Yes, There ARE Things Every Kid Should Know: Social Justice and Self-Direction

I’ve seen some interesting discussion from fellow leftists in and around the unschooling world in regards to social justice and the importance of children--all children--knowing certain things. The issue raised is this: if we can agree that there are important issues of power and oppression that all children should understand, how do you reconcile that with an approach which, on the surface, looks like children learning whatever they want, regardless of what anyone else thinks?

I agree that there is a baseline of knowledge and understanding necessary in order to be a thoughtful and kind person, and in order to engage in the work needed to dismantle structures of oppression. How are children to understand the current context if they don’t know the history of the Holocaust, of American slavery, of British colonialism, of Canadian residential schools? Children are generally taught about the ways in which they themselves are marginalized either by a hostile world which never lets them forget it, or by loved ones looking to prepare children for that world. But what about making sure all children, no matter their background, are equipped to challenge power and behave conscientiously towards those around them?

I believe the concern that these things won’t be learned if children just “do whatever they want” rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what unschooling is, or at least my understanding of it. I’ve often described unschooling as self-directed learning that is guided by the desires and needs of the learner and their communities. We exist in a world full of other people, and I would never disagree about the importance of living as morally and justly as we can, which requires being educated about important topics.

However, using oppressive and authoritarian methods to try and teach anti-oppression and anti-authoritarian politics is ridiculous and counter-productive. People learn what they live, and no matter how great the content being taught, if the structure or ways of relating reinforce hierarchies, dominance, and oppression--if children are learning that people who are bigger and older are entitled to control and dictate to those younger and weaker, they will not be learning the lessons we want them to. It’s simply unjust to use force and coercion to try to “make” children learn something, and the belief that the ends justify the means is just the type of attitude that sustains modern schooling, that continues a system built on the denial of children’s autonomy, and the enforcement of a colonialist Western model of education and social organization.

I think becoming educated on important topics can be achieved through unschooling. I further believe it’s imperative to try and nurture these qualities respectfully, and detrimental to try and do so any other way.

After all, people don’t tend to remember the things they’re taught against their will, when they don’t see the relevance or real world implications, when they’re somewhere they don’t want to be and are being taught by people they may not like. There’s a quote by Katrina Gutleben that goes “Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested, it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.” This is why I don’t believe a mandatory curriculum covering everything any of us might decide ALL children should learn would be any more effective than current curriculums, where most information that’s taught is never truly learned.

One of the things that’s always appealed to me about unschooling is the anti-authoritarianism baked into an ideology that treats education not as something done to children by learned adults, but as an organic, collaborative, community-rooted process. It embraces horizontal ways of relating to other people, across age divides, and invites us all to question the oppressive structures we’ve been told are just and necessary. It is one way to start creating a different world, to live as we wish things to be instead of recreating harm.

Do all unschoolers feel this way? Not remotely. There are unschoolers with politics I consider terrible, who have very different goals than mine when it comes to embracing self-directed education, and who are passing on a lot of harmful ideas about the world to their children.

Here is where I agree with the people who believe that some things just need to be learned in order to challenge injustice. Unschooling, on its own, is not enough. Respectful parenting alone is not a complete solution.

So what to do? Well, here is where I think the importance of family and community culture comes into play. Who is part of a child’s life? What are their perspectives, experiences, and values? If children are surrounded by people who talk about and embody different ways of existing and living outside of the dominant culture, who discuss inequalities and structural violence, important history and current events, who work to unlearn their own prejudices and fight for justice, who care and learn and struggle and include children in all of that--then that is what they will learn to do themselves.

While some disagree, I’ve never seen unschooling as a way to shelter children, or as a way to control what they learn. As I’ve discussed before, I see unschooling as a way to open up more of the world, not to restrict it. I’m also never going to argue against having firm boundaries about, say, not using slurs or derogatory language about marginalized people. I am not suggesting that unschooling is a free-for-all, but that there are far better, more authentic, more consensual ways for children to learn than an “anti-oppression curriculum.”

I also think it’s important to note that while children do not have all the knowledge and experience that adults generally have, and so of course it’s important for adults to be role models and help children gain those things, we must recognize that children, too, have valuable experience and perspectives that add to adults lives, and to social justice and liberatory movements themselves. There’s a great meme I’ve shared before on Facebook, that states in part “Children's innate tendency to question the status quo as well as their ability to imagine an ideal world without limits makes their active engagement in organizing efforts an invaluable resource as we move together towards ultimate liberation for all.”

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing children as empty vessels to be filled, as people in training instead of people now, when the reality is that everyone has things to both learn and share, everyone has something to add across the spectrum of ages. And if any movements are seeing children solely as almost-people in need of molding they’re both perpetuating oppression and missing out.

To bring it all back around, there is definitely knowledge that is important in attempts to challenge injustice and create better ways of living. However, the best way to acquire it is to live it, to be surrounded by people who care. Kind of the same way adults gain the knowledge and skills necessary to make positive change. Children, though their needs, their experiences, and their development may be different from adults, are still every bit as deserving of basic respect, to be included instead of condescended to, to have relationships with people who see their involvement as valuable.

If we really care about making things better, we can’t do so by recreating the same power structures that oppress us all. Instead, we need to recognize every person as a potential ally and partner in the struggle for justice… including kids.

On Seasons and Cycles: Unschooling and Nature

This post was originally published on my Patreon in February 2019. While most of my Patreon posts will remain exclusive to financial supporters, occasionally I share an older one over here as well.

You know winter is truly over when you hear the spring peepers. Even living in the suburbs, the wetlands, tucked discreetly behind houses with manicured lawns, would fill with with tiny frogs, their distinctive chorus echoing down streets and bouncing between buildings. A local zoo that focuses on fauna native to the Saint Lawrence River Valley would open up the gates at the back of their property when the peepers came out, allowing groups of people into areas generally reserved for zoologists and grad students, where we’d shine our flashlights around as darkness started to fall, trying to spot the small bodies clinging to stalks of grass. You could hear them before you even turned in to the parking lot, but as you made your way into the marshes the sound rose to deafening heights, exhilarating and consuming.

I can still hear the peepers from my house, when the snow has melted but the temperature still drops below zero some nights. The sound has grown fainter over the years as wetlands have been filled in for new housing developments, patches of forest whittled down, but they’re still there.

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Instead of heading closer to the city for activities, growing up we were more likely to head in the opposite direction, where suburbs faded into more rural surroundings. We’d go on hikes and on frog catching expeditions, learned to spot wood that had been gnawed on by a beaver and admired their dams, chewed on tart sumac berries and kept a lookout for poison ivy. We’d watch turkey vultures spiral high above us, and spot red-tailed hawks and downy woodpeckers.

There are children who are more nature literate than me and my sister were--quite a few of them and quite a bit more knowledgeable--but for children of the suburbs, we spent more time in wild spaces than most of the other kids we knew.

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When you grow up without school, you get to create your own structure, the what, where, how, when, and who of your choosing, which means that one of the “where’s” you can choose to focus on is outside. Without the segmentation of semesters and school vacation, you can allow other forces to guide you instead: the turning of seasons, the weather, when your favourite flowers bloom in the fields, that perfect stretch of time for hiking in the autumn when the leaves are at their brightest. You can fade into partial hibernation in the winter months, a fallow time for thinking and creating.

And, taking inspiration from the natural cycles, you can embrace the way learning itself follows its own patterns, periods of intensity and growth followed by stretches of absorption and rumination. 

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When I think of my childhood, I think of it in seasons.

Spring was peepers and fat tadpoles. It was burying peas in newly thawed ground, cold earth lodging under my fingernails. It was a carpet of white trilliums rolled out through the woods, ghostly on dusk walks, punctuated by occasional red ones, foul-smelling if you leaned too close. As spring grew into summer, we’d spend afternoons picking strawberries at the farm up the road, the sun hot on our backs.

Summer was for frog and grasshopper catching. It was fields filled with bright flowers. It was black raspberry picking, thorns sharp as they caught on purple-stained fingers, and fruit bright on my tongue. It was lying on soft-prickly grass and sunning on big, sun-heated stones like some warm-blooded lizard. For years when I was small we’d head northeast, following the Saint Lawrence all the way to Gaspe, right as summer started to fade into fall. I’d spend hours picking wild blueberries, running through un-mown fields and bushwacking my way through the woods to marvel at ancient, twisting crabapple trees. I’d walk along the beach, mesmerized by crashing waves, and sometimes seals would swim close to the shore, watching us with the same curiosity with which we’d watch them.

Autumn was leaves shading into yellow and orange, red and purple, and crunching most satisfyingly underfoot. It was ponds stilling and reeds browning, the scent of decomposition in chilled noses. It was carefully deliberating over the selection of decorative gourds at the farmstand, fingers tracing stripes and ridges. It was the excitement of halloween, clamoring over prickly straw bales, and trying to catch the first flakes of snow on our tongues.

Winter was chilled faces and sparkling fresh snow, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in the strangely quiet, creaking woods under the muffling blanket of a heavy snowfall. It was the bright red flash of cardinals against a white backdrop, tottering out in ice skates onto a frozen pond or rink, or sliding carefully along in boots, arms outstretched for balance. It was winter festivals and toes too long in the cold, bright pain burning as they thawed out near a warm fire, or merely the car heating vents.

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Kids who don’t go to school do not have a monopoly on outdoor exploration or seasonal traditions, not by any means. But what I want to highlight is the flexibility life learning provides in allowing families to choose where and how they spend all the hours of their days, instead of only being left with a handful of evenings and weekends to do with as they wish. I want to celebrate the way that seasons can take precedence over a school calendar in structuring life, how nature can be the primary force that shapes your days, instead of a schedule set up with the best interests of an institution in mind, not the best interest of children.

When you’re not in school, you simply have time. Time to be outside, time to lie in the grass, time to organize last-minute group hikes, time to stay up late watching bats, time to go on a trip when other kids are in school. Not going to school doesn't necessarily mean you’ll spend more time in nature. But it means that you have the time--boundless, limitless time--to do so.

When Learning is Like Breathing: On Awareness and Evaluation

One of the biggest revelations offered by people who live outside of schools and enforced curriculum is just how effortless, how ever-present, how natural learning can be. People sometimes ask me how I learned a specific thing, growing up, and I often have trouble answering. Both because, by now, my childhood was quite a while ago and my memories aren’t as clear, and also because, when you’re not using a curriculum, the exact mechanics of how learning happens are not always so easy to track.

This is definitely the case when it comes to writing. The short answer is that I just… started doing it, and got better over times as I gained more skill and experience.

Sometimes learning is as natural as breathing, and like breathing, when you become too aware of it, too conscious of lungs expanding and expelling, you can throw it off, start breathing too fast or unevenly, a natural process made complicated through hyperawareness. 

An author who was writing about self-directed learning once offered to pay me to document how I learned a new skill. At first, I agreed, but I quickly found that the act of scrutinizing the process irrevocably changed it, made it into something stilted and self-conscious. Even my own gaze could be turned into something that felt like evaluation, could be made somehow external and detached from self.

There’s a difference between that type of assessment and picking part of the process to offer for critique and observation. It’s a part of life to take a specific result--an essay or piece of art or demonstration--and present it to others for evaluation of some kind, and I have done that willingly, even cheerfully, many times over. It is not the same as intently watching and cataloguing each step, asking over and over is that learning? What about that? And, even worse, finding yourself judging which parts aren’t learning. To internalize that evaluative gaze is to self-police, to place yourself on a narrow track and administer scoldings when you stray too far into the bushes.

I think it’s important, for individual learners and those journeying with them, not to get too caught up in the details of what’s happening right now, if you can help it. It’s one of these things that forms a more complete picture only when looking backwards, when you can see how the different pieces of the landscape came together--a mountain dropping to valley below, that collection of happy little trees--to complete the whole.

I learned to write because I had something to say. Before I was capable of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard myself, I dictated to my mother, a child’s stories and thoughts laid out neatly in her clear print. Once I could read myself, writing seemed like a natural extension, and my stories and thoughts started to sprawl out far less neatly in scattered notebooks, and soon in Word documents and blogs. I did not consider whether I was writing at “grade level,” I was not compelled to write about what other people thought I should be turning my thoughts towards. I was not entirely free of what Carol Black refers to as “the evaluative gaze of school,” since as she further notes about parents who take their children out of school, “to their grief they may find that the gaze is inside them, and gets to their children through their eyes.” It is, I think, impossible to fully escape it. But I was cushioned from it. Protected, for the most part.

Learning can be as natural as breathing. But a gaze bent on recording and analysing learning, whether it comes from outside of us or is our own gaze turned inwards, has a weight to it, a heaviness that drags everything into its orbit, turns life into something that seemingly can’t function without scrutiny. If we want learning to happen as it should, to be a process owned wholly by the learner, then we must become aware of the evaluative gaze, and put our foot down, raise a shield: on this, you cannot gaze.

Children Are More Trustworthy and Capable than People Think

This post was originally published on Patreon in January of 2018. If you become a supporter for $1 a month you gain access to a brand new, patron exclusive post every month, along with the entire back catalog of Patreon posts. A few of them eventually make it onto this blog, but most remain available only to financial supporters! 

As I shared on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, I am continually surprised by just how little faith people have in children, in their ability to learn, to make choices, to do just about anything really. And since I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, I wanted to take the time to explore the topic a bit further, and to address some of the things people erroneously believe about kids…

Me and my sister were always welcome in the kitchen.

Children have to be taught how to learn

This one even crops up in self-directed learning spaces every now and then, and seems to show such a strange view of how humans function. It’s as if some people think that we’re born as blank slates, so devoid of any desires or drives that we must be taught to do even that most basic of all things: to learn. In reality, we come with that particular drive fully intact. It seems like a truly profound lack of respect to think children are incapable of this, when in fact it’s one of the things they’re absolutely best at.

Children will always make awful choices

There seems to be an assumption that children want to make dangerous choices, and if given half a chance will waste no time in doing so. Yet while it’s certainly true that children lack the experience, maturity, or impulse control of adults, that doesn’t mean they lack all caution, all sense, or all desire to do good. Further, the way children learn is by doing. As my friend Nola said, “Use it or lose it. If you make your own decisions, over time, you figure out how to make better choices. It works for adults, and for kids too.” With a little guidance and reasonable expectations, children can be perfectly capable of making their own choices.

Children can’t pick what they like

Content, be it books, games, or otherwise should be educationally enriching, so the thought goes, and if that’s the case then surely children can’t be trusted to pick out their own things. It must then be left up to responsible adults to choose what’s best for their children to engage with. I’m saddened by this theft of discovery, taking away the joy of picking out your own books at the library, your own shows on (kids) Netflix, getting to develop your own unique tastes and style that’s separate and distinct from the adults in your life. It’s such a simple thing, to allow children to make their own choices about their media (as long as it’s within age appropriate bounds), but it means so much. Children deserve to express their own likes and dislikes, to have their own interests, and adults shouldn’t be getting in the way of that.

Children aren’t allowed to participate in real work

So often the smallest dangers are blown out of proportion when it comes to children: a vegetable peeler in the kitchen turns into fears of ER visits, and children are barred from any work with any possibility of danger. While I’m certainly not suggesting getting a 3-year-old to help you chop wood, often fears of danger seem overblown, now even more so than when I was a child (and they were frequently overblown then). Children are capable of being careful. Children usually want to help. And the way that they learn how to be safe is by practicing, using tools, gaining skills and proficiency, and building on that base as they grow. As Laura Grace Weldon said in a piece on bringing children into the kitchen, “We spend much time and money on enriching activities and products for our children, but if they don’t get the chance to take on real responsibilities, we’re depriving them of key components of adult competency.”

There are myriad ways that children’s abilities are frequently undervalued and many avenues to gaining greater competency that are often denied to them. But in taking a life learning path, there are a lot more opportunities to respect children, to trust them, to allow them greater freedom, and to engage with them in meaningful activities. I hope that the more examples there are of living respectfully with children, the more others will see just how capable they can be.

Unschoolers Aren't Products

Every now and then, someone talks about what type of people unschooling “produces.” They want to know about the products at the end of the line.

I flinch, a little, when I see that. I know the phrasing isn’t intentionally bad. Usually, people are genuinely curious and not in any way trying to be offensive.

But the thing is, I’m not a product.

Unschooling does not produce products, or even results. Life produces people, and all of our experiences, including education, shape us into who we are.

Sometimes I see unschooling being described as mere trickery. It’s a way to convince children to learn. You just sneak lessons into everyday activities, you see! With a wink and a nudge, one adult to another, they tell you that unschooling is just about making kids learn important things without the kids realizing what’s happening.

Thankfully, these erroneous definitions of unschooling generally come from people who are not, themselves, unschoolers. But they certainly leave me shaking my head in frustration and disappointment, to know that some people see trust and respect children as a mere euphemism for manipulate them into doing what you want them to, but in such a way that they can’t even tell they’re being manipulated.

I think that these two ideas go together: the belief in controlling children, and the idea that it’s possible to mold children into exactly the person someone else wants them to be. If you believe that, I suppose it’s natural to think that unschooling can have predictable results, can reliably create a certain type of product.

In an excellent, concise article on the topic of life learning success, Wendy Priesnitz had this to say:

“In our family, the foundations of life learning and parenting (which were interwoven) were respect and trust. And we didn’t raise our daughters with respect and trust because we had an idea about how we wanted them to turn out. In fact, I think having that sort of agenda would be counterproductive to trust and respect. We did it because treating them like we would any other human being was the right thing to do.”

What a relief that sentiment is, to me, seeing it laid out like that. I want children to be treated with trust and respect because I, too, believe it’s the right thing to do. While I offer my experiences, my writing, in the hopes it can contribute to more children being trusted and respected, doing so also opens up my life to a lot of outside scrutiny. “What do you do now? Can you support yourself? How is your social life? Did you ever go to college?”

I have, with my own actions and invitation, opened myself up to that, and I do not resent the people who ask such questions (as long as it’s done respectfully, and in the appropriate times and places). But at the same time, it feels like an immense weight, people hanging all these judgments on the experience of a single person, where my words can tilt people in one direction or another.

We are, each of us, made up of many things. Shaped by our genetics and the people who raise us, by where we live, what we like, who we make friends with, and where we spend our days. Unschooling undoubtedly has an impact on those who are raised with this philosophy, but it is just one part of a whole... and it’s also a way of approaching education that takes as many different forms as there are people living it.

It’s important to listen to grown unschoolers, I think. More than our parents, even, we have firsthand knowledge of what unschooling is like, what worked and did not in our own unique lives. Yet each of us, as individuals, is just that: a unique individual. Meeting an unschooler and hearing about how they lived and learned says more about them than it does about unschooling as a whole. It is neither rational nor fair to view individuals as products of unschooling, or to use us as the guidepost for whether you should really trust and respect children.

Children deserve trust and respect regardless of anything else. Regardless of perceived “results,” regardless of expectations met or not met.

Treat children well, today and every day, because of the inherent worth in all of us, because it’s the right thing to do. Everything else will work out as it will.

Ending the Tyranny of the Classics

I’m someone who loves to read, loves books with a depth of feeling I find hard to convey in words. If you’re a fellow book lover, you know what I mean. But I’m also a reading rebel, of a sort, who believes strongly in people’s right to develop their own relationships with stories, read what they want, or not read at all. Prescriptivism only ever gets in the way of enjoyment.

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We pick our way through prickly grass, shriveled and brown from an excess of sun and shortage of rain, shake out our slightly musty lawn chairs, and settle in front of the stage, a simple fake-stone structure serving as backdrop to one of the most well-known plays in the Western canon.

My mother used to bring me and my sister to see a Shakespeare-in-the-Park show every summer when we were growing up, and after years of missing it, I’ve picked up the tradition once more as an adult. Two years ago the production was an all-women version of Julius Caesar. Last year it was a 50’s themed take on Much Ado About Nothing. And this year, a very queer Romeo and Juliet. Our local theater company that puts on these productions likes to do something fresh and modern with such well-worn material, as many great modern Shakespeare companies do. They’re also incredibly skilled, the actors featured often winning awards for their performances.

I’m watching the performance with my sister, who’s long been in love with both musical theater and Shakespeare. She’s watched the recording of the 2014 Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus multiple times, and tries to convince all her friends to see it, too. She once drove 2 ½ hours to Ottawa to see a National Theatre Live show that wasn’t going to be airing in our home city of Montreal. When she was backpacking in the UK, a highlight of London was seeing a production of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre.

I, on the other hand, am a much more casual fan. For the most part I’m purely a Shakespeare-in-the-Park person.

Romeo & Juliet: Love Is Love, put on by Repercussion Theatre.

Needless to say, we were never taught Shakespeare in a formal context. We were never forced to read plays, of all things--an exercise about as useful as teaching kids to read music so they can study the scores, instead of going to a concert. But when something so permeates a culture as does the works of Shakespeare, and when you live a life filled with books and media and other human beings, it’s impossible not to bump up against countless references that give you basic outlines of what you’re missing, or lead you to dig into the topic further, to understand for yourself why your culture has become so saturated with these works of art, and whether you think all the fuss is worth it or not

As my sister and I headed home from the play, shirts buttoned up against the surprisingly chilly summer evening, we were laughing about some of our favourite amusing bits (from the first half, before everything becomes tragic) and discussing the thematic relevance of making Romeo and Juliet a lesbian couple, with parents hell bent on their children only partnering with the “right” people. Sometimes classic works can really be imbued with a sense of timelessness, and bring joy to people long, long after their creators could have ever imagined.

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When I first started this post, I was thinking of “the classics” as the Western canon generally foisted upon high school students. But I quickly branched out to cover “classics of the genre,” and just anything that’s held up as classic in one way or another. The works people place on a pedestal. The ones people are told they have to read.

There’s a devotion in our culture to those canons, an awe felt towards works that have, as far as I can tell, been chosen as best somewhat arbitrarily. It’s not that classics aren’t generally good in some way (though some are, in my opinion, genuinely bad and just dressed up in enough pretension to fool people who aren’t looking too closely), but best? Out of everything countless people have created and produced and shared? When it comes to art and literature, I don’t think there is such a thing as “best,” a judgement that’s just far too subjective.

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My family’s home has always been filled with scores of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. It’s easily the most popular genre in this house. And as I reached the beginnings of my teens and started looking towards adult books, I tried picking up some of the supposed sci-fi greats, people you’d surely recognize even if you're not a reader of the genre yourself, like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. And that’s the first time I can remember questioning the place of “classics,” and whether the works endowed with such a title were really so deserving of my time.

There’s a certain way that those male writers talk about women, and though I didn’t have the vocabulary or understanding back then to fully recognize why those books I attempted to read (and often gave up on) made me uncomfortable, I now know the simple reason is “misogyny.” Undaunted, I dove into genre fiction, preferring the fantasy end of the spectrum, and gravitating towards newer releases.

I’ve been loving SFF for many years now, choosing my reading material primarily from the ranks of genre fiction, but I found that same frustration I had all those years ago with big-name male writers creeping back in. Time and time again I’d read stories by very well respected male authors and find that the women characters were nothing but props and prizes or cartoon villains, cardboard cut-outs of straight male fantasies or “bad” women who didn’t perform femininity “correctly.” To say I was becoming disillusioned with all of those writers held up as masters, who seemed completely incapable of writing interesting women with engaging storylines, would be an understatement.

This Christmas I was gifted with a favourite, and somewhat obscure, fantasy
trilogy: The Fall of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells. An author who writes amazing
characters of all genders!

This is emblematic not only of sci-fi and fantasy, but of the majority of what are held up as great literary works, books that are strikingly white, male, and straight, and tend to have embedded in their pages either a callous disregard for or outright animosity towards all those people who aren’t white, or male, or straight. In Erin Spampinato’s piece How does the literary canon reinforce the logic of the incel? she questions what topics have been enshrined in our collective psyche as important:

“I was trained to accept that male sexual frustration was a serious issue because I read hundreds of pages about it before the age of 20, far more than I read about issues of undoubtedly greater social import, like the legacy of slavery, the alienation of women and people of color from public life, or the violence of the settler colonialism on which the United States was founded. Perhaps these novels even coached me into taking male sexual frustration seriously through a kind of frightful education: look what happens, they seemed to say, when men don’t get what they want. “

For myself, I just decided several years ago that my reading world would be richer and more rewarding if I severely cut down on authors most likely to write terribly about women (aka men), and I have never looked back. I haven’t cut out books by men completely: I still read some books by male authors I already know I like, books by marginalized men, and books by men that have been recommended by people whose taste I trust. But to put it in perspective, I’ve read more books this year by nonbinary authors than by men, and out of the 55 books I read in 2017 only 4 were by men.

I imagine this choice will strike some people as unfair, but I have only so much time to read, only so many books I can read in my lifetime, and each book I choose to read means another book left unread. Each book that leaves me disappointed is time that could have been spent on something that enchants me instead. My parameters for choosing books are designed to prioritize the books I think I’m most likely to like, and my experience has taught me that I generally prefer books by people who aren’t men. So that is what I read.

I also almost exclusively read newer books, those published in the last fifteen years or so. It brings me great joy to stay on top of new releases in my chosen genres, to read books that are extraordinarily timely (as they’re products of the world we are currently living in), and ones that will likely end up on the ballots of my favorite awards. I’m constantly asking my library to purchase new and upcoming books, and delight in discovering promising emerging authors. In choosing to focus on newer books, I also read more diverse books, since the industry is changing and the authors who used to get shut out--authors of colour, queer and trans authors--are at least starting to be recognized.

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As I mentioned previously, there can be a lot of gatekeeping in the SFF genre (and, I imagine, other genres as well), with ideas that you have to start with “the classics” when entering a genre. That you have to read Tolkein if you want to read fantasy. I almost finished The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings trilogy bored me immensely, meaning I never finished the first book, and if I’d believed those gatekeepers back in the day, the ones who say there’s only one door that everyone must pass through, I would have missed out on an entire world of literature that makes my heart sing.

As bestselling fantasy author V. E. Schwab has said about her own disinterest in Tolkein, “I have a very strong belief that reading should be an act of love, of joy, of willing discovery. That when we force someone across the wrong literary threshold, we risk turning them away instead of ushering them through.” (That linked article is well worth reading in full, by the way.)

Or, as another successful SFF author, John Scalzi, put it on Twitter, “Most ‘classics of the genre’ (whatever the genre) are just unbelievably dated and anyone who demands new readers to genre ‘start with the classics’ is going to ensure they hate it. Give new readers new books they have a better chance of relating to. They can work backward later.”

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I tried reading Jane Eyre at some point in my teens, and was deeply bored. I picked up a couple of other very old books in my teens and found myself similarly uninterested. It’s only this year, after diving into the world of modern historical romance, that I decided it might be time to give some books by Jane Austen a try. An audiobook would be a good medium to tackle such a novel, I decided, and I picked a narrator I was familiar with, one I knew I liked, out of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of recorded versions. I know the story of Pride and Prejudice quite well thanks to countless film and book riffs on the story, and I’m happy to say I’m enjoying it! The immersion in a different time period, the sly humor, the differences in story construction between a Georgian and modern novel. It’s not that I’ve decided everything old is bad, just that newer generally means more relevant, unless you’re specifically interested in understanding the history of a genre, or a time period.

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If someone came to me and said “I want to start reading SFF. Where should I start?” by now it should surprise no one that I’d pull out modern suggestions, by women, as my top picks. Something by N. K. Jemisin, either The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or The Fifth Season, depending on how dark and complex a read someone was looking for. The Ancillary series by Ann Leckie, for certain. I’d say they should definitely pick up something by Naomi Novik and Martha Wells. I’d make sure to note some new authors to watch, like Ruthanna Emrys and Rebecca Roanhorse, C. L. Polk and Alexandra Rowland. I’d let them know about some of my very favourite series, like Wayward Children by Seanan McGuire, and the Spiritwalker trilogy by Kate Elliott.

But I’d also be very sure to make it clear that my beloved books might not be theirs, that the experience I’ve built in the genre is tailored specifically to me, to my interests, to the themes I find captivating. Maybe they would like entirely different authors, different stories, different experiences.

A statue I came across in Quebec City, by the
sculptor Rose-Aimée Bélanger

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My argument against attempting to force anyone, children most definitely included, to read “classics” feels like a very personal one to me: I don’t read many, and I’m fine. But going deeper than that, I credit not being forced to read things other people decided were best for me with allowing me the space to find what I, personally, loved about books and reading. I wasn’t turned off of reading, or turned off of a certain genre or type of book, by being forced across a threshold that was not meant for me. Letting people come to things in their own time, when and if they want to, allows them to figure out what’s right for them, which parts of the literary world they wish to explore and which parts they want to steer clear of. 

In trying to force the same set of books on everyone, you push people towards things that most will find irrelevant, outdated, and not at all in line with their interests. You turn what could be something positive for some percentage of those people into a chore instead.

There’s a big difference between introducing works you think are interesting and important, and deciding to dictate to another person what they themselves should like and care about. In the relentless amplifying of so-called classics, too many people fall into the latter category.

The world of books and reading can be a fantastic one to explore. Lets stop ruining it for others by insisting there’s only one path to take.

Why Can't You Just Unschool Part Time?

In every collection of unschooling skeptics I’ve come across--such as that found in the comments section any time unschooling is covered in a major outlet--you’ll always find the question of why people can’t just unschool part time. Why does it have to be a full-time gig? Can’t children just go to REAL school to get a REAL education and do that self-directed nonsense in their downtime?

I’ve found myself explaining, over and over, with as much patience as I can muster, that they’re missing the point. Here’s why…

Time

Between school, and homework, and extracurricular activities, and things like sleeping and eating, your average child has very little actual free time. And in what little free time they have? They’re tired. They need to relax, to unwind, to veg out. That time can certainly be an important part of learning, as I’ve discussed before. But to suggest that all the richness of a self-directed education can be squeezed into what little free time a child has leftover is completely absurd.

Values

The way education is approached in school, the fundamental ideas underpinning it, are antithetical to unschooling. Children in school are being taught that learning is something done to them; that learning can only be imparted by experts; that other people know what’s best for them and hey get no say in how their education unfolds; that children are not capable of making any decisions about their learning; that learning is always difficult and complicated. Unschoolers, on the other hand, know--and live the knowledge--that learning is ever-present, and happens with all different people in all different places; that play should form the basis of childhood (and of learning!); and that children are perfectly capable of directing their own education. Ideas about what education is and how people are educated differs dramatically between conventional schooling and unschooling, and without making a conscious effort to reject strict school-based ideas of how education works, you can’t really unschool.

Lifestyle

Unschooling is a way of life. It’s a full-time commitment to living a rich life with children, providing a safe and resource-filled environment, building respectful relationships, seeking out opportunities in the community, and trusting that children are incredibly capable learners. Unschooling is a philosophy that trickles into every aspect of your life, colouring all your relationships with a greater understanding of everyday consent and principles of non-hierarchical living.

While families unable to unschool can certainly take inspiration from unschooling in the ways they parent, talk about learning, live together as a family, or treat the children in their communities, that alone is not unschooling. There is no way to simply squeeze unschooling into the bits of life left over after school and on weekends. It’s too big to just fit into six weeks of summer vacation.

You can’t unschool part time, and those who ask why this self-directed learning thing can’t just be supplemental are showing a profound ignorance of what unschoolers are attempting to do.

*A note that sometimes unschooled kids/teens go to school by choice, and that is most definitely practicing self-directed learning. I think the most important part about unschooling is the bit about respecting children’s rights to make their own decisions as much as possible, which means fully supporting them if they decide they want to go to school. I hope it’s clear that what I’m talking about in this post is not that, but rather the skeptics who don’t believe in young people’s right to truly direct their own learning.

Unschooling in the Positive: How to Live and Learn Without Schooling

There’s a complaint frequently voiced by a segment of life learners and self-directed education advocates, and it is that the term “unschooling” focuses too much on what isn’t happening instead of what is. That’s certainly the way that many mainstream news coverage treats it, as is the case in a recent article on unschooling in Canada titled “Unschooled kids learn what they want – no curriculum, no homework, no tests.” That article is largely positive (and I love seeing a spotlight on Canadian unschooling in particularly, since I myself am Canadian), but it’s typical in it’s highlighting of the don’t-do’s. So I thought I’d challenge myself to lay out some basic tenets of unschooling, things unschoolers know and do, using only positive language, describing our reality in terms of what it is, not what it isn’t.

1. Unschooling is “delight-driven, inquiry-based, self-directed life learning.” That’s how I described it a few years back, and it remains my favorite concise description.
2. Unschooling is social, learning from adults and children, from relatives and neighbors, community members and teachers.
3. Unschoolers take advantage of a variety of resources, learning from the internet and books, podcasts and films, from all different types of media and on all different platforms.
4. Unschooling is as structured or unstructured as the learner themselves wishes it to be, utilizing classes, teachers, and similar formal educational settings when wanted or needed.
5. Unschoolers embrace the reality that every person is different, and will learn best on their own timeline, picking up knowledge and skills quickly once they’re ready and willing to do so.
6. Unschoolers see parents and other caring adults as guides, mentors, and partners in learning, who help children find the resources they need, learn the skills necessary to function in the world, and cheer them on when the going gets tough.
7. Unschoolers seek to remove unnecessary struggle from children’s lives, for as Isabel Rodríguez recently said, “Life tests us. All lives involve a dose of tragedy. Death, illness, heartbreak, natural disasters are all a part of life. But this does not mean that it is ethical to inflict unnecessary hardship on children and call it educational.”
8. Unschoolers know that free play forms the foundation of all learning, and make sure children have plenty of unscheduled time in order to just play. 
9. Unschoolers know that school is always an option, that a child who’s free to make their own choices might end up entering regular school, and that older/grown unschoolers can go to college or university if they want to (and many do).
10. Unschooling is relationship focused, deeply valuing trust and respect between people of all ages, and building education on a foundation of consent.
11. Unschoolers know that all subjects are interconnected, and take note of the links between disparate bits of knowledge, different skills, and different ways of learning, marveling as they all come together to create a unique whole.
12. Unschoolers recognize that children are remarkably capable and successful learners, that learning is something we all have the innate desire to do, and when supported, nurtured, and provided with the appropriate resources, we’re all capable of gaining all the education we need (coercion-free!).

Unschooling can certainly be described in relation to school, an outline shaped by all the things we’ve removed from the equation, which will give you a general idea of what it looks like. But it’s unlikely to give you as complete a picture as if we were to just tell you what we do. Because all the things we do outside of school, the vision of education we’re cultivating outside of those strictures, is pretty great all on it’s own; no things we don’t do required.

The History in Historicals: Learning Wherever Interest Takes You

I spend a lot of time talking about how ever present learning is, and how learning doesn’t have to look like schooling in order to be valuable. I also believe that fun and leisure are perfectly good pursuits all on their own, whether they lead to learning or not (and they almost certainly will, anyway).

But I also think it can be helpful every now and then to discuss examples of learning that looks “educational,” found in places that may be unexpected.

In the last few months I’ve been reading what’s certainly the most maligned of the broader historical fiction category: historical romance. People like to make snide comments about “bodice rippers,” and disapproving comments about what sort of people would read such “trashy” non-literature. Yet I’ve been not only enjoying the genre immensely, but also learning a lot. Shocking, I know! While books within the genre range from quite thoroughly researched and historically rooted to what’s perhaps best described as anachronistic, they’ve all lead to a whole lot of historical fact gathering. Thanks to my friend Google, I’ve been looking things up multiple times for every book I read, seeing what is and isn’t accurate, figuring out when exactly a story is set, and falling down rabbit holes in pursuit of more details about a particularly fascinating event or topic.

An incomplete list of things I have looked up and learned something about in the past four months of romance reading, in no particular order:

When (and where and for whom) wigs were fashionable; the British political party of the Whigs; the various “eras” in British history and where they start/end/overlap (Georgian, Regency, Victorian, Edwardian); the evolution of bustles and bonnets; the Peterloo Massacre and the Six Acts; the Cato Street Rebellion; the Corn Laws; history of condoms from earliest examples to mass production; bloodletting and the theories behind it; when the link between hygiene and infectious diseases was first made; what railway surgeons were; history of “sodomy” and other anti-gay laws in the UK, France, and North America; Regency era sex clubs; British nobility, all the ranks and rules around titles and courtesy titles; the differences between various horse-drawn conveyances; Mary Wollstonecraft and the Vindication of the Rights of Women; history of epilepsy and treatment of epileptic people; the anti-slavery sugar boycotts of the 18th and 19th centuries...

Even the staunchest supporters of learning-that-looks-like-schooling couldn’t find fault with studying history, and all of this gaining of greater understanding of the United Kingdom in Georgian through Victorian eras is thanks to the humble historical romance novel.

Constant curiosity, the drive to look things up, discuss and consider, is in large part an innate human quality… Though it can, of course, be discouraged and suppressed. Even when that’s the case, cultivating a practice and lifestyle of curiosity can be done, by paying attention to those sparks, the ideas or comments or facts that our brains get snagged on, and seeing where it goes. It helps not to put pressure on yourself to make a passing interest into something it’s not: a passion. There’s no need to force it, just follow it for as long as you’re eager to do so, and veer off down a different path when the mood takes you. Unless you have a specific reason for sticking with something past that point (and if you do have a compelling reason, go you!), there’s no need to do so.

I’m quickly becoming almost as enamored with historical romance as I’ve been of fantasy fiction for the last 15+ years, and novels in general definitely merit a passionate interest rating from me. But my online historical fact-finding missions don’t usually go very deep: I’m content to know important dates and make connections between different political events and movements without feeling a need to check out six books on the appropriate topics from the library. What’s important to me is that I keep on reading what I like to read, researching where curiosity prompts me to do so, and just enjoying going wherever life learning takes me.

Related reading: Passion Without Purpose, Why Assigning Books or Reading Time is a Bad Idea, Fun is More Important than "Education," and for Patreon backers only How to love what you love, (mostly) guilt free.

What Makes Unschooling Successful? Advice From Grown Life Learners

I’m delighted to be sharing some words from fellow grown unschoolers today, something I’ve been wanting to do more of for a while now. For this post, I asked people to share either something they think their parents did especially well, or an aspect of their experience they found especially positive. The ten responses gathered below are thoughtful and insightful, a collection of anecdotes and advice that I hope will be helpful for parents and carers still in the earlier stages of this journey. I’m always really fascinated seeing what others who grew up with a similar philosophy as my family have to say, and I hope you find these tidbits similarly interesting and helpful.

“[My parents] carefully respected my privacy, especially in my teens, and let me and my brother spend a bunch of time playing video games, reading comics and watching cartoons even as it seemed like the whole world was freaking out. ‘Oh my god, your kids do WHAT all day??’ They just ran with it and looked for the good in whatever we were doing.” -Nola A.

“My mother was completely judgment free about how I spent my time, never criticizing me for spending hours on my computer every day. This allowed me to cultivate many of the interests I hold most dear to this day.

[She] frequently offered my brother and I the chance to go to school if we wanted to, and supported me when I decided to shadow at local high schools as a teenager. I ultimately decided I wanted nothing to do with high school, but many of my unschooling friend's parents had a lot of difficulty when their teenagers expressed interest in high school. Having parental support through considering what school had to offer empowered me to make my own informed decisions about continuing to unschool.

Going to conferences and connecting with other unschoolers was one of the best decisions my mom made. Having the support of other young unschoolers got me through some of the most difficult times in my life. It made me realize I wasn't alone. Meeting grown/older unschoolers at conferences gave me a way to imagine myself as a successful adult- a thing that can be hard when you've never met anyone like you. Around my fellow unschoolers was maybe the first time I ever felt like I truly belonged anywhere other than with my family, like I was entirely celebrated for being myself, and like no one would question me or my right to exist.” -Emmett D.

"The best thing my parents did was let me sleep when I needed to. That meant the world to me." -Rachel H.

“Follow your kids' interests and provide them with resources to find more info. We were all into community theater so our mom would get us books about the plays we were in. When we did Annie Get Your Gun we learned about Annie Oakley, things like that. The trick was to NOT choose the topic for us, but to notice the topics we were already interested in (the plays we were acting in already) and then give us the tools to expand from there.

Relatedly, a story about why you shouldn't force kids to learn. I was late to start reading. My parents were new to homeschooling at the time and my mom got concerned and tried to push it, having me do this horrible reading workbook every day which I absolutely despised. It did not work, I made no progress, I hated it, and my mom probably hated it too, so eventually she stopped pushing it. Pretty much immediately I spontaneously started reading random things I'd see without any prompting. So we all learned that I am incredibly stubborn and that kids learn better when they're not forced to learn.

Make a learning experience out of EVERYTHING. My dad is especially good at this. He actually built the second largest home owned aquarium in the US in our house (huge conversation piece), which requires a lot of upkeep and for many years we'd help him do the iodine testing. That's how I learned, at like 7 years old, that saltwater life (as well as humans) need a very specific amount of iodine - not too much, not too little - to be healthy. He had to do the testing anyway, so he involved us, explaining why he did it, how the chemistry of the testing strips worked, etc.” -Jennifer L.

“The very best thing my mother (specifically) did was pushing us to do everything on our own. Calling to make doctor's appointments, doing our own laundry, taking us to the grocery store and having us weigh the produce (okay, we weren't forced to do that one!), etc. She never hesitated to step in to help if we asked or were really frustrated, but she always had us try before doing things for us. I think this is something a lot of parents are missing (I work in a daycare). Things like having your 2 year old put on their own pants after using the potty, for example, are more important than many would imagine. It not only teaches children real-life skills, it also builds self-confidence and mastery without constant praise (read Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn) or inflating self-esteem (which is different than true confidence).” -Casey H.

“Some things I really appreciate that my parents did during our unschooling years:

1. Made sure we had library cards and made going to the library a regular thing.
2. Honoring season rituals and other ways of marking time. I loved the abundance of unstructured time but having a rhythm to the week and season and year is grounding.
3. My parents were able to afford high quality art supplies and we always had access to lots of 'making' supplies which was really wonderful for satisfying creative play.
4. They gave us tools and helped us learn to use them to do stuff on our own: make our own snacks, do our own laundry, dress ourselves, etc. We learned a lot of skills participating in regular housekeeping and self care activities. I have really appreciated those practical skills as an adult.” -Anna CC

“My parents were good at seeing when I seemed to be lacking direction, and asked if more structure would be helpful. They didn't push anything on me, but helped me set goals and gave gentle reminders when I wasn't doing the things that were most important to me for long periods.” -Julian B.

“The best thing my parents did for myself and my sisters by unschooling us was encouraging us to devout our time to what we were passionate about.

I spent my high school years drawing and painting and reading books. I'm in my early twenties now, still working to put myself through college, but I have 5 years teaching experience as an elementary grade art teacher in museums, centers, and public school systems. If I hadn't been unschooled I wouldn't have had the time to devote myself to my art, which is one of the major reasons I've received the scholarships I have for programs and college.” -Ashley H.

“No ‘screen time’ limits. Instead, we used television, movies, the internet, etc. as limitless resources. These were topics of conversation, which turned into interesting tangents about all sorts of subjects, which turned into questions. Depending on the question, we would either talk with each other about our ideas and opinions, or look up the answer online (or both). Limiting resources would limited possibilities for one thing to lead to another this way.” Zoë B.

“Over time, my mother's education mantra became 'the parent/teacher opens the door - it's is the child/learner's decision whether to walk through it'. In other words, I was allowed to try any subject (academic or practical) that I wished, and was often supplied with opportunities for new experiences. It was always my decision whether to participate however, and there was never any pressure on, or judgement of, my decisions.” Flora G.

Why Assigning Books or Reading Time is a Bad Idea

This post was originally shared on Patreon back in October. I can't emphasize enough how big a difference my monthly Patreon income, small as it might be, makes in my life. Seriously, by investing $1 or more a month in me and my work you can have such an impact. And you also get extra posts, like the one below, most of which will never end up on this main blog, some of which will end up here many months after their original Patreon publication date. So please consider becoming a financial supporter, and whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this taste of what I share with Patrons!

I don’t think children should be assigned specific books. I also don’t think children should be assigned specific reading times or amounts. Basically? I don’t think that reading should ever be compulsory.

Some of the biggest pushback I get when I say this is from people who fondly remember the works they were introduced to thanks to assignments in English class: If I hadn’t had to read Pride and Prejudice I probably never would have. I’m glad to hear of people discovering Things They Love, in whatever way they do. However, I find the underlying assumption that coercion is the best way to force someone to love something to be troubling, to say the least.

Compulsion is not the best way to create passion. This one should be obvious, really. For everyone who loves a book they were assigned in school, there are probably at minimum two other people who hated it, and decided they’d never go near that author again (or never touch another classic, or in some cases just avoid reading altogether). Humans as a whole do not react well to being forced to do things they don’t want to do, and often develop a strong resistance to the subject or thing they are being coerced into doing.

Compulsion shows a fundamental distrust of the child. “I know what’s best for you to do, so you should do it and like it.” Nowhere in an assigned reading list is there room for a child to make their own decisions, to explore what they’re most drawn to. And there’s little more room for a child to set their own pace, their own priorities, and their own goals within assigned reading times or logs, which turn what should be something joyful into a chore. Every piece of a child’s learning that is taken out of their hands is another signal to them that they are incompetent, untrustworthy, and incapable of learning on their own, which is such a sad message to be sending children.

Sharing really is caring. Enthusiasm is often infectious. If there are books that had a big impact on someone in their formative years, or that seem culturally important, or that they think a kid will like, it’s great to suggest reading it, to borrow it from the library and leave in a stack of books-I-think-you’ll-like, to initiate a read-aloud...It’s definitely the role of adults in children’s lives to expose them to things, to make suggestions, to share passions. But all that can be done without bringing coercion into the mix.

Developing a personal relationship with stories. As someone who really, deeply loves novels, who comes from a family of readers, I feel very strongly about the importance of individuals developing their own unique relationships with literature and more broadly with the written word (or spoken word! Audiobooks are great if that’s your jam). As all of us who love books know, they can be truly magical, but only if they remain an enticing option, and not the brussel sprouts of the learning world: do it because it’s good for you, not because it tastes good.

Ultimately, no one has control over what another person will like, or love, or be curious or passionate about. All you ever have is influence, and when used both enthusiastically and respectfully, you have the power to introduce exciting and beautiful things into the lives of children… Without compulsion.

Passion Doesn't Require Purpose

This post was originally published on Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows supporters to pledge a monthly amount of their choosing (as little as $1) towards my work, in exchange for perks including an extra post each month... Like this one! If you want more like it, please consider becoming a patron. 

I have a confession to make: I really love makeup.

No, wait, that’s not right. Not the loving makeup part: that’s entirely accurate, but the confession part. While I can sometimes have twinges of embarrassment or uncertainty around interests of mine that are often ridiculed or seen as shallow (like makeup, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with the gender it’s most often associated with…), I’m not actually in the least bit ashamed about it. I try hard to live the idea--which I know to be true--that all interests have merit. The things that are important to me matter, and don’t require justification. What I should say is this:

I have a confession to make: I really love makeup, and I don’t plan to ever make a career out of it.

I’ve often seen people, in an attempt to convince others of the merits of children’s interests, point out that the kid who loves video games might become a game designer; the teen who’s obsessed with Anime might become an author of graphic novels; the child who can’t get enough of baseball stats could become a professional athlete… All of these arguments seem to be based on the underlying idea that each of these passions are worthless on their own, but gain greater status in being seen as a step to something useful: a step towards a career.

To be clear, I’m not trying to put down individuals for using these arguments: I’ve said similar myself at times. And if pointing out that interests can lead to financial gain in the future helps a parent relax about video game time, or mollifies a concerned grandparent, I’m certainly not going to say there’s anything wrong with that. But when that’s the go-to justification for “letting” children pursue their interests, I feel like we’re internalizing some harmful ideas about worth--the worth of our own and others’ interests, and by extension the worth of ourselves and others as people. If you see your worth as being tied to your actions, to the way you spend your time, as is true for most of us, then if you think time spent doing some things is worth less, isn’t that going to affect the way you feel about yourself? And if you look at others and think “what a waste of time,” isn’t that going to affect how you think about and treat them?

If we fall into the trap of believing that our purpose is productivity, and further that “productivity” has to be about financial gain (or steps towards that goal), then it seems to me we’re undervaluing important work, dismissing joy (focus, excitement, creativity, play) as a worthless goal to pursue, and missing out on a lot of the most enriching parts of life.

Is money important? We live under capitalism, so of course it is (and we often need it to pursue the things we love most… Makeup isn’t free, after all). But we need to let children, especially, and also ourselves, explore all the parts of life we find ourselves drawn to, all the hobbies and interests that catch our eye, without needing to come up with a reason why we’re “allowed” to enjoy it.

I don’t want to be a makeup artist. For me makeup is an important and exciting form of self-expression, something that makes me happy, allows me to be creative, and is a skill which I can greatly enjoy improving. What I get from it might not be as tangible as money, or recognition, or approval (though I’ve greatly enjoyed sharing this interest with others), but it’s important nonetheless.

If it enriches your life, or the lives of your children, it has value. It might not be something that you’d choose--I fully respect your right not to wear lipstick--but we each find delight in different things, and that diversity is a good thing.

Forget what an interest may or may not lead to in the future. Look instead at what joy it’s bringing, right now, right in front of you. That’s where the learning, and the fun, is happening.

What I Learn: Unschooling as an Adult

I talk a lot about learning in a general sense, but sometimes people want to know a bit more about my learning, my experience as an adult unschooler, and how that works. How do I decide what to learn next? How do I find the information that I need? How do I learn? I addressed the question somewhat in a recent patreon post, but as was pointed out by someone, if your background is one where learning is something divorced from your own interests and daily life, it might not be as obvious as my suggestion that “learning is as simple as living life while curious.” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that, and so I figured maybe I could try to use some actual examples from my own life to illustrate the various ways I learn about the things I care about most. While the more conventional understanding might be that a curriculum comes first and then it’s followed in order for learning to happen, that’s obviously not how I approach things. So instead, I thought I’d look back on the past year or so, and try to condense it into something like a portfolio: this is what I’ve been doing, and these have been some of the helpful resources I’ve used. Makes sense? Okay, time to dive in!

Media studies aka I watch a lot of TV shows and documentaries
TV watching might have a bad rap (documentaries not so much), but as I’ve discussed in other posts, I actually interact with the shows I watch (as do many people!): I watch them with others, and I look at the content critically (not in an I Only Watch Good shows way, because some of my faves are trash, but with an eye for what is well and badly done story-wise, what biases or unspoken assumptions are at play, etc.). And on the flip side, I watch documentaries not only to learn about their topics, but for the beauty, the experimentation, and the art inherent in a good doc.
The how: watch lots of things, read reviews and discussions online, watch video reviews and deconstructions, talk about TV and documentaries with others.

Makeup
This is an art and form of self-expression that I cherish, and I’ve been learning more about it, building skills, and amassing my own personal product hoard over the last couple of years. I admired others for a while before I took the plunge myself, and it can admittedly be overwhelming. There has been lots of Googling, reading of reviews, Instagram inspiration, and trial and error along the way… But mainly? There’s been YouTube!
The how: YouTube tutorials, product reviews, hauls, lots of experimentation and practice.

White supremacist hate groups and ideology
With the belief in the old adage that it’s important to understand your enemies, current events should provide a pretty clear picture of why I started digging deeper. White supremacist hate groups have been around for a long time, but greater exposure in recent times has lead to a resurgence, and understanding what’s behind it has seemed deeply relevant.
The how: News articles, short form journalism, documentaries, long-form journalism, conversations with others.

Swimming
Starting in the winter, I made the huge stride (for me) of actually exercising regularly! Yay phys ed I guess?? It involves working through some anxiety (not about the swimming itself, more about being alone with my own thoughts being difficult), building up stamina after not being physically active for a long time, and finding the meditative moments in leisurely treading water, the swirl between my fingers, and the sound of my own breathing as I float on my back…
The how: Buy pool membership, go to pool, swim.

Cat behaviour
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty obsessed with cats. It started when I was a toddler, and I really never grew out of it! But instead of being content simply with cuddling and fussing over the three cats I share my home with, I wanted to understand more about their behaviour and motivations, the ways I can better communicate with and train them, what research is saying about feline cognition, and just generally how to be a better cat guardian and friend to cat kind.

The how: reading and watching anything I can find by cat behaviorists, keeping up to date on new research, spending lots of time observing and interacting with cats. 

Literature appreciation aka I read a lot of novels
Since I first picked up a novel as I was learning to read, I never really stopped reading. I am very much in love with the science fiction and fantasy genres, and I’m usually in the middle of one novel or another. Over the past couple of years I’ve even set myself yearly reading goals through the book social media site GoodReads: in 2016 I read 50 books, and my goal for this year is 60 (I’m a little behind right now, but still well on track to make it).
The how: Get a library membership and go there regularly, request they purchase new books in my preferred genre that are getting a lot of buzz, read books, read book reviews, write book reviews, talk about books with people.

Self-directed education
The obvious one, really, so much so that it seems a bit superfluous to go into it more than this…
The how: Read articles and essays on unschooling/self-directed education and current events that influence both mainstream and alternative education, watch education documentaries, maintain a Facebook page on the topic, write my own posts and essays on my blog and other places, talk about education.

This collection of interests is not an exhaustive one: there have been plenty of other spurts of curiosity and research and dabbling… But it is a good overview of the things I’ve been most focused on in recent months. The more you do things and learn things just because you’re interested, you’re curious, you care, the easier it becomes. A habit formed of questions and Google searches, a process of letting go of the need to prove the worthiness of a task in favor of just enjoying it. Self-directed education might start out feeling complicated (and it can certainly be difficult, as many things can be, even when we love them), but it doesn’t have to be that way. Learning can be reclaimed, and enjoyed on its own merits, free from unnecessary complication and curriculum. It can be simple.

Why Not Leave Education to the Experts?

My mother used to get asked, sometimes, if she was a teacher. Considering my sister and I weren’t going to school, the assumption ran that surely she must be a teacher. Surely she wouldn’t consider something so drastic as to take her children away from the hands of educational experts, and into those of a mere layperson. That remains one of the biggest fears expressed about school-free education: the belief that experts will know best and do best, and so to take away those experts seems to be doing a great disservice to children. Of course, I could talk about the fact that teachers often find a big gap between the more idealized educational practices they learn in university compared with the reality of what they’re actually allowed or able to do in the classroom; the impossibility of fostering any type of truly individualized learning in a class filled with dozens of individuals; the fact that teachers are as prone to biases and prejudice as anyone else, meaning that marginalized students are often served especially poorly… But I don’t really want to get into that. What I want to explore instead is all the ways that unschooling functions without school teachers, but not without teachers; without institutionalization, but not necessarily without structure.

“One person can’t possibly teach everything.”

I agree! But the idea with unschooling is not that the parent becomes a teacher, but instead that they act as a mentor and partner in their children’s learning. They’re not expected to know everything their child might want or need to know, they’re expected to help their children find the answers to their questions. They’re not there in order to “teach” different subjects, and instead work to find their children the resources needed in order to fully explore the things they find interesting and important. Parents or other trusted adults are not expected to be super-people, knowing and doing more than is humanly possible in order to single-handedly provide an education. They’re facilitators, co-learners in a quest for greater knowledge. 

“You’re just isolating them from learned people.”

Unschoolers usually find it very important to make connections in their community with various different people who have a variety of different skills. Learners volunteer, find mentors or teachers to guide them in their chosen pursuits, even take classes. They take advantage of book clubs at the local library and free lectures at a university; they use the wealth of information to be found online, including video tutorials and complete courses, long-form journalism and blogs covering an interesting topic. Experts and skilled amateurs alike make their knowledge and skills available to others in all sorts of different ways, meaning that self-directed learners can always find some way to learn about whatever it is they want to learn. Unschooling doesn’t mean eschewing all “experts,” it just means seeking them out only if and when they want to… And it also means that many unschoolers have access to more experts with more in-depth knowledge in their field than children in school do.

“But surely an actual teacher is best equipped to guide a child through their education.”

If you take it as fact that all children should and will learn the exact same things, at the same time, in the same way, and with a similar aptitude and amount of interest, then maybe. But as we all know, that isn’t the case, and as much as many teachers might want to allow for more individuality in learning, the reality of high stakes testing and large classrooms makes such a thing completely impossible. It’s also important to note that while the term “self-directed” has been co-opted in certain circles to mean learning the same things from the same sources but going at your own pace, that’s not what actual self-directed education is. If your goal is not for everyone to reach the same point (just at different speeds) and instead you seek truly personalized education, consisting of what is most wanted and needed by the learner and their community, then you quickly realize that maybe a teacher doesn’t make the best director. Maybe the learner themselves, the owner of their own unique mind and body, is best equipped to shape their own learning.

When you take out classroom management, and teaching to a test, and whatever the bureaucrats or textbook producers in your particular region have decided is the one body of knowledge all children should have, you make way for much greater diversity between individuals in the shape and content of their education. It’s a reality shift, one that ultimately looks to create not conformity, but a diverse society where varied skill sets, different strengths and weaknesses, unique quirks and passions, can exist without shame from the earliest of ages. If we want a world where everyone is valued for their own unique selves, why do we try and educate every child in the exact same way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate those differences instead?

Leaving education to the experts doesn’t seem to be working out too well, so maybe it’s well past time we stop relying on them, and look to the learners themselves show us the way forward.

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Summer Rules?

There’s an image I see going around Facebook a lot lately. Titled “Summer Rules,” it sets a long list of requirements that must be met before children are allowed to “use electronics.” While I’ve certainly seen some dissenting voices, the overwhelming response seems to be one of great satisfaction. That’s the way to make kids live life right, people explain, congratulating each other on assuring that children make exactly the choices that the adults in their lives think are most appropriate, even during what, for many, is their one real break from school all year long.

Source

As you’ve probably already guessed, I find this graphic frustrating at best, infuriating at worst. Why? Here are just a few reasons…

I already fail to meet this list of requirements every single day. My bed gets made at night, right before I get into it, because that’s my routine and there’s nothing wrong with it. I spend plenty of days in my PJ’s. My hair rarely gets combed out (the breakage! The frizz!), as a light finger combing that doesn’t unnecessarily disturb my curls is usually all that’s needed. I tend to brush my teeth while I open up my computer for the day, checking email and Facebook notifications while tending to oral hygiene. Ditto for breakfast. I get to make all these decisions for myself, because I’m an adult, but I also got to make these decisions for myself when I was younger, because my parents respected me. As I hope I’ve just made clear, doing all of these first section “rules” before electronics every morning, or even doing all of them every day, is pretty arbitrary. Yes, I get that we want children to be clean and to eat well and all that, but there are a whole bunch of better ways to encourage healthy habits besides holding electronics over children’s heads as bribes/blackmail.

Making some things “good” activities, and others “bad” (the old books versus screens dichotomy) is a great way to teach kids just that… But not necessarily in the direction you want. What is forbidden usually becomes more desirable. Screens! What is forced generally becomes less desirable. Books! Art! Playing outside! Tidying! Helping others! Is that really what anyone wants? When activities are instead presented as equally valid choices, when children are involved in family life, and when adults themselves are engaging in a range of different types of activities, children are going to be influenced by that. And sometimes? Sometimes they really love something and will want to spend all their time engaged in that something, and if we want to nurture passion, sometimes we’re going to have to accept that other people--children included--will be passionate about something we neither like or understand, and learn to be okay with that. No one gets to choose what someone else will love, whether they’re children or adults. Also? Lumping things like artistic creation and reading into the same category as cleaning is a good way to extra, super duper discourage them. Like, has anyone really thought that one through?

There are a whole lot of different uses for “electronics.” I’m going to assume here that the creator of the List Of Rules means computers and video games here, and not, say, a microwave, because they’re not very clear. If we’re talking about video games, see above on passion. If we’re talking about computers… Well. Some of the things people regularly do on the computer include: writing emails, reading (fiction and articles and essays and poetry), writing (blog posts or essays or fiction), watching YouTube videos (for both instruction and entertainment), playing games (strategy games and simulation games and puzzle games), talking to friends, creating art, participating in online discussions and forums, researching any topic you can imagine, looking for new hobbies or activities, looking at art… Whenever people decide to generalize “screens” or “electronics” I can’t help but be exasperated. You’d think that when we opened up our computers, there was just one option: Stare At Blue Screen Like Zombie. In reality, the amount of activities it’s possible to engage in on screened electronics is huge. It’s a really big window into a whole lot of the world, and dismissing it as bad, or deciding (as the above image seems to be doing) that virtually any activity off of screens is better than any on seems completely absurd.

Luckily, someone out there named Laura Sweet did a bit of fixing:

“Have you: Woken up today? Then you can enjoy summer like kids should.”

Now that’s something I can get behind.