Unschooling and Access to Media

Yesterday, I asked, in a YouTube video, for people to ask me questions about unschooling.  And I got lots of interesting questions!  I tried to do a video on this one, but I was having a lot of trouble getting my opinions on this subject across in that format.  So, I decided to answer it in a blog post instead!  The question is in italics, my answer in regular font.

Let's say children are like seeds. In order to grow into good people, they don't need to be *forced* to grow, because they do that naturally. But that said, a seed must be planted in fertile soil, in the right climate, and must be watered, etc. What if some kinds of media today threaten the minds of the young- for example, television which provides immediate satisfaction but gives no decent returns in the long run may be more compelling than a book.

Firstly, I think you’re making a huge jump in saying that television gives “no decent returns in the long run”, and automatically assuming that a book has more value than a TV show!  I totally disagree with that!  Also, what’s wrong with instant satisfaction?  A life well lived is one made up of many happy moments: if watching TV gives you joy, I don’t really see how it’s in anyway unworthy of your time.  I’m an avid reader, and have been for many years.  Books have enriched my life in many ways!  But, so has TV.  When I was young, I watched tons of science shows and history shows.  Tons of “educational” shows on a variety of topics.  I also just watched some fictional shows.  I was never a particularly big TV watcher, but it was never forbidden to me, and I enjoyed what I did watch.  I also learned a ton!      

My opinion is that if kids have less manufactured entertainment stimuli they are forced to use their imagination to invent their own games, stories, etc. But because of the exponential growth of media, it is getting harder and harder to give children a world which does not numb their minds and imagination.

Again, I totally disagree.  Storytelling fuels imagination, and at their hearts, ALL types of fiction, be it novels, comic books, TV shows, movies, or oral storytelling, is just that: storytelling.  You find similar elements in all of them, and stories, no matter the medium they’re told in, can bring great joy, fuel imagination, cause you to question deeply held beliefs, ask profound questions…  Storytelling is an amazing art, and I find it rather sad when people start passing judgments on what types of storytelling are “good” or “bad”.

I also want to give some real life examples of this.  Far from squelching my very creative sister’s imagination (she currently writes tons of fiction), my sister would play pretend all the time based on various favourite movie characters.  She would also, as a young child, spend hours alone in her room just creating huge complex stories and worlds.  Soon, that imagination was used to start writing fiction.  She’s currently working on her first novel!  And she even plays video games, supposedly the most mind numbing things out there, and has played them for years. ;-) 

And yet- this brings up two competing ideas about freedom: should we free the child in the immediate moment, by imposing no limits on how they spend their time; or can we control their environment so that they are more likely to build their imaginations and judgements?

I’m sure you’ve gathered my opinion on this by now.  I do recognize that some (okay, a lot) of stuff on TV has messages that really aren’t so great (as do tons of books out there, I might add).  But I’m not advocating casting your kids loose and ignoring them while they do nothing but watch TV.  When you have a good, attentive relationship with your kids, one where you discuss what they’re seeing, have good dialogue, you’re exposing them to the world around you, with all of it’s negative and positive “influences”, and doing so while remaining a loving, supportive, and knowledgeable companion.  I don’t think that sheltering your kid does anything but make things more difficult for them later on. 

I also think that any time you make something forbidden to your child, you’ve just made it the most interesting thing out there.  Kids are curious, and if they’re denied access to something, chances are they’ll both really want to get access to it, and quite likely resort to lying and going behind their parents backs to do so.  Really, I don’t blame them!  I’ve come to this conclusion from my own experiences growing up, which were that the more controlled a child was, the more likely they where to frequently lie to their parents.  It was the only way they could have freedom.

I also want to add that even now, I find TV very “educational”.  I find advertising fascinating, I find the underlying assumptions and worldviews in mainstream shows fascinating, and watching TV sometimes helps me to remember how most of the world thinks (my sister regularly tells me I’ve forgotten what “normal” is)!

So that’s my answer to that question.  I hope I’ve given some insight into it!

Peace,

Idzie

Vlog: Unschooling=No Procrastinating?

Answering a question I was asked today, in response to my previous video Ask me questions about unschooling?.

Unschooling=No Procrastinating?



And don't worry, this sudden surge in vlogging is most likely short lived.  I'll have more written blog posts up soon!

Peace,
Idzie

Vlog: Ask Me Questions About Unschooling?

I especially love writing online to convey ideas, share opinions, etc, but I also like vlogging on YouTube, and I have a very different audience there, an audience made up largely of those who aren't, themselves, unschooling, but want to learn more about it!  However, I rarely vlog.  Mostly because I often have trouble thinking of good things to vlog about (I find coming up with vlogging ideas to be much harder than coming up with posting ideas).  So I made a video asking people to ask me about unschooling, and give me ideas...



It's aimed mainly at the aforementioned YouTube audience, but I'd welcome questions from blog readers as well!  My YouTube channel: Catzie690

Peace,
Idzie

It Begins in Fire

Enjoy Life Unschooling is hosting it's first blog canival, with the topic of New Beginnings, and when I read the list of prompts for writing a New Beginnings themed post, one of them stood out to me:

How do you celebrate new beginnings in your life?

When I was a child, I loved mythology.  All mythology.  Anything I could get my hands on.  Once, I read a novel about an Indian dancer, and in it the main character worshiped the god Shiva, who is both destroyer and creator, benign and terrible.  Shiva is also often associated with fire.  In the book, I remember reading about Shiva, the god of fire and dance, who dances the destruction of the world, then dances it's rebirth.

That must have made an impact on me, since the memory of it has stuck with me for years.

To me, fire is like that: the creator and destroyer.  Bringer of endings and beginnings.

I like to have ritual in my life.  It makes me feel calmer, more grounded.  It's a way of both connecting with the wider web of life and of centering myself.  When I forget to mark passages, and changes, and holidays, and the turning of the season through ritual, it saddens me, and even makes me feel a bit lost!  It's something that I forget about too often, but that adds greatly to my life.

Fire has always felt sacred to me.  Anyone who's ever stared into the flames knows how you can fall almost into a trance while doing so, how fascinating and exciting it is, the warmth and light of it.  Fire is both comforting and dangerous.  So it's not surprising, I suppose, that fire plays an important part in ritual, for me.

And what I want to talk about now is endings, and beginnings.  Because the two are inextricably intertwined!

A few years ago, instead of just making resolutions at New Years that I won't keep anyway, and will just feel bad about when I break, I wrote down, on a blank sheet of paper, all the things I wished for in the new year.  New friends.  Good health.  Discovering new places.  And I went downstairs, along with my family who'd chosen to do the same thing, and in the dark-warm-stillness of past midnight, we placed our papers in the wood stove and watched then curl as they burned brightly, the smoke carrying our wishes up the chimney and out into the night.

I've also used fire to symbolically cleanse bad things from my life.  To burn bad memories and feelings, release them in a tangible way so that I can move on in my life more freely.  Regrets can weigh so heavily, make you wince, and want to just curl up in a dark corner and forget about it all.  I think that too many people carry heavy regrets with them long after they should have been put to rest.  The past is past, and can't be changed.  You can never fully get rid of regrets, I know, but I'm constantly trying to lessen the burden of my regrets, and to realize that every moment is a new beginning, a time to do things differently, to move further toward what and who you want to be in this new moment.  

Fire is both endings and beginnings.  It's change.  It's wild and warm and life giving and life taking.  It's spontaneity and it's meditation.

And it helps me to remember that life is moving, not static, and to mark those passages, those changes, those new beginnings.

Peace,
Idzie

In Honour of International Women's Day

In conversation recently, someone said to me they don't think that most men realize to what lengths women are expected to go to look "pretty".

I think that person is right.

I also think many women don't think much about all the things they're expected to do to look "pretty".  For the most part, those things are just accepted.  Normal.  Just what you do.

And it harms us.  Physically and emotionally. 

Physically, the average woman is exposed to a huge amount of chemicals on a daily basis: the facial cleansers, body creams, lip balms, makeup, deodorant, hairspray, perfume.  All of these (except for a very few "natural" brands that actually don't contain any harmful chemicals) are loaded with carcinogens and other harmful chemicals.  Yet if a woman, or even more so, a teenage girl, doesn't wear makeup she's often considered a freak.

For fear of being ostracized, for fear of weird looks, most women shave.  Most women wear a bra.  Most women wear makeup.  And most women would never even consider NOT doing any of these things!!  If they're freely chosen, none of these things are bad (with the exclusion of cosmetics and body care products containing harmful ingredients).  But as the ONLY option, the only way you'll be considered attractive (or so people think), I think it's absolutely horrible.

Why can't people see that breasts are not, actually, bra shaped, and that they move when you move?  Why can't people see that all humans have hair all over their bodies, not just the parts currently considered socially acceptable?  Why can't people see what a beautiful face looks like without a heavy coating of makeup?

I went through a stage, in my mid-teens, where I felt so different, so out of place, and I was desperate to fit in.  So, casting off my hippie upbringing, I bought bras, and shaved my legs, and even after a while started wearing makeup.  I got to the point where I'd usually put makeup on before leaving the house, and if I wasn't wearing any, I'd look in the mirror and think I looked ugly.

That's what kind of snapped me out of it, along with my new findings about just how dangerous many chemicals in cosmetics are.  I didn't want to get cancer.  And I knew that I should not think that the only true beauty was from synthetic gunk on my face.

That also coincided with a definite movement in my life towards finding myself.  Creating my own identity, being my own person.  This involved, and involves, a steady movement to a more "hippie"-ish, more organic, and less constrained by social mores, existence.

So I've become part of the bras and razors are optional club (want to join me? ;-)).   Really, why must I change my body, constrain myself in weird and uncomfortable undergarments, or endanger my health by absorbing harmful chemicals into my skin, to fit into some version of beauty I neither accept nor support?

I guess you could say I'm in the process of detoxing from the expectations of this culture.   In both this area of my life, and in many others.  It's a long process, and often a difficult one, to break away from the expectations of your entire culture.  But I think it's a very healthy, very *good* thing to be doing.

Peace,
Idzie

Expectations on Being an "Adult"

In less than two weeks (on March 16th, to be exact), I'll be turning 19.  Almost two decades on this earth.

And I feel like it's this great, looming presence on the metaphorical horizon: waiting, the days counting down, their passage constantly reminding me of how old I'm soon going to be.

I haven't really enjoyed my Birthday in years...  Since I was 13 or so, Birthdays reminded me of all the things I hadn't done in that year (all the things I thought would be good to do at X age, that never happened).  A time to feel sad about all the things in my life that weren't the way I wanted them to be.  Isn't that a horrible way of looking at things?

But last year was different.  Last year, I was simply dreading turning 18.  Becoming an official "adult", with all of the encumbent expectations of just what being an adult entails.

I think turning 19 is almost worse.  At 18, I could get away with being a brand new adult!  Now, I've had a whole year to get used to it.  It's like solidifying the adult-ness.

And I've really, really been struggling with that.  At this point in life, even most unschoolers *expect* me to be working, or in college, or in an apprenticeship...  They expect me to be Doing Something.  Something more than what I am.

Because I'm not working.  I'm not in school.  I haven't found someone to apprentice to.  I'm still just writing, researching, planning travels to a couple places, on very limited funds...

And when I look around me, it seems EVERYONE my age is doing *more*.

I feel ashamed.  Embarassed.  Like I'm the slow kid in a nonexistant class, the one that people are looking at with a mix of dissaproval and confusion.  She's smart enough, why isn't she doing something with it?

Because the thing is, I don't want to be an "adult", whatever the fuck that means.  I finally realized that in one of my recent breakdowns (I very rarely meltdown, normally, but in the last couple of months, I've been making a habit of it.) that all I want to do is to be 15 or 16 again (despite the fact I had no clue who I was at those ages, and wasn't necessarily all that happy), and be able to just *be* without all of the pressure.  The expectation that I should be moving on to *more*.

And that realization makes me feel even more embarrassed.  I feel like feeling that way makes me immature.  I look at others my age, with their jobs and college classes and apprenticeships and world traveling, and wonder what they think of me...

My mother says I've always been very wary of and unhappy with change.  I know that to be true.  I've always wanted to watch from the sidelines for a while, before I decide whether or not I want to join in.

But haven't I been watching from the sidelong too long now?  Don't I have to find something to join into now?  I'm turning 19!!

And I do want to make some changes in my life.  I'm not as happy as I could be with where I am now.  But the changes I want to make aren't necessarily the changes others think I should be making.  And I'm no longer sure what the right choices are: which ones I want and which ones others want me to want.

I just feel lost...  And stressed.  And ashamed.

My mother and sister are supportive, and without them, I would truly be lost.  My father is loving, yet with a much more traditional outlook, and he's worried.  He thinks unschooling has failed, because I'm not doing any of the things I "should be" doing by my age.  He doesn't say it, he quite possibly doesn't even think it, but what I hear is that I've failed.  That's not a nice feeling.

So that's where I am right now.  What I've been struggling with for too long now.  My apologies for the disjointedness, the rambling...  It's late.  I'm overtired.  And life feels really difficult right now...

Peace,
Idzie

A lovely outing and more info on SMUG

My mother and I drove out to check out a campground today, Oka national park, that we thought might be good for the Summer Montreal Unschoolers Gathering (we figure since we came up with the idea so late, only a few months before we want it to happen, we should get everything done as soon as possible!).  And I'm very happy to say that I think we've found the perfect place!!  It's only about 45 minutes from downtown Montreal, and it's also a really lovely place.  It's lovely in the Winter, and looking around, we think it'll be even more beautiful in the Summertime!

There's even a (swim-able) beach on a large lake...

Why we were especially interested in this campground/park was because they have a building with twelve rooms to rent, but you can rent as little as five rooms and get the whole place to yourself!  Here are the pictures I took on our tour of the Gîte Sous Les Pins:

Here it is from a couple of angles...

Inside, there's a lot of lovely wood...

A dining room...

A downstairs hangout room (my mom thinks those tables are perfect for playing Bananagrams! ;-))...

 

 

The upstairs hallway, which is entirely comprised of bedrooms...

Each bedroom sleeps three people, with the option to add a fourth bed (which would make it wall to wall beds).

 

Each bedroom also has a sink and closet space.

 

For those who would prefer to camp, either for money reasons or because it's more fun, there are campsites RIGHT by the gîte, as in a two second walk, so that really wouldn't affect your ability to hang out in the main building at all.

Also, the park includes several historical chapels and oratories (see the little white building on the hill?  That's one of them!).

The staff there were even super nice, and very knowledgeable, so we were just pretty impressed with the place in general. 

Nearby Oka village is lovely, and my mother and I decided to drive through it and make a list of important local stores (I found it funny that, by chance, the grocery store and the liquor commission where at the top of our list.  Really, what else do you need. ;-)).  While we were there, I hopped out and took a couple of pictures, including of this old church, that I've always thought was gorgeous.  Quebec has an abundance of lovely old churches!  All the old buildings are one of my favorite things about Montreal and surrounding area. :-)

Right by the church is where the ferry is in the Summer.  The ferry goes right across the water, to another scenic little town called Hudson. 

On our way home, but still only minutes from Oka national park, we pulled over to take a closer look at an old, yet still operational, monastery.

Having now looked the place up online, I know that it's not only operational, but open to visitors!  Next time I'm out that way, I TOTALLY want to see inside that building.

So, it was a really nice day out.  The weather was beautiful, and we were both so pleased to have found such a pretty place for the gathering, that's also so close to the city!!

Now we just need to find a good date (we're thinking maybe July 2nd to 6th or 7th?  We're not sure how attached the Americans who want to come are to July 4th celebrations though, so that might not work...).  The jazz fest would be on then, with TONS of free music, so it would be a great time to hang out in the city (if that date doesn't work, there are plenty of other music festivals with lots of free shows.  It's just that the jazz fest is both the biggest and bet known!).

I'll be setting up a website for the gathering soon (both because I love playing around with Wordpress, and because it's practical to have all the info in one place!).

If you're interested, don't forget to join the yahoo group:  Summer Montreal Unschoolers Gathering

Really excited about this, and hope to see you in Montreal this Summer! :-)

Peace,
Idzie

Summer Montreal Unschoolers Gathering

I've been having a difficult time of things lately, emotionally.  I'm not thrilled to be turning 19 in less than two weeks, and having some family issues.  But, one thing that's making me feel happier at the moment is a tentative unschoolers gathering this Summer in Montreal that my mother and I are (looking at) organizing...

Tentative time: June or July 2010

Tentative place: A campground within an hour of downtown Montreal

My mother and I are actually going to be visiting a campground with a building to rent this week!

If you're interested in possibly attending this gathering (if it ends up happening), and would like to provide some much needed and appreciated input, join the Yahoo! group here:  SMUG: Summer Montreal Unschoolers Gathering.

Montreal is a gorgeous city, and I'd love to share it with a bunch of awesome unschoolers!! :-)

Peace,
Idzie