Un/Deschooling:
Legacies of Contradiction in Alternatives to Mainstream, Public Education
Once an unschooler, always an unschooler.
The conflicts that arose with some regularity between parents (who wanted some level of control in the school) and the School Meeting (which wanted the control to reside entirely in the school’s resident population) finally led to the abandonment of the idea that parents should be involved in the school’s affairs and to the fashioning of new by-laws that make the school community entirely self-governing with no outside interference. While this has eliminated the former conflicts, it has often left homeschooling parents who enroll their children dissatisfied with their lack of direct influence on their children’s lives at school.
That experience has taught us many things that have made it easier to anticipate the nature of the relationship that the school can expect with those students, their parents, and their families.
For the first 43 years of its existence, Sudbury Valley experimented with various organizational structures (as reflected in its corporate by-laws) that allowed parents some say in the school’s governance. These attempts were based on the principle that the people who pay for the school’s operation should be able to have some input into what was being done there. It took us time to realize that this principle makes sense only if the population that pays is the same one affected by what they are paying for — in other words, only in situations where the stakeholders and the financial supporters are the same people.
Parents of unschoolers are often angry at the school for being “rigid” in not allowing them any access to the school’s activities or input to the school’s decisions regarding their children.
I believe that John Holt is right in saying that most people use ‘education’ to refer to some kind of treatment. ... It is this usage that I am contrasting with learning ... this idea of people needing treatment. ... Many people use the words ‘learning’ and ‘education’ more or less interchangeably. But a moment’s reflection reveals that they are not at all the same... Learning is like breathing. It is a natural human activity: it is part of being alive. ... Our ability to learn, like our ability to breathe, does not need to be tampered with.
It is utter nonsense, not to mention deeply insulting to say that people need to be taught how to learn or how to think. ... Today our social environment is thoroughly polluted by education ... education is forced, seduced or coerced learning.
Freedom was nice, but theirs was tangled up in mine. Their lack of freedom affected mine. From my loneliness to my sadness they had to suffer there. You’d think it’d be enough to be free. It wasn’t.
No child just automatically conforms to such authoritarian raising, such methods. There is naturally rebellion and resistance. But you are just a child, weak and dependent upon those around you to "prepare" you for the real world.
I’m going to share what happened when I called CPS in my state this year. I reported that they were doing radical unschooling and not doing well child check ups, no vaccines, and only going to the dentist when something was rotten. Our state is VERY permissive on “homeschooling;” all you have to do is sign a waiver and put down the curriculum you plan to use. It’s in the state homeschool law that “the state shall not investigate the methods of homeschool or education” meaning they will do NOTHING. Bc the parents are signing a waiver so our state truly does not care, they abolished the testing laws around 2014. People come here to do this.
To accomplish this, the schools were organized: To give children of workers elementary skills in the three ‘Rs’ that would enable them to function as workers in industrial society. To give children proper reverence for the four ‘As’: American History, American Technology, the American Free Enterprise System, and American Democracy. To provide a smoothly functioning siftingmechanism whereby, as Colin Green has phrased it, the “winners” could automatically be sorted from the “losers”; that is to say, whereby those individuals equipped by family background and personality to finish high school and go on to college could be selected out from among the great majority on their way to the labor market after a few years of elementary school, or at most a year or so of high school.
One doesn't live as long as expected if one doesn't fully develop one's capacities.
You hit the nail on the head. Whenever I tearfully told my mom how far behind I was after talking to a public school kid, she would: Tell me to stop talking to them. Claim I’m more educated than them in every other way.
Tell me I had to study my way out of whatever I was behind in. I was pulled out of school in the second grade, what kid that age knows how to educate themselves?!
We only moved to states with lax homeschooling laws, we did just enough to pass any end-of-year exam (usually by showing off artistic skills and her trying to label us as prodigies), I had to beg for any educational materials (and I was forbidden from getting them if I tested above grade level because "I didn't need it,"), etc.
Unschooling is about blazing your own trail.
Unschooling is about playfulness.
Unschooling is about avoiding institutions.
Unschooling is about consent.
Unschooling is about resisting capitalism—whatever that means. Unschooling is about libertarianism.
Unschooling is about returning to ancestral roots and communing with nature.
Unschooling is about selfemployment.
Unschooling is about being a passionate learner.
So what can you do but eventually submit, conform to their social designs? I am certain that I had to learn through this process of instilling Fear in me, to cement each lesson in my soul. Not like I got it much, but I didn't like to get my butt whupped, didn't like to be shouted at, threatened, ordered to stay in the house away from friends and games and all. They were upset with my natural wild zest for life and mostly, all of their measures were designed to restrict it, that "wild zest. "
This report argues that homeschoolers should support broader school choice proposals because greater educational freedom empowers parents to provide richer learning opportunities for their children. Drawing on the examples of four states with “robust private education choice programs” (p. 5)—Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin—the report suggests a causal link between greater private education choice and continued homeschooling growth and innovation. “Some homeschooling families may be taking advantage of school choice mechanisms, like education savings accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarship, ” the report states. “Even if they are not, an environment that supports educational freedom may encourage homeschooling growth” (p. 1).
From the instant that you form the project of a pedagogy founded on a natural pact with life, you will no longer have to beg money from those who exploit and scorn you. You will demand that pact because you will know how and why you can seize the freedom that it implies.
