Steve Jobs and Growing Without Schooling

I fell in love with the Macintosh from the start. I own one of the first 128K Macs created; it has the Mac team’s signatures etched inside its case. I remember trying to convince John Holt in 1984 to bring the Mac into the office for creating Growing Without Schooling magazine and our other publications; John was skeptical. I used to lug my 128K Mac from my apartment to the Holt office to show how it could be used, and it wasn’t easy. Though touted as a portable computer, the original Mac needed to be carried in a large, square, padded container and it weighed a lot. I garnered lots of funny looks as I squeezed onto rush-hour trains with this huge bag slung over my shoulders. But I felt the effort was worth it. I worked with rubber cement, typewriters, and razors to create our publications in those days and I immediately grasped the elegance and ease of using a Mac to do the same. Of course, the software for laying it out took time to develop (anyone besides me remember MacPublisher, the first layout program for the Mac?), so it wasn’t a quick solution, but I could at least create advertisements (MacPaint and MacDraw) and articles (MacWrite) for HoltGWS on my Mac, and I did. We eventually became an all-Mac office (see photo) and remained Apple users even during their direst corporate moments in the nineties.

However, in recent years I came to respect Steve Jobs more as a person than as a corporate and technology visionary. That’s because of his openness about his background, revealed most in his commencement speech to the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford University.

I quote parts of this speech in some of my talks, and I want to share them with you today in case you haven’t read them. I use Jobs’ words to allay people’s fears that they might be constraining their children’s options and growth in the future by unschooling them now. Like the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, these words are worth considering because they can reduce stress and make your life a little easier and a little more fun. Steve Jobs:

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Stop trying to connect the dots for your children’s future and stay focused on your present time with them. Trust children, and yourselves. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Want to Learn? Don’t Go to College

PF: Nadia Jones, a homeschooler who is now a working adult, is a guest blogger for me today.

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For many in the United States of America, going to college has been considered a stepping stone to making money, despite the fact that hardly any of the skills one learns in college has any bearing on the daily tasks required of most jobs, even high-paying ones. The other, learning-based view of college is that a higher education is necessary in a civic sense—it helps mold young minds to think critically, to become more knowledgeable and sensitive about the world within them and around them. This has been the traditional (though now in our technocratic age, obsolete) view of the necessity of college.

As someone who has been to college, I can say without hesitation that neither objective was achieved after I graduated from a top-twenty liberal arts school only a few years ago. As an English major, I was not prepared for the job market in the slightest, unless you count learning to please superiors by agreeing with their point of view as an employable skill. Using the more traditional view of the importance of a higher education, the one that I believe in more whole-heartedly, I was equally disappointed. All the promises they fed me since orientation about being a scholar, about learning to think for myself, ended up being a beer-soaked, mind-numbing process of learning how to navigate the system.

This is how it works—you choose a few classes that sound interesting or that meet requirements. You attend them whether or not you feel like it. You work really hard to make good grades your first semester until you realize that there’s this thing called grade inflation. Grade inflation, a phenomenon in which higher grades are given for work that would have received lower grades in the past, is increasing rapidly, as noted in this New York Times article. The result is that we students learn that you don’t have to work hard, to improve over time, or to do anything really except to “win over” the professor.

Professors, whose performance (and pay) are increasingly being evaluated based on student reviews, and whose research dominates their professional lives, have no incentive to direct their students to achieve the goals of learning and critical thinking. As such, the student-professor relationship has become one that is based on a radical free-market ideology. Instead of students and professors, we have customers and salespeople. In this environment, the only positive outcomes are that students meet others who are much like them—reasonably smart but overly-opportunistic, entitled young men and women whose idea of success is going through the motions of college, grubbing for grades, going to parties, making friends, and networking for that high-paying job. In the process, learning is sacrificed.

Now do I regret having attended an institution of higher education? Not necessarily—I did have fun. But the fun incurred is not worth the student debt that now cripples my finances. I learned more by reading on my own before and after college than I ever learned in any of my classes. Even if college used to be a place where one could leave having learned to think and to evaluate independently, a college education in America now is nothing more than a four-year summer camp after which you earn a credential that everyone says you must have in order to succeed.

I question this logic, however, because I know several people, both friends and family members, who never went to college and are smarter, more enterprising, and dare I say, more successful, than 90% of the people I know who hold bachelor’s degrees. If you have an interest in working in academia, then yes, a college education is necessary. But for almost any other goal in life, whether personal or professional, it won’t help you much except to dig you deeper in debt. Trust me, I know.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie-related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

Major Newspaper Stories about Unschooling

Here are two good articles that discuss homeschooling. One, in the Hartford (CT) Courant, focuses on unschooling. Though the headline makes it seem like the article will view unschooling as a way to reform school, the article itself is more about one family and their journey to unschooling, and how North Star and other options can help families with self-directed teenage learners.

The Chicago Tribune did a story about homeschooling, with a focus on unschooling. The article was aimed at non-homeschooling parents, as the subhead indicates: "Supplement your child's education by stealing a few pages off the home-schoolers' playbook." Interesting how both stories intersect on the issue of how non-school activities and places can supplement or replace conventional schooling for children whose parents are not able to fully commit to homeschooling.

Homeschoolers in the News and in College

Amy Milstein, an unschooler living in Manhattan, sent me this good article and video about homeschooling done by a local PBS affiliate. It is, I think, an honest, even-handed portrayal about why and how homeschooling and unschooling are done. The interview at the end of the video, with two unschoolers who did well in college, should be interesting to all parents who worry about their unconventionally raised children getting into higher education.

On that note, this recent article will also be of interest: 15 Key Facts About Homeschooled Kids in College.

HoltGWS.com update, Catholic Unschooling, and Illich Video

I’ve been overwhelmed with good wishes, support, and requests for help since I launched the new www.holtgws.com site, which is why I haven’t been able to do much of anything else since it officially went live on Sept. 14. I’m rather surprised at how emotional I get when I read the materials we produced at HoltGWS; this is even truer when I review the photos, audios, and videos of John and my friends and colleagues from years past. It has taken me nearly a year to get the site to the point it is today, and I’m still surprised by some thought or memory that comes back to me as I work with the materials. It’s been ten years since we officially ceased publication of GWS and the distance does help me from getting too blubbery about its demise, but I’m still surprised at the emotions that get stirred by an old photo or reading an old letter.

 It is especially nice to have so many old friends and subscribers get back in touch with me. It is very encouraging to hear from parents whose children are now adults in their 30s and 40s describe how GWS and unschooling made such a positive difference in their lives. Indeed, as I create the first newsletter for the site I plan to reprint some of those letters, and to create a section on the site for GWS veterans to share their stories with those who are just starting, or are in the process, of homeschooling/unschooling. As momentum and publicity build about the site I look forward to hearing from more old timers.

I’m also still trying to decide which platform to use for a discussion forum for the site: Facebook (so many people are on it already), Google Plus (the Hangout video chat feature could be a leg up on Facebook), Tumblr (blog comments on steroids), or a stand-alone BBS that is located on the site—all have their pros and cons and I’m befuddled. If anyone has thoughts or opinions on which platform would be best to use, I’d appreciate you getting in touch with me.

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Suzie Andres informed me of a book promotion her friend Sue Elvis is doing. Elvis will be giving away three copies of Suzie’s book A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling. You can enter by going to her blog, Stories of an Unschooling Family.

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Another bittersweet moment for me occurred the weekend before I launched the HoltGWS site. I was in PA with a group of friends to attend a farewell symposium for Lee Hoinacki, a great person who is also a writer, thinker, farmer, and activist. One of Lee’s books, El Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela, is a moving philosophical and spiritual reflection about his pilgrimage and his thoughts about modern society that I find to be particularly powerful. Lee and Ivan Illich were close friends; indeed, many at the symposium felt Lee helped make Ivan’s work more understandable to them, including myself.

Gene Burkart and I drove down together, as we have several times before, and we decided to take the scenic route instead of the more direct highway route. Despite the bad weather we had faced right up to the day before we left, we were assured that all roads were now clear. Nonetheless, we got more than we bargained for—severe flooding in New York and Pennsylvania from the Susquehanna River caused a couple of detours for us that opened our eyes. As we neared Binghamton, in particular, many homes, malls, and gas stations could be seen on the river-side of the road, engulfed by at least four feet of water. It was an eerie experience. The weather was gorgeous—clear sky, mid-seventies for temperature—yet there was all this devastation floating near us. The scenic route doubled our driving time due to these difficulties, but it also gave us more time to talk.

One thing Gene told me about was a blog he had recently discovered about Ivan Illich: New Scare City. He mentioned it again to the group in PA, and then again as we drove back to Boston a couple of days later. I have since gone to the blog many times and have enjoyed all the history and posts about Illich and his work that Winslow, the site’s author, creates. Most recently he put up a video of Illich that he found in the Internet Archive. The archive describes it: “Ivan Illich, in the 1984 Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture conference titled "What Makes a City: Water and Dreams," explores the human conception of water through history, which leads to the inspiration of his book H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness."

Ivan did not like to be filmed or photographed; he once described photographs to me as a modern version of collecting scalps. Winslow writes, “We're not aware of any other such video showing Illich speaking publicly. A good number of audio recordings of him are available, but not video, as far as we know, probably as a result of Illich's well-known aversion to being recorded. (‘Modern-day pornography,’ he testily described the recording of his ‘conversation’ about de-schooling with an evangelical audience in the 1970s.)”

It is quite ironic to me that after our drive through the flooded areas to say farewell to Lee, with Ivan in our hearts and minds the whole way, that a rare video of Ivan would appear on the subject of water: H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. It appears as two videos below.