Reflections from an Adult Unschooler

Astra Taylor, a writer and filmmaker, has written a personal essay about growing up as an unschooler, and she reflects upon the influence of Growing Without Schooling magazine on her life. It is nice to know that the work me and my colleagues did is appreciated by those who were directly affected by it, and I really like how Astra understands at a deep level how our culture is increasingly against self-directed learning, particularly for children, and how schooling is dominating their lives more now than ever. This has always been a difficult issue to find allies and support for and, as Astra notes in the selections below, it has become nearly impossible in today's womb-to-tomb schooling climate.

Also, like many home- and unschooled children I know, Astra chooses to go to public school and comes out to unschool again. Reading how she navigated high school and college, moving in and out of school as her heart and ambition move her, shows how many different combinations of learning opportunities can be used instead of the linear, factory-style model of school consumption.

When my mom was doing her stint stalking caribou, books about radical education were in wide circulation. First and most famous was A. S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, an account of the legendary antiauthoritarian boarding school in England, which sold more than three million copies between 1960 and 1973—an astounding figure. Then there was Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation (1964), John Holt’s How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967), Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967) and Free Schools (1972), Carl Rogers’s Freedom to Learn (1969), George Dennison’s The Lives of Children (1969), and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1970), to name the most influential. In those early days Growing Without Schooling, the magazine started by Holt and published well into the 1990s, came in a brown paper wrapper, as though the subject matter addressed in its pages might be as objectionable to the postmaster or to nosy neighbors as pornography.

These publications were part of a top-to-bottom movement to devise new philosophies of and forums for learning. First there were the “freedom schools” that had been part of the civil rights movement. Next were the hundreds of “free schools” founded across the country committed to child-centered and democratic education. Finally, there was the widespread campus unrest against the corporate multiversity, beginning at Berkeley, which then became part of the movement against the Vietnam War and culminated in the massive student strikes that shook the nation—coupled with the establishment of open universities, where idealistic students and faculty sought to liberate learning from the tyranny of accreditation.

Today, the prospect of a book like Summerhill—one that paints a sympathetic portrait of kids who refuse to attend classes, do schoolwork, or obey authority—reaching an audience of millions seems absurd. Instead we have well-meaning studies like Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting and The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. These and countless other recent books and articles rightly criticize the current emphasis on testing and tracking, our obsession with “enriching” kids as though they are bags of flour, and our single-minded obsession with climbing to the top of the meritocracy no matter how rigged and meaningless it is to begin with. But in the end they make no rousing or imaginative suggestions of other ways to live and learn. After-school tutoring is OK—just do it in moderation. Ditto for SAT prep classes, sports, and other “extracurricular” activities. These books advise parents to stay on the well-trodden path of standardized schooling, but to travel it a bit slower.

. . . We differed from homeschoolers in essential ways. We weren’t replicating school at home. We had no textbooks, class times, schedules, deadlines, tests, or curricula. Were we fascinated by primates? By rocks? By baseball cards or balloon animals? If so, it was our duty to investigate. My parents eschewed coercion and counted on our curiosity, which they understood to be a most basic human capacity. This is really what the whole debate over compulsory schooling is about. Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not? This trust isn’t always easy to muster. The older I get the more astonished I am that my parents had it in such abundance when most of us mete it out as though it were a scarce resource; whereas I suspect the more we dispense trust to others the more we see how deserving most people are of it. After all, have you ever met anyone who isn’t interested in something? Sometimes other people’s interests aren’t fascinating to you, sure—but people always have interests. Have you ever met someone who was incapable of learning? John Holt, who coined the term unschooling, summarized his view this way: “The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.”

After enduring some higher education Astra discovers the Albany Free School, whose work and efforts we wrote about and supported at GWS for years (as well as many other radical writers and teachers), and writes about her conversations with Mike Guidice, a young teacher there. Mike notes, after some time working at the Free School, “I am just now starting to understand the intersection of my antiauthoritarian politics and the school.” This, I think, is a very important realization for those of us who have been working in this area for so long: the connections we see as obvious, and that drive us to continue our work, are not that clear to young people who did not grow up with the ideas, books, and trust in their abilities to learn that Astra describes.

Indeed, many of those books and ideas, which were very popular in the sixties and seventies, are now out of print and ignored by academics, so they only exist in little enclaves on the Internet and in society. Most important, as Illich and Holt wrote in the early seventies, education is no longer a personal quest but has become a public commodity we are compelled to consume; those who refuse to partake are considered by the education establishment to be uncooperative citizens and losers who, obviously, need more schooling so they can be made to fit into society. Fortunately, in the United States and elsewhere, we can still be conscientious objectors to compulsory education and help our children, and others, escape the negative effects of schooling. But as Astra notes at the end of her essay, the creation of a new community that supports learning and provides resources for all children to learn instead of focusing resources on schools to control and predict learning, seems to be a public policy that is impossible to achieve.

Growing up, I experienced unschooling as a compromise, the more appealing of the two extremes available in Georgia given my family’s modest budget: staying at home and teaching myself, or going to public school and having my spirit crushed. What I really wanted—what I still want, even now, as an adult—is that intellectual community I was looking for in high school and college, but never quite found. I would have loved to commune with other young people and find out what a school of freedom could be like. But for some reason, such a possibility was unthinkable, a wild fantasy—instead, the only option available was to submit to irrational authority six and a half hours a day, five days a week, in a series of cinder-block holding cells. If nothing else, we should pause to wonder why there’s so rarely any middle ground.

To read Astra Taylor’s essay in its entirety, you can go to the magazine website that published it: http://nplusonemag.com/ or you can purchase the essay as a Kindle Single. 

Homeschooling's Past Informs the Present

Peter Bergson founded and operates one of the oldest learning centers for homeschoolers/unschoolers in the US, Open Connections in Newtown Square, PA. Peter also worked as a management and creativity consultant for many years, as well as being the author of books about children, learning, and parenting, so he brings a unique perspective to discussions of how education can change. He was interviewed recently about how and why he and his wife unschooled their kids (who are now adults), the history and context of how Open Connections started, and the influence of John Holt on his work.

Peter Bergson talks about homeschooling on VoiceAmerica.

Peter also wrote about the US education establishment’s current fascination with Finland’s education system and I thought his ideas are worth sharing.

I well remember when, in the early ‘70s, I joined the boatloads of Americans who flocked to the midlands of England to observe firsthand the Leicestershire method in action. The “integrated day school” model featured a basically hands-on pedagogy (learning by doing, including lots of “play”), multiple-aged classrooms (at least three years’ difference in ages), a high student to teacher ratio (often 40 to one) made possible by the high level of engagement of the young people (and thus little need for supervision). A number of American school reformers touted it as the solution to the boredom and lack of initiative in America’s schools, while the British were warning us that it was not directly transferable to the US because our society did not reflect the same level of respect for teachers. The result of our adopting such “open classrooms,” they warned, would be chaos and then backlash—and they were absolutely right.

Then we fell in love with the Japanese model (although we never adopted it).

Then, for some, Reggio Emilia.

Now, the Finnish.

Yawn.

Some other thoughts: International test score comparisons, such as PISA, reflect the selectivity of the test-takers more than anything else. On a similar note, I have read that, if you eliminate the bottom 10% (as I recall) of the US’s test scores, which are almost all from the “disadvantaged” school population, America’s average test scores put us near the top in the world! In other words, the reason that we are around 23 or 24 out of 26 is because, unlike every other country in the pool, we include our “worst” students. Other countries don’t include the bottom of their heaps because that part of their population isn’t even in school, let alone taking the same test.

Now, all of this is merely to debunk the implications drawn from the reported test scores that suggest that America’s schools are getting worse each year.  At the same time, I really couldn’t care less about our test scores, or anyone else’s for that matter. I am much more concerned with the degree of self-direction in the Finnish system, for the teachers as well as students. I don’t see that much value in any system that is dedicated to producing people who are merely better at regurgitation, which is generally what standardized tests measure. As has been said many times by many others, we need to support the growth of logical and creative thinking, the kind that comes so naturally to toddlers. As John Holt wrote, "The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do but how we behave when we don’t know what to do."

What I like about the attention being paid to the Finnish model is that there is no real way to ignore the bigger picture component, which is a belief in (financial) equity, or at least a truer sense of equality of opportunity than what we have in the US. They make the same point as the Occupiers of Wall Street—that the school system reinforces the philosophy of the culture at large with regard to economic justice. The US system reinforces the status quo (or worse, is widening the gap), whereas the Finnish seem to be trying to reduce the variation between rich and poor—not by lowering the bar but by giving more people the resources needed to get up and over it. Only when we Americans truly recognize how our system, with or without standardized testing, keeps the poor in their place will we ever be willing to give any type of genuine reform a real chance at succeeding—whether it’s democratic education, integrated day, or anything else.

Nothing in the World but Youth

The Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, Kent, UK is curating an interesting art exhibit about young people and how they and others view their role in modern society, particularly, as noted in the exhibit catalog's Foreword, youth's "sense of non-conformity and experimentation." The show is entitled "Nothing in the World but Youth." I learned about this show when I was contacted by a curator for permission to reprint an essay of John Holt's, "The Problem of Childhood," from his book Escape from Childhood. Turner has kindly sent me a copy of the catalog and I'm impressed, not just by the fascinating images, but also by the significant selections of text they used.

The exhibit starts with works that JMW Turner painted when he was a teenager and ends with modern works commissioned just for the exhibit. Included with all this are some amazing insights into what it means to be young in a society where school dominates their time and choices and the real world is all too often off limits to youth. The curators capture some significant moments in both art and literature about what it means to be a teenager in the past and present. If you're in Britain I hope you'll be able to visit the exhibit. If not, here are some thought-provoking excerpts from essays in the catalog.

On the creation of adolescence as a stage of development by G. Stanley Hall in 1904 in Kent Baxter's essay (Re)inventing Adolescence:

It [adolescence—PF] was invented for rehabilitative purposes and spoke so well to American society and was so influential that we continue to accept it almost verbatim as truth. If we can very broadly describe ageism as 'discrimination based on age,' then many past and current attitudes toward teens would unequivocally stand guilty as charged. When an overwhelming majority of people persistetly characterizes a group as delinquent in the face of data that indicate otherwise, and when such characterizations become so commonplace as to be accepted without question, clearly there is a problem.

From "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life by Danah Boyd:

While we can talk about changes that are taking place, the long-term implications of being socialized in a culture rooted in networked publics are unknown. Perhaps today's youth will be far better equipped to handle gossip as adults. Perhaps not. What we do know is that today's teens live in a society whose public life is  changing rapidly. Teens need access to these publics—both mediated and unmediated—to mature, but their access is regularly restricted. Yet, this technology and networked publics are not going away. As a society, we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these publics as adults, even if we try to limit their access now. Social network sites have complicated our lives because they have made this rapid shift in public life very visibile. Perhaps instead of trying to stop them or regulate usage, we should learn from what teens are experiencing? They are learning to navigate networked publics; it is in our better interest to figure out how to help them.

"The Problem of Childhood" from Escape from Childhood (1974) by John Holt:

. . . By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a 'child,' or being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good.

I propose instead that the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them . . .

. . . Those who are skeptical about these change may ask, 'Even if we were to admit that the change you propose would bring about a better reality, can you prove it would stay better? Might it not create problems and dangers and evils of its own?' The answer is yes, it would. No state of affairs is permanently perfect. Cures for old evils sooner or later create new ones. The most and best we can do is to try to change and cure what we know is wrong right now and deal with new evils as they come up. Of course, we have to try to use in the future as much of what we have learned in the past as we can. But though we can learn much from experience, we cannot learn everything. We can foresee and perhaps forestall some but not all of the problems that will arise in the future we make.

John Holt: April 14, 1923 to September 14, 1985

Sept. 14 is the anniversary of John Holt’s death. He would have been 88 had he lived, but he died at the young age of 62 from cancer. In honor of his memory, and to support those who act upon John’s ideas and further them, I have revised the www.holtgws.com website. All the issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine are now online and available for free, as well as many articles, video and audio recordings, and photographs that have been out of the public eye since we closed HoltGWS. In the case of the video and audio recordings, some have never been available until now.

If you take the time to explore the site you will discover John’s thoughts about how schools could be better, how unschooling and homeschooling are self-selecting and self-correcting activities that do not need central authorities to dictate content and standards, and how his goal was not to create an insular education movement for children but rather “A life worth living and work worth doing—that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called ‘a better education.’”

At a time when education reform is about technocratic fixes and students are just test scores to be processed by the school machine (there are teachers in schools who resist or ameliorate these issues for their students but they are outnumbered) it can be disheartening for me to remember John. After all, things have gotten worse for students, not better, since John died. Sure, we can point to test scores that may have improved as a result of billions of dollars being spent and regulations that keep children in school longer, but what of their lives? Compared to 1985 when John died, more children live in poverty, have broken homes, do not have health care, and suffer from a lack of community and free play in their lives; children now read less and less for pleasure, are less civically inclined, and they face jobless recoveries while trying to pay usurious college-loan debt.

But John was not a pessimist, and he believed that if shown another way to help children learn and grow some people would choose it. You can read about John’s “Nickel and dime theory of social change” in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling. If you do so, I hope you will continue reading through the site and gain courage and ideas about how you and your children can forge lives worth living, not lives handed to you based on your school test scores.

Varieties of Unschooling Experience

Unschooling is not just for secular, white people with alternative lifestyle demographics. The ideas about learning that John Holt developed over the years speak to people in school and out, to children and adults, to conservatives and liberals; Holt’s work is translated into more than 14 languages now.

However, when we speak about unschooling we are speaking about an idea, not a program, and people need to incorporate ideas into their lives to make them real. Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I recently read A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling by Suzie Andres. She writes:

“Unschooling has been the easiest and most comfortable fit for my family. I knew it was right for us, because it was the educational approach that chased away my fear and spoke to me of love. I could really appreciate St. Theresa’s words when she wrote to her older sister in Story of a Soul, ‘No word of reproach touched touched me as much as did one of your caresses. My nature was such that fear made me recoil; with love not only did I advance, I actually flew.’

“Then I heard an echo of her words when I read John Holt. John, like Therese, is articulate, sure, and passionate. He concludes the revised edition of How Children Learn:

‘Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?’

“He wrote, too, of fear in education, and how ineffective a tool it was. I thought of my own education and agreed. He wrote of children’s natural love of learning and desire to master the world around them. Again, I knew from experience he was right . . . when I read John Holt I felt the same deep peace I felt when I read St. Therese. Their message to me has been essentially one and the same: Replace fear with trust. Since this is exactly what Jesus taught, I knew it was good advice.”

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 While speaking in Chicago I learned about Finding Joy: A Christian’s Journey to an Unschooled Life by Julie Polanco (it is available from lulu.com). Polanco ends her short book with questions and answers; here’s her reply to a criticism unschoolers often get:

Q: This sounds like all you do is have fun all the time. Life isn’t about having fun. How do kids learn that life is rough?

A: Why shouldn’t life be fun? Why shouldn’t people make money doing something that they find and fulfilling? Sure, all of us experience hardship and tragedy at some point in our lives and our children often experience those things in the course of their lives, too. Their best friends move away or begin to exclude them from the group. The family dog dies. Grandma gets sick and is hospitalized. Dad loses his job. If your children don’t experience any of these things, they will feel the pain through someone they know.

Doing service together often exposes them to the realities of life. When they visit a widow or bring a meal to a new mother, when they make Christmas boxes for Samaritan’s Purse, when they bring new clothers and food to the neighbor whose basement flooded, or when the befriend the immigrant family down the street, they will experience all the ups and downs that life has to offer. Learning should not be among those things that are difficult and unpleasant for children. Learning should be joyous, wonderful, and anticipated with fervor and zest.