Unschooling: Realizing I Don’t Homeschool After All

We learn what we want to learn. Period. Children can be in school, behind reading level for years, and suddenly, like magic, they catch up. Or they never do. And you know what it depends on? Whether the kid wants to learn to read or not. My very first experience with trying to force my four year old to learn something taught me that I don’t actually want to homeschool. That’s when we began our journey into unschooling.

Children Learn What They Want, When They Want

“Celaya, just try to write the letter. Just try it.” I told her at the living room table one day.

I was convinced that, even though we were homeschooling, even though she is an avid learner and awesomely curious, that I had to teach her how to write all her letters, and it had to be now.

She was four.

She was becoming increasingly frustrated as she drew her C’s, her S’s, and her J’s backwards.

“Oh god,” I thought.

“What if she’s dyslexic?” I worried. “What if she struggles forever? What if I’m not equipped to help her with her learning disabilities?”

Did I mention she was four?

Fortunately, I checked myself, I checked my ego, I laughed, we quit, and we went to have a snack.

The Cycle of Force and Frustration

I have been thinking a lot about this cycle we put ourselves into lately.

“Don’t you think you might want to put your daughter in high school, at least? To have the experience?”

This question came from a student of mine last week during one of our sessions.

My student is sharp as a whip, mature far beyond his fifteen years, and his mother sends him to me because, although he has good grades and does well in school, she thinks he can do better.

“If you would just apply yourself.” She tells him.

“First of all,” I begin in my response to him. “I’m not ‘sending’ my daughter anywhere. If she decides she wants to go to school, we’ll find her a school and she can go.

“Second of all, you hate school!” I teased him, kind of.

“You hate school. You complain about it all the time. The only thing you like is the social part, and my daughters will always have ample social opportunities.”

He laughed.

“Yea, you’re right.”

Life Must Be Hard, Right?

But here’s the thing. We discussed this further, and we both agree: people fall into systems, they struggle through, they are miserable the whole time, and then they insist that others, including their children, fall into the same systems, struggle, and experience misery.

“You’ve got to pay your dues.” We repeat the refrain.

“I went through it too. It’s tough, but you’ll get through it. Just keep trying.”

“I know it sucks. No one ever said life was easy.”

And so many other tropes we’ve played out to death until we all just except them and feed them, spread them, let them grow.

Now we simply cannot imagine a better way, a different way, an easier way.

If it’s not hard, if it doesn’t hurt, if there isn’t misery, then it isn’t worth it, right?

Wrong.

What If There Is Indeed a Better Way?

Why? I want to know.

Why on earth do we insist that it must be hard?

 

I’ll tell you why: because those are the stories we hear, and we reinforce those stories with our belief in them, and we write our own stories according to those beliefs.

Well, I reject the entire framework of that argument.

Life can, and indeed should, be easy.

And I am going to give that to my children.

Unschooling: The New “All Natural”

Celaya and Matilda are growing up surrounded by books, raised by parents who love to read, who love to learn, who are naturally curious.

They are inheriting that love of reading and love of information naturally.

Beyond that one day of struggle, I have not had to force Celaya to learn anything. She looks forward to reading every single day, twice a day. She is an avid reader, and she loves books.

For her birthday, she asked me for a kit called “Organic Science,” which is a plastic skeleton with separate bones that you can take apart and put back together, including smushy organs you can remove and replace, all with the help of a diagram you can follow.

The intestines actually pull apart and can stretch out to their full length relative to the size of the skeleton.

And my daughter is super into it.

She’s learning biology because she wants to, chemistry with slime and glitter and jello because she wants to, reading because she wants to, history because we talk a lot, math because she gets an allowance and has to count how many days left until Avengers: Infinity Wars comes out.

She’s having fun, she’s free, and she’s learning at a rapid pace, completely unaware that she is learning.

It is all natural.

The Benefits Outweigh the Consequences

What were the consequences again? Oh, right, socialization.

So my kid can socialize with the best of them. Just today as we were walking up to Safeway from our house she noticed a kid with her parents hanging by the fountain.

“Mama, can I go make friends with her?”

She does that everywhere.

Everywhere.

The other consequence I’ve heard is the one my student referred to.

She will not understand our systems, our institutions, our way of life the way everyone else experiences it.

And for a second, when she was much younger, I did worry a bit about that.

But then it came to me: that’s actually a good thing.

It will take generations of children who have not been trained into systems to be the ones who reject them altogether and build something new. It will take people who understand freedom and joy at a molecular level to insist on always feeling that way, and to show others just how easy and how possible it really is.

It will take kids who have not had the joy of learning beaten out of them by standardized tests and abused, undervalued, burnt out teachers, by stressful nights of studying for exams they don’t even care about only to forget everything as soon as the test is over. It will take kids who never had to worry about getting into the best college to get the best resume to get the best job to get the biggest house to get the best health plan to get to get to get to get to get.

It will kids who lived a free life and still got everything they wanted because they knew that there was a better way, a happier way, to show others that it is possible, it is fun, and it is available to everyone.

What If?

“So,” you ask, me, stuck in your ways, stuck in your patterns, stuck in your systems, stuck in your confidence that you must be right, that it must be hard, that you are doing the best for your kids that you possibly can to give them every opportunity for a successful life, “what if you are wrong, Shanna? What if you are wrong?”

I will not argue with you.

I have spent many many years stuck in old stories, stuck in systems, doing what I was so sure was right, doing the best I could with what I had. We all are. I believe you you are doing the best you can with what you have.

I believe you.

And really, it is what I am doing now, the best I can with what I’ve got. Just like you.

My only response, ever, to that question, is this:

What if I’m right?