Dissonance

SOFIE
So you really think having two opposing ideas in your head does some kind of damage?

MUMFORD
Sometimes, yeah... pulling in two different directions at once. It makes tiny little tears in our fabric.

SOFIE
Well then, my life has been some kind of huge rip.

From Mumford

Anti-school quotes

What Einstein, Twain, and Forty-eight Other Creative People Had to Say About Schooling

Head over heels

"Life, I really believe, is about falling in love.
With ideas, with stories, with experiences, mistakes, adventures, poetry, imaginations, old books, new books, movies, music, and, of course, people.
Everything that is worthwhile in this world is worth falling in love with,
and I can’t imagine a better way to live one’s life than
to be always head over heels."
~ Anonymous via Idzie via various others

Anti-school quotes

Post your favorite anti-school quote from songs, movies, plays, or books. I'm hoping to re-create a really fun thread we had on unschooling.com back in the day. The purpose is to show that—despite the widespread support that formal schooling receives—people really do know that something is wrong with it.

I'll start:

"I want to run through the halls of my high school, I want to scream at the top of my lungs. I just found out there's no such thing as the real world, just a lie you've got to rise above." ~ John Mayer, "No Such Thing"

Quote of the day

Conventional parenting, which gets accepted as good parenting, is destination oriented. It's getting kids into college. It's stopping the tantrums. It's making sure kids stay away from drugs. It's about getting kids from point A to point B. It's about molding kids into what we think will help them the most.

If there is one thought that will help you understand unschooling and respectful parenting it is this: The primary goal is joyful living. All other goals are secondary.

All decent parents, of course, want their children to be happy. But they assume that sometimes happiness needs to be sacrificed to get something better.

But for unschooling, peaceful parents meeting any goal must also meet the goal of living life more joyfully.

~Joyce Fetteroll
(emphasis mine - and how!)

A must read

The Guy on the Plane by Jeff Sabo

The point is that so many parents never "really think about" the parenting choices they make. They don't always pause to think about what success means, what is necessary and what is arbitrary. They think of restrictions and obstacles, instead of alternatives and possibilities. They focus on the way things were or the way things should be, not on the way things are or the way they could be.

Jeff's post touches on (nails!) one of the things that initially attracted me to unschooling, and that is the "what ifs" that unschooling embraces. What if there is a different way to live and build our lives? What if all those things we've been told are so important are really the least important things in our lives? And what if we gave our kids the opportunity to do things differently?

Keeping it simple

The only experts that truly exist on Unschooling
are our children. They do it perfectly.
~ Heather Burditt

I love this. I wish I'd taken it to heart early in our unschooling, not to disregard all the great advice I received from other unschooling parents but to help quiet the doubts that came up.

What I have to work on

Evidently the universe thinks I need more patience. Or evidently I do. Backing up my own feeling that I didn't exercise enough patience in recent comment discussions on my blog, I got two messages today:

This blog post: I've Walked Many Miles in Your Shoes

and this quote:

The job of the spiritual friend is to insult you. . . . If you really want liberation and you really want freedom, you need people around who are going to be provoking you to show you where it is that you still have work to do.
~ Pema Chödrön
My thanks to Jeff for the post and to Laura for bringing the quote to my attention. Oh, and thanks to the spiritual friends who brought me the message, even if it wasn't quite the message they intended for me to receive.

Taking my chances

"Everything you do in your life is a chance to practice. It is all Dharma. When you do your chores try to be mindful. If you are emptying a spittoon or cleaning a toilet don't feel you are doing it as a favor for anyone else. There is Dharma in emptying spittoons. Don't feel you are practicing only when sitting still cross-legged.

"Some of you have complained that there is not enough time to meditate. Is there enough time to breathe? This is your meditation: mindfulness, naturalness in whatever you do."

~ Ajahn Chah

Quotables

Some quotes from unschoolers, gathered from the Interwebs over the past few days. I love the atmosphere of love and respect and simple compassion that these quotes reveal about the unschooling community.

Heather Burditt: "Phoenix is going to be 2 next month. We have never had any expectations surrounding his sleep... He knows what it means to be tired and when his body has had enough. That is more than most adults can say, even myself sometimes. Forcing him to bed before he is ready, is not worth the lasting negative effects." (from this post)

TJ Phillips: "...there is nothing cuter in the world then when Phoenix walks up to you sleepily, holds up his hands for you to pick him up and says in his little voice 'ni-nite.'" (from a comment on Heather's post above, made profound by the knowledge that *every single time* Phoenix asks to be held, he is)

Ren Allen: "I'm so grateful [my children] can sleep until their bodies are done sleeping, and go to sleep when they choose. I remember the torture of trying to get through a school morning and not being able to fall asleep at night. They've never known that…" (from a comment on Heather's post above)

Trisha Laszlo: "I want my kids to know they can wake me any time they are scared, and I won't be angry." (from a comment on Facebook about Heather's post above)

Jenna Robertson: "Parenting with integrity and respect requires us to involve our children in the conversation. We must be honest and we must not be arbitrary. If we say 'no' then we need a real, fact based reason why. If we can get to the teen years with our parental integrity intact, with our children knowing that we are willing to help them explore the options and answers, that we are not trying to control or manipulate their behavior to make our life easier, and we are truly supportive of the person they are, the better our relationship will be." (from this post)

Jeff Sabo: "And where personal freedom is subjugated, learning is inhibited. In fact, it doesn't become learning at all; it becomes indoctrination. The students have no choice in what they learn, when they learn it, how they are taught it, or by whom. That, my friends, is indoctrination." (from this post)

Jeff Sabo: "Parents who want to be better usually care enough - and have courage enough - to evaluate whether or not they're doing well. Perfection is not the goal; growth in an environment of joy and peace is. And letting go of our need to control is the first step." (from this post)

Shannon Burton: "Oddly, though, this remembering doesn't make me angry, anymore. Instead, it tends to defuse situations where I might react angrily to my own children, because my emerging memories are complete with how i felt at the treatment, and I don't want my children to feel the way I did then...." (from a comment on Facebook)

Frank Maier: "I support you. I love that you are pursuing your dreams, whether that dream is a solo circumnavigation or a desire to be a manga artist. Keep going after whatever it is that you want. Ignore the annoying cawing of the doom-crows. Listen to your own inner voice. It's your life. Live it." (from this post)

Guest house

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!

~ Rumi

Freedom to learn

I have a problem or six with this quote from Ayn Rand:

"The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort."

The entire quote smacks of kids needing something done TO them: teach, develop, equip, train, "has to be taught." It's completely antithetical to how we approach the world. We believe our kids arrived in our lives as complete people. They learn from what they see, do, and experience, just as adults do, but THEY own the process. Our part of it is simply to make their home and lifestyle as kind and fun and resource-rich as we can. What they take from it is completely up to them.

It's that old question about whether there is anything that kids MUST learn. I think the answer is "no," because as soon as you put something on that list, you take away from the kids the unfettered, creative right to determine for themselves what has value in their lives. And learning *that* is the most important learning of all.

Just sing

My elementary school had a well respected choir. The choir director, Miss Brittingham, would hold rehearsals each year, and a select group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders would be chosen as that year's choir. Being in the choir was a Big Deal. Choir members got to be out of class each week for rehearsals, they got to go on field trips to performances, and—best of all—they got to say, "I'm in the choir." I tried out all three years I was eligible and got in once. I was thrilled the year I got in, of course, but what I remember more is the years I didn't. Not making the cut was pretty traumatic. I wasn't good enough.

I took choir classes in middle school and junior high, but the choir directors were uninspiring at best and pompous autocrats at worst. They did not improve my singing ability or my self-esteem, and by the time I got to high school, I was done. I had decided that I was, at best, a mediocre singer and that I should limit myself to singing along with the radio.

(I wasn't really wrong, by the way. I am a mediocre singer: my range is pretty limited, and my ability to sing on key... well, it fluctuates.)

So there I was, going through life as a mediocre singer—or rather, not thinking of myself as a singer at all—crooning rock-n-roll lullabies to my babies, belting out classic rock during my commute, shouting out Christmas carols with daughters and nieces who were quite happy to be off key with me.

And then one day at LIFE is Good 2009, Frank and Jeff and Russ said, "Hey, we're doing 'Gloria' for the talent show, and we need backup chicks."

And just like that, I became a backup singer. I've spent the last year singing. I've performed shows in public. I even sang lead on one song in January and plan to do so again in May. It has been pure, perfectly imperfect fun.

And the really interesting thing is that now, in my 40s, because I am doing it, I am becoming a better singer. I have learned so much about technique and breath control and harmonizing and taking cues from the musicians and my fellow chicks. My range is still limited, but it's enough. And I've discovered that when one is performing live music with a rock-n-roll band, being off key now and then is not the end of the world. Usually nobody notices.

G. K. Chesterton said, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." What he could have added is that by doing, you might find "badly" changing to "better and better," and even if you don't, it can be a helluva good time along the way.

The reason why

The question: Why are you doing that?
The answer: Because it's fun!

Yes, this is a simplistic little Q&A, but it represents a distinct pattern I have noticed in our lives since we started unschooling. Fun is our driving force. We consider it a worthy goal, all by itself, and it leads us to such good things.

Society so often insists that we do things for weighty reasons, for unpleasant reasons, for "good" reasons. What we've found, though, is that living for fun does not mean ignoring responsibilities, or shirking duties, or abandoning productivity. It simply means we enjoy what we do.

TJ Shuflin, an unschooling friend and professional photographer, explained it nicely on Facebook today:

"... if you don't call it a job, it isn't work. If you call it a hobby, it is fun. So I call what I do my 'hobbiness' and I'm getting paid to have fun while not working!"

Conditional vs. unconditional friends

"In the long run, I find that the closest friends in my social network become more unconditional over time. My path of personal growth and exploration naturally weeds out the conditional connections, i.e. the people who are only willing to have me in their reality if I align with their particular prejudices." — Steve Pavlina

From his recent post about social networking

For a friend

"It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been hurting this way: I can change. Perhaps not enough people have noticed my pain and taken it seriously, but I have noticed, and that is enough. My pain doesn’t make me alive, it shuts out countless possibilities by blocking them from my life. I deserve to be healed. I don’t need rescuing; I need help. There is always someone willing to help. I may not understand what is happening to me now, but if I undertake the healing journey, understanding will come." - Deepak Chopra

Good stuff on vaccine safety

From James Moore, columnist on The Huffington Post

"The failure of health institutions in the government to conduct these studies will eventually do great harm to the uptake of vaccines and will likely jeopardize critical herd immunity.

"Private research, in collaboration with universities, is endeavoring to fill this gap and is turning up disturbing results."

Full article

Good stuff on listening and feeling

Wise words from unschooling dad Brad Holcomb

"I now understand that talking interrupts the flow of feeling. If I'm talking about my feelings (talking to myself, or to others), describing them, putting them in words, telling the story of what's going on inside of me, I'm not really FEELING. The talking is an avoidance measure that lessens the [natural flow of feelings]. It increases resistance. I had always defended my blabber blabber as being Good For The Relationship. After all, everyone says that partners need to talk, right? And I was *so* good at talking. I got it from my parents, and their parents, etc. It's in my DNA story... I have words. LOTS of words. The Gift of Gab, some call it.

"My personal breakthrough involved taking a [short-term] personal Vow of Silence... What I found was that I had a 40-year backlog of feelings...

"The more I drop out of words, and the less I force my words onto others against their will, the *better* I can *feel*. That's why, today, I consider 'feeling better' to mean the same thing as 'feeling MORE'."

From Peaceful Partnerships

Good stuff on education

Terry Deary, author of some of the Horrible Histories books, on school

“I get 200 requests a year [to speak in schools] and the answer is no. I detest schools with a passion. I’d rather cut off my left arm and eat it with Marmite than go into a school. And I don’t even like Marmite.

“Schools are an utter waste of young life. Learning things that will never be any use to you. The only reason they are there is to keep kids off the street. They were a Victorian invention. The Industrial Revolution took kids from their families and made the parents work in factories long hours. Then they said, ‘we can’t have these little kids working here.’ So what do we do? Lock them all up in the same room all day and we’ll call it school. I spent hours learning trigonometry, physics, none of which prepared me for life. Relationships, talking to people, managing money, planning your career, how to help someone who has cut their leg open. I have had to learn these things by default.

“There won’t be any schools in 25 years. There will be mentoring. Older people passing their skills on to younger people.”

Full story in the UK Telegraph

Alvin Toffler on the future of education:

Edutopia.org: You've been writing about our educational system for decades. What's the most pressing need in public education right now?

Alvin Toffler: Shut down the public education system.

He then goes on to describe what he thinks schools should look like.

"Like real life, yes! And, like in real life, there is an enormous, enormous bank of knowledge in the community that we can tap into. So, why shouldn't a kid who's interested in mechanical things or engines or technology meet people from the community who do that kind of stuff, and who are excited about what they are doing and where it's going? But at the rate of change [in schools], the actual skills that we teach, or that they learn by themselves, about how to use this gizmo or that gizmo, that's going to be obsolete -- who knows? -- in five years or in five minutes."

Full story on Edutopia

When you act like a teacher,
it's usually because you're afraid to be the student.

—Byron Katie