We don’t need no education?

Leonardo Da Vinci, born out of wedlock, was forbidden to attend school. Instead he learned voraciously on his own and through apprenticeships and became an unrivaled inventor, artist and scientist, basically one of the founders of modernity. Benjamin Franklin went to school for two years, then spent the rest of his life educating himself. Thomas Edison went to school for a few months before being homeschooled. Mozart, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Winston Churchill, Claude Monet, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis and Agatha Christie all learned at home. Highly acclaimed musicians Billie Ellish and Alanis Morisette never set foot in a school. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out. Albert Einstein flunked out. What all of these people have in common is that they were raised mostly outside of any system of standardized thought, and many went on to be, well, only some of the most influential game changers ever.

I went through South Carolina public schools, and did well for the most part, but there’s not much of it I enjoyed. To be fair, I had a few wonderful teachers and made a few friendships that remain with me even now. But the overall experience left me empty. I sat in desk after desk and each night at the kitchen table filling my head with what adults had deemed necessary to know. I crammed all sorts of dense information into my brain to pass tests, then promptly forgot it all. I struggled through trigonometry equations wondering when I’d ever have to use them (well, did you ever use them again once you graduated?). I dodged the fights that broke out daily in the halls, and gazed at the chain link fence around us. Did I dare cut class, hop that fence and run screaming into the woods (I may or may not have done this)? School was traumatic at worst, and felt mostly like a waste of time at best, time that felt priceless, prime-of-life time. When I graduated highschool I found I was so burnt out on learning that I didn’t read a book for years. Somewhere in my early teens a Dead Kennedys cassette was left at my house by a skateboarder friend. Songs like “Straight A’s”, “Life Sentence” and “Insight” landed like little bombs in my consciousness. I was a fierce teenage nonconformist, and began to see school as a homogenizing influence on society, manufacturing bored mentally exhausted conformists bound for a meaningless job and an early grave.

I became aware of the history of public schools not only as places to leave your kids so you could work a 9 to 5 job, whether in a factory or in an office, but as strict training facilities for preparing kids to grow into those same jobs when their parents were too old and worn down to continue working. Not to mention the early efforts in school systems to propagate the white version of history in order to combat the feared uprisings of black and native populations. It’s not so much that I was anti-school, as in it should be abolished. I just wondered what could be possible if kids were allowed open time to explore, access to books, tools and materials needed to bring their visions to life and granted the ability to be involved in their communities all day rather than locked up in classrooms. How much of that cliche teenage angst was simply blow-back from more than a decade of being made to sit still in a desk doing what you didn’t want to do all day?

When my wife and I had our first child, we found we were united in our sense that children needed this kind of Dreamtime, an unstructured way of being that allowed unbridled creativity and exploration. That’s when our childbirth teacher dropped the word “unschooling.” We’d never heard of it, but it was exactly what we were looking for. Having the mixed fortune of being in a state with a powerful right wing Christian voting block that championed homeschooling for religious reasons, we found there was almost no regulation on how we could educate our children.

My children had an open childhood. They had no schedules or alarm clocks. They never knew what day of the week it was, and barely knew what year we were allegedly in. They basically all taught themselves to read. Turns out if you leave kids alone about it but you have lots of books in the house and the parents read to themselves and to their children, kids eventually pick up a book and figure it out. They watched butterflies hatch from chrysalises. They planted gardens and foraged wild plants and mushrooms. They brain tanned deer hides, screwed wood planks and glued cardboard into invented machines, made musical instruments, created complex societies among other children in an abandoned urban lot, learned to stilt walk, taught themselves languages, chopped wood, made puppets, wrote stories and wove baskets. We read ancient and classic literature, listened to music of about every genre known to humanity, memorized poems, talked about history and politics, drove across the country, lived in an eco village in Italy and another in NC, learned to contra dance and fed hikers on the Appalachian trail.

It becomes apparent when raising kids this way that there aren’t actually any subjects, like those we divide the world into in schools. Science weaves into history weaves into literature weaves into art weaves into math, and so on. One day years ago while I was reading a book about pirates to my daughter, she asked why pirates say, “arrr!”, at least in popular depictions. So we looked it up and found that sailing ship piracy really got going in Ireland, thus the lower class Irish accents. The Irish were colonized by the British of course, and pirates decided to remedy their forced poverty with violent robbery. We looked at the trading routes by ship in the 1600s, which led us to looking at the route around Africa to the Middle East and beyond. Which led to talk of those ancient civilizations, and the oldest known one, Mesopotamia. Which led to finding a photograph of Sumerian cuneiform, the most ancient known writing. Which led to looking at how the Phoenician alphabet is based on the flying patterns of cranes. So, was it linguistics we studied? Political science? History? Geography? Zoology? Archaeology? These subjects are artificial divisions. Anything you look into far enough connects to everything else.

While we were up for the task of learning with our kids, and letting their many questions lead where they led, we weren’t so ready for the financial hit we took to do all this. We were both determined to be integrally involved in our children’s childhoods, so neither of us worked full time, and we were both mostly self employed, though I worked for a time at the University. The trade off for us was that there were lean times, there was struggle. There were sleepless nights when I wondered if we were messing up our kids. How would they go to college if they wanted to? Would they end up living under a bridge?

My oldest is now moved out to another state, learning jewelry making in college and teaching kids wilderness and traditional skills. My middle daughter is an accomplished artist, is proficient in Latin and French, just planned and carried out a solo trip to Europe, and is now applying to colleges. My youngest, the inventor, at 14 decided he wanted to go to Arthur Morgan School, a very alternative somewhat free form school in the mountains. He got in and with his mother helped raise the money to go. He rides a unicycle to class, records music and works in a wood shop. They’re not under any bridges yet, and I’ve realized that they’re so skilled and resourceful that it’s hard to think they’d be under a bridge for long if they ever did end up there. They attract attention by being the profoundly unique exuberant people they are. I’m immensely proud of them.

Should all kids grow up out of school? Definitely not. School is the only way some kids eat regularly. School is the only way some kids know there’s a world beyond their tiny rural towns, the only way most of our populace knows any history, the only way many learn to read. It has an important place in the functioning of society. But over the years many of the criticisms we received (and there were many) have slowly been debunked by my family’s experiences. “How will they learn the facts?” Well, first of all what is a fact? Very little if anything is concrete fact. Science continually revises itself. Yesterday’s fact is tomorrow’s fiction. History tells us “facts” from a dominant point of view, that of the conquerors. Turn the point of view around and the “facts” look very different. But an answer to this question is that kids learn “the facts” through their unhampered curiosity. Human beings naturally want to learn. You didn’t go to school to learn to talk or walk. You learned these things because you were overflowing with curiosity about the world around you. Information surrounds kids, now more than ever, and they’re hungry to learn if you don’t dull this enthusiasm by coercing them to learn what they’re not interested in.

“You’re not carrying out your civic duty.” This argument goes that if those of us who have options were to all take out kids out of public schools, they will become all about crowd control of the poor ignorant masses, little different than prisons. I noticed this came particularly from parents in northern cities. Yes, I see this argument, but first I’m not asking anyone to pull their kids out of school. Do what you feel is right for them. Second, I question the wisdom of sending your kid to school as a kind of sacrifice for the greater good of society, rather than because you’re certain it’s the best place for them physically, psychologically, even spiritually. Are these schools relevant in the same way they were with so much information now at our fingertips? The “Teenage Liberation Handbook”, another influence on me as we decided what to do with our kids’ educations, makes the point that childhood and especially the teen years are some of the most formative and powerful years of our lives. Is it universally appropriate to have kids spend those years under fluorescent lights cramming full of facts with little import in their lives, told when to pee and eat? Is it more appropriate for them to study biology, for example, out of a text book than to spend that same time wandering the forest? What we sought with unschooling was direct experience. Social studies is riding the city bus. Politics is riding on their daddy’s hip while he speaks at a city council meeting. Math is measuring for recipes and shopping for groceries. Science is stacking the kindling just right to get the wood stove cranking. Not studying life, but living it.

“Standardized education makes for an informed public, which is crucial for a democracy.” Perhaps. In a way standardized anything is an industrial model. Standardizing thought serves production more than it serves a free society. What sort of society are we preparing kids for if we teach them regimentation and conformity? Could it actually be our civic duty to raise citizens who are free thinkers with utterly unique experiences of the world to bring to the table? My list of influential thinkers and innovators in the beginning of this article speaks to this. Some of them dreamed up and orchestrated this democracy, and they didn’t get these ideas through standardizing their ideas with the mainstream take on the world of their era.

“Won’t kids just become tech addicts, play video games all day if they’re not in school?” Probably. That’s why we had no TV in our house and held out on getting smart phones for years. My youngest still doesn’t have one. Without these distractions the outside world drew them into the sunshine to explore. If you grew up in the 70s or 80s or 90s this was just called childhood. Now it’s seen as radical, and we were even accused of robbing our children of the electronic engagement they’d need to succeed in this era. Don’t worry. They can all work a smart phone. But they grew up mostly without corporate products hijacking their consciousness. Their games were utterly their own creations, from the magic of their own child minds.

“It’s unfair for homeschool parents to be able to just write their own transcripts for their kids. It’s a slap in the face to school kids, and should be illegal.” Definitely I heard something along these lines over the years. I can imagine the frustration of those going through the normal schooling route. And the lack of regulation particularly in a state like S.C. leaves it open for parents to just cheat, though making it sound like your child knows more than they do only hurts them in whatever they want to do next, when they find they don’t have the academic background necessary to attend a college they want to go to, for instance. I take transcripts seriously, though I go about it differently than the school board. My children have learned a tremendous amount in their short lifetimes, but some of it isn’t what is academically valued. What if much of what is academically valued isn’t actually valuable to us? My oldest daughter has an intriguing transcript that I stand behind. Highschool science credits for permaculture design studies they did with me, and for extensive foraging knowledge. You can drop them in the woods and they’ll find something to eat! Language credits in American Sign Language, which they learned in order to communicate with a cousin with Down’s syndrome. Math credits in Algebra they learned with an older cousin. In other words, my kid’s lives are their transcripts. Their variety of experience off the beaten path is their great asset as they go on to whatever’s next. Their education shows in what they say and do, in what questions they choose to ask.

The comment I hear most about my unschooled children is that they stand apart, they are truly original, confident and self-actualized. A friend who was newly a father once asked, “how do I raise my kid to be like your kids?” I didn’t know what to say. I don’t take much credit actually for how my kids are. I felt like I was the witness to the unfolding miracles of my children. We are all these unfolding miracles. Some of us in our unfolding meet with formidable bounds on our freedoms to be the fullest expressions of ourselves. Who knows what we could’ve been, if we’d been set free. I finally answered, “support them to be themselves and stay out of their way.”