Back to school... NOT

The "school year" is starting all across the country. I have grown to resent that term a bit: why should schools get to decide what constitutes a year?! But we are not immune. Washington requires homeschoolers to file a Declaration of Intent to Homeschool at the start of each school year. And I needed to know the first day of school so I would know when Emma would be rejoining us. And of course we enjoy some of the back-to-school sales (10-cent notebooks!!!). But that's about as much attention as we pay to it.

Instead of picking up schedules, finding lockers, and settling into somebody else's agenda, my kids will be off having an experience something like this. That's Peggy Pirro's description of the East Tennessee Unschooled Summer Camp, which took place last month. Not Back to School Camp (NBTSC), the camp MJ and Chloe are headed to on Tuesday, is very similar. These camps really are the happiest place on earth.

My favorite excerpt from Peggy's post:
I will say with complete confidence that not one of the parents at that camp wishes our kids were on another planet. Not one. Is it because our teens are exceptional? Well, sure they're exceptional. They're unschooled. Which means all of the schooly stuff that comes between kids and their parents, between kids and their passions, all that stuff that gets in the way of kids figuring out how to relate honestly with one another, how to respect themselves and others, and how to respond to the needs of their bodies and their minds and their imaginations, all of that stuff that gets mediated by school and by the institutionalized thinking that supports the schooling paradigm, is absent. It isn't even a part of the atmosphere.

My love affair with unschooling is well known to my regular readers, but there is something about the start of the school year that brings it all to the forefront. I am SO HAPPY that my kids aren't caught up in the school machine. I am SO HAPPY that, as much or little as they are aware of the school year, they start it off by going to a place that gives them so much joy, that inspires them, and that provides them with an environment where they can make real connections with people who put their passions first and who treat MJ's and Chloe's dreams as achievable goals.