Unschooling is Forever Part 1: Beginnings

It was a really great experience speaking at the Toronto Unschooling Conference (and it was a wonderfully relaxing and enjoyable conference!).  I should know by now not to freak out over public speaking, because once I get over the pre-talking-in-front-of-a-bunch-of-people nerves (which fade about a minute in), I really and truly enjoy it!  I never thought I'd say this, but my experience in the last year has led me to believe that public speaking is lots of fun!  And the incredibly kind words of those in the audience make all the stress and worry that goes into doing it MORE than worth it. 

The audio recording of this talk will be for sale here sometime soon, unless I'm much mistaken (I believe the cost per talk is $5 Canadian), and I'll be posting the text of this talk in it's entirety here over the next few weeks.  Here's the first part!

I’d like to start with a quote by Wendy Priesnitz:

"I wonder why so many parents still want to keep their children hidden away in schools, when they could be learning in the wonderful, bright, ever-changing, always-stimulating real world."

How I became an unschooler

Before I was born, neither of my parents had ever even considered homeschooling, never mind unschooling. It just never entered their minds. But my mom was, and still is, a bit of a hippie, so she did plan to breastfeed. Because of that, she joined the La Leche League when I was born (or possibly before I was born... I’m not sure how those things work!). Now, my mom had plenty of gentle discipline, unconditional parenting, type books, I was never let to “cry it out”, lived in a sling for ages, and all those other attachment parenting type practices, though I don’t believe that term had yet been coined when I was born.  Point is, she was the type of parent who liked having her kids close by, and wanted to be very involved in their lives.

At the La Leche Lague, she was exposed to an idea she'd never really thought of before: homeschooling. And she liked it! Being the type of parent she was, she didn't like the thought of sending her little girl off to spend her days with strangers.  So she started reading and researching, and decided that she really did want to homeschool! My father, on the other hand, was less enthusiastic. He can be rather traditional minded, and he truly thought that school was the best place for a growing child to learn, so my mother agreed that they would at least try it out. So off I went to half-day kindergarten at age five! I didn't really mind it. Neither did I love it. I had fun sometimes, but I was always happy to head home afterwards, as well. However, partway through the year, we started getting strange phone calls. Obscene phone calls, actually, and when they were traced by police it was discovered that it was a kid in grade 2 making them. Sad, isn’t it? So that was enough to convince my father, and halfway through my first year of school, I was pulled out. That half year of kindergarten remains my only experience with institutionalized schooling.

We started out as homeschoolers, though pretty darn relaxed ones, and for years our "schooling" is a bit of a blur, I'm afraid. I was pretty young! I know that we had various school books and programs and similar stuff, to use if we wanted to. We did lots of fun science experiments, as well as watching Nova and Nature and similar shows avidly (I say we, because my sister reached school age with no one ever suggesting she go to school, so we just continued to learn together!). My mom always read aloud to us: poetry, stories, the newspaper, and I started actually reading myself at age 8 or 9 when my mother was reading Harry Potter too slowly for my taste!  I memorized poetry, and wrote both poetry and stories before I could even read (I'd narrate them to my mother). But what I remember most strongly from these years is how connected and good everything felt.  Playing for hours on end, hiking in the woods, making crafts and art, cuddling and spending time together.  Everything was tactile and immediate, a life free of lectures and homework and intermediaries between my young self and the learning that was all around me.  Throughout this time period, my mom would tell everyone that we were doing "child-led" homeschooling.

And in all that time, the only thing that was ever really treated in a non-unschooling way was math.   When I was about 11, when any existing control around that was let go, I’d say we became true unschoolers.

So, How do you learn?

Unschooling requires a paradigm shift, one in which you must stop looking at the world as a series of occurrences/resources/experiences etc. that can be learned from, and a series that can’t.  The world doesn’t divide neatly into different subjects, and you can’t tell right from the outset what a seemingly unimportant question, interest, or TV show obsession will lead to.  I learn from: wandering, wondering, listening, reading, watching, discussing, running, writing, daydreaming, searching, researching, meditating, hibernating, playing, creating, growing, doing, helping, and everything else that comprises the day to day happenings of my life.

Unschooling can seem like a complicated endeavour, growing up as we do in a society so thoroughly schooled.  A schooled outlook sees learning as something difficult and mysterious.  As Ivan Illich said:

“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.”

But in moving past that mindset, a more accurate question starts to become how can you not learn, and I truly think the answer to that question is that it’s impossible to live without learning.

Once you’ve realized that, unschooling starts to seem incredibly simple.  Because, well, it is!  Unschooling, at its heart, is nothing more complicated or simple than the realization that life and learning are not two separate things.  And when you realize that living and learning are inseparable, it all starts to truly make sense. 

Read part 2, part 3, and part 4.