"My obedience to authority figures and my timidity anesthetized me to remain silent. This submissiveness is the antecedent to a future lived in fear and puposely introducing fear into a child's life is -obscene."
-Valerie Fitzenreiter in The Unprocessed Child
"'Winning' an argument with a child because you are bigger or the parent is hardly a triumph. You have only proven that you are physically stronger and that you are a bully and that stance does not elevate you in the eyes of your child. Children will handle this adversity in different ways. Some will grow sullen and vow to never talk to you unless they have to, and they will become silent and mistrustful towards all adults. They have learned that they cannot win or even be treated as equals, so they keep things to themselves, and that does much harm to their personal growth and development.
When you consistently override a child's opinions, he becomes more determined to 'win' arguments and he will take it as a challenge and disagree at every opportunity. It will not matter what he is fighting about or even if he truly thinks he is right. Competition has become the name of the game and he will continue desperately trying to prove you wrong at least once. The stress level will be high in such a home."
--Valerie Fitzenreiter in The Unprocessed Child
"... she found him standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look - oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face."
--from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
"I'm liking being alive for once. I just remember to breathe and relax. Nothing is as urgent as it used to seem. I was just thinking about this the other day, my life improved immensely the minute I stopped planning what I was going to do with my life, and just started living it. Letting go of "what I want to be when I grow up" was the best thing I ever did for myself."
--my conventionally-schooled friend Laura, February 2006
I have fallen in love with the radical unschooling movement. In early 2004, some months after I finished my student teaching and decided that I would never work as a classroom teacher because the whole environment sucks so much, I began researching homeschooling and discovered unschooling. I was surprised and overjoyed to discover so many people - adult people - who believed firmly in children's right to be treated with the same respect and dignity as adults.
I was public schooled through graduation and went to a private college. I loved being in school until I hit college - then I hated it. I have wanted to be a public school teacher since toddlerhood. Only when I got a taste of what it is to be a classroom teacher did I decide that the whole thing is crap. I burned out just from student teaching. More than it just not being for me, though, the nature of school as an institution had started to grate on me. School was a wonderful place to me as a child, for the most part - I loved my teachers and, at least until I was about 13, I loved the work. I can only imagine how much more wonderful things could have been if I'd been unschooled. (Given that my parents were abusive and school was a place to escape to for me, I'm glad I wasn't kept home, but that wouldn't have been an unschooling environment anyway. Unschooling is first and foremost about trusting and respecting your children. My parents did neither.)
Unschooling is the belief that learning happens from living, not from having information forced down your throat, and as such is a life-long state of being. Even though I was traditionally schooled from toddlerhood into my 20s, I consider myself an unschooler and autodidact (self-taught person) today.
Radical unschoolers believe that parenting does not (or should not) involve doing battle with your children. Cooperation and respect for all involved is the key. They do not believe in making children do things because it is more convenient for the parent. They make a conscious effort to see things from their children's point of view and encourage their children to do the same - with family members and everyone else. This is not the same as permissive or neglectful parenting - the safety and happiness of everyone is taken into account at all times. Radically unschooled kids aren't allowed - in the families I've heard from - to damage property or hurt people. At the same time, things like TV watching and food are not restricted; if the parent is concerned about something the kid is watching, ze watches with the child and actively engages the child in discussion about it. As for food, it's been proven time and again - with people of all ages - that if you present someone with a wide variety of food, they will, over time, choose a balanced diet. The people who watch TV even when they only sort of want to or eat junk food constantly are the people who have had it limited at some point and are still in that mindset of "get it in while you can." When true freedom is the bottom line, conscious choices can be made. Most radically unschooled kids I've heard about prefer healthier snacks most of the time, and eat when they're hungry rather than when they're bored or tired or cranky. (More on food here and on television here.)
Supposedly reading anything by John Holt, more or less the founder of the unschooling movement, is a good idea. I tried, though, and got bored pretty quickly even though the subject matter is interesting to me. Maybe the type was too small; who knows. It's definitely worth checking out though, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. John Taylor Gatto, three-time winner of the New York state Teacher of the Year award, is another good one to read, and somewhat more contemporary than John Holt.
I had much better luck with The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. It was interesting and fun to read, and it was written for teenagers, not for adults, which may have been why I enjoyed reading it so much more than John Holt's stuff. Grace's other books - including Guerrilla Learning and Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go To School - are fantastic reads as well.
An absolute must-read - and it should be read repeatedly, because it takes a long time for most folks to really think about and process all that's discussed, although it's in a very reader-friendly format - is The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School by Valerie Fitzenreiter.
Questions about socialisation, reading, but-how-do-they-learn, etc. should be taken to Radical Unschooling, where there is more info than you can shake a stick at, as provided by parents who are actively unschooling their kids.
I'm a frequent lurker - although I rarely post - on the Unschooling.info forum. Check it out - it's good stuff.
Stuff to Read:
Is it a Cheetah?
Against School by John Taylor Gatto
How Children Really React to Control
The Animal School - a wonderful story
Can a Single Parent Unschool? (YES!)
Of Daffodils and Diesels - a fantastic, short, easy read. Makes a fantastic case for unschooling without ever saying the words 'unschooling' or 'homeschooling.'
Sometimes this house feels like a prison
That I just can't leave behind
There's so many rules
I gotta follow
'Cause you can't let go
I don't wanna hear it
And I just can't believe it
All the stupid things you say, but
One day
I won't take this anymore
One day
I'll be old enough
To do what I want to
And I won't have to run away
And you won't be there to say I'm not allowed to
One day
Sometimes I wonder if you know me
Or if you just pretend to care
So tell me are you
On a mission to bring me down?
I don't wanna hear it
And I just can't believe it
All the stupid things you say, but
One day
I won't take this anymore
One day
I'll be old enough
To do what I want to
And I won't have to run away
And you won't be there to say I'm not allowed to
One day
Go away
Don't look at me
'Cause we're not the same
And you can't do nothing
You can say
That it's not okay
But I'm not afraid
And you can't do nothing
One day
I won't take this anymore
One day
I'll be old enough
To do what I want to
And I won't have to run away
And you won't be there to say I'm not allowed to
One day
One day
Nanana.... One day
Nanana.... One day
Nanana.... One day
Nanana.... One day
(from "One Day" by Simple Plan, 2002)
