safety and education.