Interview: Unschooling

Excerpts from an interview with someone who grew up in rural Canada and got her education outside of school as an unschooler. I do not have permission to post this, though I do plan to request permission and don't foresee any problems...

My mom taught college before I was born…After two or three classes of elementary school teachers she became scared because they weren’t inquisitive. She’d ask them why they wanted to teach and they would answer “I love kids”…they lacked a desperate need for something to instill in children…she started reading…and had pretty much made the decision before I came along…She was pretty much into experiential education on all levels, so it was never anything foreign to me.

I remember sitting down with the math book, but I remember long stretches of adventuring or playing with animals…not doing grammar…If you followed me around when I was a kid, it didn’t look like I was doing a lot of learning. Whenever I would try to check in with people who spent six hours a day on this education project, I wasn’t ever behind.

What you’re doing with unschooling is being out in the world…I was out in what you get trained for in school. Why bother preparing when it’s out there waiting and fine having a kid in it?...I think kids can see things through an adult lens much more easily than most adults assume. I never felt like I was especially smart or vivacious, but somehow adults were always impressed that we would have those conversations they always put in the little adult box…Kids are capable of a lot that doesn’t really occur to adults, but at the same time, I lived in a community of 130 people, so it was isolating for me…as a teenager… A bunch of kids had just moved away when I got there, so it was lonely, but I’m not sure spending two hours a day on a bus would have really helped that…

In a lot of things, I was a late developer by school standards…I went through a longing for structure…I ended-up being fascinated by groups defined by uniforms…regimented life was…so foreign and almost forbidden because I knew it was in a lot of ways the antithesis of that was working really well for me…I tried to emulate highly structured life for a couple years but that didn’t work super well for me…[except] I got really good at math…

Interests went in cycles...some of the little ones came from reading a book or seeing a documentary on something or a conversation…but there were these things that seems to cycle back almost on a yearly basis I’d get interested in the same thing again, and realizing that has been really useful for me…in terms of where my life has gone…

The way I tell whether I’m working or learning…is by the ratio of inflow to outflow…When I want a lot of inflow over one area of knowledge…I went all right I’ll see if I can get enough knowledge to make that a work thing, an outflow.

When I was fifteen and [people I knew] started reading The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, they just had their minds blown, that they could…determine their own education. I read the TLH and I wasn’t very impressed because I had already been doing it…it was a pretty clear divide…

I moved, my parents split-up, and my mom got super busy. My mom said, “all right ____ do you want to be the person at the steering wheel of your education or do you want to go to school.” I said “I’ll do it. Can I still ask you stuff?” So I started studying textiles.

I went to Not Back to school camp when I was sixteen and realized how amazing and cool and unique and…full of their own vital energy unschooled teenagers were. I really kicked back and started to think a lot about community and sustainability…

The culture of Not Back to School Camp was pretty intense. The camp itself is a hundred kids out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon for a week…It got to be a lifeline in terms of what it meant to be outside of the system in a lot of ways…it was at a time when young people tend to spend a lot of their time trying to push against the system or visually signify that they are outside of the system but actually being out of it is really trippy and scary…Knowing that there were other people doing it and knowing how they were doing it in terms of [education resources]. The culture very quickly evolved into…deep, honest, emotional sharing…unschooled teenagers tend to be really emotionally mature. I realize that one of the arguments against unschooling is that your not going to have to build up all those coping mechanisms and defenses…that your gonna be more vulnerable…but by bypassing all that shit, you can figure out who you are a lot earlier. A lot of people had really clear picture of themselves…

I was pretty dedicated to the concept of never going to college…I would take on these projects…deciding I would spend a certain amount of time learn to do a specific thing properly…I did that with costuming. When I turned seventeen I decided my next project would be being grown-up…I spent three years making sure I could be a grown-up, that I could support myself without any help and I got an apartment….I pretty much went into that the same way I would do any other kind of educational project. It’s been pretty weird for me watching people leave my college and realize that life stuff is different from school stuff…not teach themselves the same way.

I came to college and I realized that most people were coming off of 12, 13, 14 years of organized education already…One of the biggest things for me was that I was allowed to pursue what I was curious about.
I’m so idealistic and unafraid to be dorky. I think that had the biggest impact on me when I did decide to enter an education system, which was when I was 21 and went to college for the first time. It floored me that there were people being paid to facilitate my education…I didn’t have to go get my own resources, my own mentors and books. All the books I wanted were on one shelf. At the same time, they were being paid with all the sociocultural [implications]…

My freedom to determine what I learned and why and how…I have to wonder why that isn’t something that is considered a right…I feel like a lot of the time that has to do with control and…what permissions we give ourselves as individuals and also as subcultures… The theory behind what you learn and how…I like it to a certain extent, and then it gets really scary because it is about control.

I think there are a lot of certain social checks when exposed to a society that’s trying to train you to be a certain way, and one thing that homeschoolers tend to be protected from is that. At this point, I have a community of people my age who were unschooled that I met through not back to school camp…We tend to have pretty damn strong personalities and be glorious generalists really about anything or be absolutely driven by the shit that’s interesting. I think a lot of people see that lack of being willing to be safe as either over-innocence or awkwardness…I’d like there to be more characters in the world…its something that we all have the capacity for but it gets socialized out of us.

At this point I’m not exactly out as an unschooler most places…I prefer for people to know me so I don’t get type-cast…The interactions aren’t as rich…There are so few real conversations in life…that whole mind-blow open thing I did between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one: I went to NBTS camp; I moved out of home; I realized I was gay; I realized was genderqueer; I moved to another country to live with my girlfriend; I held down jobs; I went to conventional school for the first time…coming into all of those wider cultures...the depth that I know is possible so often isn’t there…that’s why I’ve gotten so protective of my unschooler culture for…usually when I say to someone, “you’re such an unschooler,” to someone it’s as much about how they do social interaction as how they do education.