I watched Waiting for Superman recently.
So many loaded terms. “Success.” “Failure.” “Achievement.” “Learning.” So many experts who know what’s best. So many devils. So many details.
It’s an exasperating film, full of unfounded assumptions, not least of which being the assumption that putting kids in a box is the starting point for all learning.
Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will. It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure. Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college. For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
My daughter was 11 the year we went to our first unschooling conference. It was a big one. There were 300 or so people in attendance. We knew exactly none of them.
We’d been unschooling in our fashion for a couple of years, making the segue from an eclectic, workbook-based homeschool approach to something less schooly and more fun. In our homeschool co-op we’d become the fringe family, the ones who didn’t “do school at all.” (We also didn’t do religion, which pretty much put us into the Satan’s Spawn category, but that’s a subject for another day.)
From an article by Richard Elmore, instructor at the Harvard School of Education, on the modern secondary school:
I wonder, finally, what would happen if we simply opened the doors and let the students go; if we let them walk out of the dim light of the overhead projector into the sunlight; if we let them decide how, or whether, to engage this monolith? Would it be so terrible? Could it be worse than what they are currently experiencing? Would adults look at young people differently if they had to confront their children on the street, rather than locking them away in institutions? Would it force us to say more explicitly what a humane and healthy learning environment might look like? Should discussions of the future of school reform be less about the pet ideas of professional reformers and more about what we’re doing to young people in the institution called school?
“What Would Happen if We Let Them Go?”, Education Week, May 17, 2011
Back from spring ARGH, the twice-yearly unschooler gathering in the mountains of east Tennessee. A smaller group this time, fewer families, less frenetic, with plenty of time and space to wander and think and porch-sit and play.
Making telephone wire jewelry at Spring ARGH
ARGH stands for Autodidactic Radical Gathering of Homeschoolers. Kind of a mouthful. But it makes for a memorable acronym. And memorable gatherings.
We’ve been to five ARGHs so far. I like to imagine that we’ll just keep going, growing old among these people who are our spirit sisters and brothers, our found family.
Returning from a gathering or a conference always entails a period of re-acclimation. I’m tired from the long drive, and sad to leave people with whom I feel such a sense of ease, knowing it will be months before I see them again. Once home, I find myself at loose ends for days, not sure which threads to pick up from my daily life, and which to leave alone. Before I left I made a list of new projects I want to work on, but now I look at the list and can’t muster the energy to begin any of them.
Re-entry takes time. I believe I will give myself some.
A broken link, now fixed: the Kindle version of 101 Reasons has been unavailable for a couple of weeks, due to an oversight on my part. A failure to click one last page after doing an edit left my poor li’l book in Kindle-limbo. I’ve now clicked, so it’s available once again. Still 2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a free app for your pc or ipad or whatever device you want to use from the Kindle store, and you can also find the book at Smashwords in a bunch of formats, including a simple pdf.
Thanks for being patient.
That’s all for now.
