Un-class photo

It's been six months since LIFE is Good 2010, so I figured it was about time to get my photos off my camera. Here's my favorite, our poor isolated homeschooled kids in their version of a class photo. The age range in this classy, classless group is about 13 to about 20. Click the photo to see it larger. Friends on Facebook can see it with name tags here.

The cons of unschooling

My friend and grown unschooler Idzie has written a post about the downsides of unschooling. She didn't include some cons I would have listed, so those are here as an addendum to her list.

Note that not every family will experience all of these or the ones on Idzie's list. But they represent some distinct themes that we see in the unschooling forums.

You follow your child's lead
This is the core of unschooling, so even newbies are excited about it. But it doesn't take long before something comes up that causes the parents to have a moment of revelation about what it really means, which is you follow your child's lead. Even when you don't particularly like or have interest in where they are headed.

This is happening to me right now in a couple of areas. Most immediately, Chloe is awake even though I got up expecting quiet time alone, and she wants to chat even though I am bursting with ideas for a new blog post. (She is very sleepy, so her bids for my attention are infrequent and short-lived, which is why the post is getting written anyway).

Then there's the college prep. Both girls are suddenly--happily, voluntarily--caught up in all the You Must Be Good Enough rigmarole that is getting into college, and I very much dislike it. I find myself caught up in long involved fantasies of starting a real South Harmon Institute of Technology.

Multiple kids mean a lot of leads to follow
Being an unschooling parent is no walk in the park (unless your kids want to walk in the park). If you have more than one kid, get ready to juggle interests, energy levels, sociabilities, sensibilities, and schedules.

Schedules? We don't need no stinking schedules!
It is entirely possible in an unschooling household of, say, four people for there to exist four very different daily schedules, with each subject to change without notice and often at a time that is awkward due to prior commitments made. Parents of younger children may be able to arrange things to their liking, but not always. We regularly have parents with infants asking what to do when the four-year-old wants to stay up late while mom and baby sleep and isn't really ready for that much alone time.

In a household with older kids, the mixed schedules can really be pretty fun and work amazingly well, but not always. Idzie misses spending time with her nightowl sister. Chloe sleeps through the occasional family event.

Learning happens all the time
Again, this is a core value of unschooling. It's why unschooling works. But it ain't always easy to live by.

One of my favorite bits from one of my favorite books is this from Parenting a Free Child by Rue Kream:

The moon was out, and Rowan and Dagny started to talk about craters on the moon and how you can see them with a telescope, and gee, maybe we should look at them with our telescope? Jon jumped up and started walking towards the house, all the while muttering just loud enough for us to hear, "Damn this unschooling. Kids wanna see the moon, I gotta schlep out the telescope. Put 'em in school, and if they wanna see the moon you just tell 'em to wait 'til they cover it in science class. Stupid idea, keeping these kids home..."

Socialization
There, I admitted it! Socialization is a problem!

Okay, not really. What can be both a joy and a con of unschooling is that the time it takes to get someplace to visit like-minded friends must often be measured in hours instead of minutes. Bright side? We do a lot of traveling and have a lot of houseguests! Down side? We do a lot of traveling and have a lot of houseguests. And since each trip or visit requires prep and recovery time... Well, see below.

Your house is lived in
And I do mean lived in. What we have discovered is that keeping the house tidy when all of its residents go off each day for six to ten hours is MUCH easier than when some number of them are at home all day. Every day. Busily engaged in the business of learning and playing and living their lives.

Whatever your weaknesses as a parent, they will be revealed
I imagine parents whose kids are in school discover their weaknesses as parents, too. But when you are it for your kids, parent and partner and mentor and friend and confidant, you had better be a good it. Unschooling parents tend to do a lot of self-examination and a lot of work on improving their reactions and responsiveness to their kids. It is hard fricking work! The rewards are huge, of course, but it's not for the faint of heart.

A note about cons

I want to respond to something Idzie said in the preface to her list of cons. She said the downsides of unschooling aren't talked about much by unschoolers. I don't think that's entirely true. Every item on her list and mine is discussed regularly by unschoolers. We write about them and we talk about them. It's just that we tend to take them on one at a time, issue by issue, helping a specific parent with a specific instance. And every discussion includes lots of commentary on why we do what we do, and why we think it is so very much worth our time and commitment.

To read more about my personal whys, see some of my previous posts about unschooling.

Ruled by joy

Scene: It is 10:30 p.m. We are flies on the wall of the third-floor corridor of the hotel at an unschooling conference. A wild-eyed boy who bears a charming resemblance to young Harry Potter streaks by, gabbling something about girls. He dances frantically in place as he waits for the elevator to arrive, then dives through the doors as if his very life depends on it. A few minutes later, his pursuers appear. Judging by the noise level, we assume there must be twelve of them, but no, it is only three. "Shh, it's quiet time," warns a mom who is not their mom. The volume comes down for a moment, but we hear it increasing again as the elevator carries them down to the lobby. ("Harry" went up, in case you were wondering.)

Over the last several weeks—perhaps because four unschooling or unschooling-related conferences have taken place in that time—I've been privy to a number of discussions about where one should draw the line between respect for kids and respect for other people's rights and property. I gather (but have no firsthand knowledge) that there was some minor kid-inflicted property damage at the Rethinking Education Conference down in Texas. Some people are outraged by this and blaming unschooling for it.

Even disregarding the fact that RE is not strictly an unschooling conference, I must question their logic. Do they think that 300 schooled kids or, heaven help us, 300 Shriners would have been better behaved at an event like that? *snort*

That said, I don't think it's a bad idea to ponder this issue.

"Unschooling is not unparenting."

This is something that is often said in the unschooling community. "Unschooling parents," the argument continues, "are present with their kids, and involved, and ready to step in."

Uh huh. It's not that I disagree with the people making this argument. I don't. I've seen a lot of unschooling kids and parents in action, and the level of involvement we're talking about is unparalleled.

But.

The whole truth of the matter is that most people walking into an unschooling conference would describe it with words like "chaos" and "running wild" and "irresponsible." At the talks and chats, people are "terribly disrespectful." They bring their kids, they come and go, their cellphones ring and their walkie-talkies beep. In fact, when my grandma expressed interest in coming to LIFE is Good last spring, I felt obliged to warn her off. To someone with her traditional mindset, the conference would probably be terribly unpleasant, and she would probably find a lot of evidence of unparenting.

"You have to see with better eyes than that."

That quote is one of my favorites from The Abyss. Our heroine, Lindsey, is pleading with her husband, Bud, to step away from fear and the reality he has known. She wants him to step into wonder.

And wonder is what I find at an unschooling conference. Because the "chaos" is actually a pretty sophisticated system. It's just not the system that people are used to.

All that motion in the lobby? That's 400+ people moving from point A to point B. All that conversation? That's friendship and support in action. Those kids riding the elevators and running the hallways? That's playtime and socialization. (Remember socialization? A few minutes ago, you were really worried about socialization.) Those kids in the talks and chats? They're there by invitation. And the coming and going? That's all part of an underlying acceptance that our kids' needs come first, even if it means leaving during a speech.

And notice what's missing. The kids aren't fighting. In fact, anger is virtually nonexistent. And that typical scene from the real world—the silent elevator where everyone stares at the numbers—that never happens. There are no strangers here.

And notice what's different. Adults smile at the children. Children smile at the adults. People who cry are comforted. There is lots (LOTS) of hugging. The kids strike up conversations with other kids' parents. The kids strike up conversations with the hotel employees. The kids strike up conversations with the couple who came to this hotel to get away from their kids. The kids strike up conversations with you.

And what's that over there? It's a group of teenagers! They came here voluntarily. They make eye contact. They smile. And then, can you believe it, they take turns with a microphone and share all sorts of details about their lives.

"An old man dies. A young woman lives. A fair trade."
Hartigan (Bruce Willis) in Sin City

I'm sure things get damaged at unschooling conferences. (Zombie makeup can't be easy on the towels, for instance.) I'm sure there are people who are bothered by the noise and who feel (and I agree) that the hotel reservations people really should have warned them. But there are solutions to those problems that do not involve limiting the good stuff.

Why is adding rules and punishments to a kid's life the first, and usually only, solution people come up with? How unimaginative! What limited thinking!

Unschooling parents believe resorting to rules is a creative failure.

Here's an example. I've deliberately chosen a hypothetical situation here, not one I've ever heard about.

Problem: The hotel is unhappy because several towels were stained.
Possible solutions:
- Take up a collection.
- Trade ad space in the conference handbook for some new towels.
- Ask everybody to contribute ragged towels for next year.

The solution does not have to be a new rule, "Zombie makeup is hereby prohibited." In fact, most unschoolers would see replacing a few towels as an incredibly low cost for the fun and learning that some zombie-makeup sessions provide. And by making our kids aware of the problems that come up, by involving our kids in finding solutions to those problems, our kids learn a gazillion times more than they would from any rule.

Prattle

INTRANSITIVE VERB: To talk or chatter idly or meaninglessly; babble or prate.

When I was in high school, my friends and I—A and B students all—would spend our class time writing multiple-page notes to each other. Since our lives were really not very exciting (however dramatic we found them at the time), there tended to be a lot of passages in these notes that lamented the slow passage of time til the end of the period. "Well, there are 20 minutes of class left now... Well, there are 15 minutes of class left now..."

For twelve pages.

Not very scintillating stuff, and yet we all loved writing and receiving those notes. We were addicted to the writing—full of doodles and hand-lettered fonts and lots of talk of crawlstrokes (our code word for guys' behinds)—and we thrived on that constant connection to each other.

Nowadays for me, there's blogging. I'm hooked. And sometimes I want to blog so badly that I'm tempted to get online and tell you all how many minutes until my next meeting at work or until the clothes can come out of the dryer.

I'll spare you.

But it's been interesting to watch my daughters develop their own outlets for communication. Through blogging, fanfiction, e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and MySpace profiles, bulletins, and photo comments, they stretch their creative wings and savor that same feeling of constant connection to their friends. I am lucky enough to get glimpses of this content now and then, just as my mother probably came across the occasional note left in a pocket, but it's not really for me.

And it's not really about the content (although theirs is pretty damned good). It's about that connection. Anyone who can look at what they produce and see "a waste of time" is missing the point.

Scenes from a Mexican restaurant

Table 1 - a booth in a quiet corner of the restaurat
Our actors: a family of four
mom, dad, 2-month-old baby boy in a carrier on the floor, 4yo girl

7:45 p.m.
Mom: "Eat your dinner. How many times do I have to tell you?"
Girl: (mumbles)
Dad: "You're going straight to bed when we get home."
7:50 p.m.
The 4yo is standing on the seat in the corner of the booth.
Her head barely clears the back of the booth.
Mom: "Sit down."
Mom: "I need you to sit down."
Mom: "Eat your dinner."
7:55 p.m.
Mom: "Do you want a mushroom?"
(this was the only thing I heard the mom say that wasn't an order)
8:00 p.m.
Mom: "I told you to sit down."

Table 2 - a 10-top nearby
Our actors: an extended family group
Nearest us are 4 boys about age 10, probably cousins.
They are watched closely by a mom-type.

8:00 p.m. - as they take their seats
Mom-type: "First, let's get out the antibacterial lotion."
8:05 p.m. - as the boys are served some mild salsa, just for them to share
Mom-type: "No double-dipping. Now, here's what you do. You dip the chip, then you turn it. Hold the spot you bit before. Then dip again."

Now let's return to Table 1
Let's imagine what the same girl might have experienced tonight if she'd been born into an unschooling family. She would have been as safe, as polite, as well fed, but there would have been real conversation, laughter, a sense of adventure about the food they were eating. The Mexican waiter might have been invited to share a word or two of Spanish. The dad might have made goofy faces at her across the table. The mom might have stroked her hair or pulled her close for a one-armed hug. The murals on the wall would have been noted, discussed, daydreamed over.

The girl might have been willing to speak above a whisper.

And back to Table 2
Unschooling parents worry about germs, too. We dread having sick kids as much as the next person. But can we get real for just a second here? If one of those boys is germy tonight, there's no avoiding the others coming into contact with said germs. When kids socialize, contact is part of the deal. They wrestle; they have thumb wars; they do high fives, low fives, and on-the-side fives; they do "Oh say, oh playmate" and make cat's cradles; they hug, poke, touch, tickle, tap, and bump. They exchange hats. They hang each other's spoons on their noses.

This is the good stuff, people. This is what a childhood dinner out with your cousins is all about.

Besides, 48% of respondents in a recent poll on MSNBC think the "flip the chip" double-dip is bad, bad, bad. How can nearly half of us be wrong?

Oh, wait, I forgot for a minute what country I live in.

Socialization

As I type this, I have four teenagers in my livingroom. Two are residents, two are guests. They are talking to four people on AIM and two by phone.

So much for the isolation of homeschooling. :-)

The only bright side...

...to this story is that it gave me something to blog about.

Girl, 13, gets detention for hugging two friends

I'm just not sure what this experience is supposed to teach her.

And when I contrast it with our joyous weekend—where we had kids of all ages hugging, holding hands, walking arm in arm, wrestling, tumbling, tickling, and laughing, laughing, laughing—I just want to cry.

Socialization? I prefer our variety, thank you.

I'm speechless (but probably not for long)

Bulletproof backpacks for kids returning to school:
http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_13653.aspx
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1016084

Oh, yeah, school's a good place for socialization.

Socialization

From the American Heritage Dictionary:
socialize
TRANSITIVE VERB:
1. To place under government or group ownership or control. 2. To make fit for companionship with others; make sociable. 3. To convert or adapt to the needs of society.
INTRANSITIVE VERB:
To take part in social activities.

One of the questions homeschoolers hear often is, "But what about socialization?" The question usually encompasses all of the definitions above except the first one (although perhaps that one ought to be examined just a titch). This lumping of definitions means that the question also encompasses a number of assumptions, such as:
(1) School makes kids fit for companionship and for society.
(2) Positive social activities happen for every child in school.
(3) Homeschooled kids are isolated to such an extent that they will not be fit for companionship and society, nor will they get to take part in social activities.

Our societal belief in the first two assumptions is pervasive and virtually unchallenged. In fact, over the last few years I've been struck again and again by how often people accept such societal beliefs without even thinking about them. No logical reasoning is applied. Someone said something to me the other day about "drinking the unschooling Kool-Aid," implying that unschoolers are brainwashed or cultish or perhaps even doomed. Personally, I've seen far more evidence that indicates that we, as a society, have been drinking the school Kool-Aid!

So, I'm here to offer a dose of antidote for the assumptions listed above. I suspect that even listing the assumptions has prompted my readers to see their flaws, but I'll enjoy pointing them out anyway.

(1) School makes kids fit for companionship and for society.

Ahem. Actually, maybe I won't tackle this one myself. Here instead are a few quotes from John Taylor Gatto's "Underground History of American Education."

"By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a form of school technology was up and running in America’s larger cities, one in which children of lower-class customers were psychologically conditioned to obedience under pretext that they were learning reading and counting (which may also have happened). These were the Lancaster schools... They soon spread to every corner of the nation where the problem of an incipient proletariat existed."

"As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do. In such environments, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, and other tension-breakers do the work better than angry words and punishment. Years ago it struck me as more than a little odd that the Prussian government was the patron of Heinrich Pestalozzi, inventor of multicultural fun-and-games psychological elementary schooling, and of Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergarten. It struck me as odd that J.P. Morgan’s partner, Peabody, was instrumental in bringing Prussian schooling to the prostrate South after the Civil War. But after a while I began to see that behind the philanthropy lurked a rational economic purpose."

"In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia. Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: 'The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided.'" (emphasis added)

In other words, American schools were, in fact, designed to socialize kids—into factory workers. The students' fitness as companions has never been a goal.

(2) Positive social activities happen for every child in school.

Oh, I hope no one actually believes this. It simply isn't true. I'll take myself as a case in point. I went to a decent suburban school where there was virtually no violence. I was a successful student. I was reasonably happy in school. I had some fun. I was mildly popular ('though that one is harder to write, because I always felt like an outcast).

I had nightmares every night the week before my 10-year high school reunion.

Imagine what school was actually doing to me if it could have that effect on me ten years later. Imagine what school does to the kids in schools that aren't essentially safe places, to kids who aren't so successful, happy, enaged, and popular.

At my 20-year reunion, one woman wouldn't leave her hotel room because she was overcome with guilt over the way she had bullied her classmates.

And then there's the idea that school is a place where kids can be with their friends. That is also not true! School does not foster social interaction; there are dozens, even hundreds, of rules that prohibit it. Classroom management and school administration is very much about controlling and stifling the natural response of kids who find themselves in the company of other kids—that is, laughing, talking, playing, socializing. (Does the phrase "Stop socializing" sound familiar to anyone? I heard it more than once when I was in school.)

Here's a good example: The Federal Way, Washington, school district is contemplating a ban on iPods and cell phones. District reasoning runs as you might expect, with reference to distractions and text-message cheating, but the ban would cover not only classtime but time between classes and during lunch. Where does their reasoning fit into that? What's really happening is a change-with-the-times expansion of the district's anti-social-interaction ruleset.

Another good example: Classes in MJ and Chloe's elementary school were rewarded for walking the hallways in straight lines with no talking.

(3) Homeschooled kids are isolated to such an extent that they will not be fit for companionship and society, nor will they get to take part in social activities.

Over the years, the media has provided us with a few stories that seemed to support this assumption. There have been some much-publicized cases of child abusers who isolated their children from society and called it homeschooling, and the news stories about these people often carry the implication that these parents' freedom to homeschool gave them the freedom to abuse. Educators line up for the chance to say so on national television. It's bullshit, pure and simple. After all, most abused children are in school. I don't mean their abuse happens there (although it can and too often does), but it happens. School or no school, child abuse happens.

Rather than being about isolating our children, homeschooling is about putting our children into the real world. Instead of being confined to a room with kids their own age, our kids have friends of all ages. Homeschooling families have access to an increasingly vast network of peers, resources, and facilities. I'm sure many homeschooled parents wish their kids were more isolated, because all the running around they do makes for a busy life!

The reality is, homeschooled kids are only as isolated as they want to be.

Our family experience provides a good example. We are a somewhat insulated family, relatively homebound (when we're not out chasing hurricanes), so you might put our routine at the "isolationist" end of the homeschooler social spectrum. Knowing what you know about us and reading the brief history that follows, you might see that it's not very isolationist at all.

In the early days of our unschooling, MJ and Chloe were still in touch with their friends from school, and we had regular get-togethers with them. Those connections dwindled as time went on, and for a couple of years, the girls were perfectly content with the social activities our lifestyle naturally provided (cousins and other relatives, neighbor kids, family friends, Kendo devotees, boat yard and marina workers, sailors, park rangers, etc.). Then last year, MJ expressed an interest in widening her social circle. Chloe didn't much care, but she's gone along for the ride.

I found Hope for Horses, MJ's home away from home, where she has become very close to the adults who run the charity. I can't count the people that involvement has brought into her life, from veterinarians to farriers to musicians to movie makers.

I reached out to the unschooling community and Frank reached out to the cruising community, and we formed friendships with families all over the area. Chloe attended Summerhill School and formed friendships with kids from all over the world. MJ attended the Not Back to School Camp and formed friendships with kids from all over the country. Then we attended the unschooling conference, where a lot of those connections came together in one place (yes, there was even another former Summerhillian there), and discovered what a community of people we have become part of.

And then there's the community we're not part of, the more traditional homeschooling community, with its clubs and co-ops and meetings and potlucks and seminars. It's there, anytime we want it.

The result of this less homogenized socialization is kids who are comfortable talking to people of all ages. Sure, homeschooled kids like hanging out with other kids—and that is definitely a generalization to which there are numerous exceptions—but they don't automatically reject a newly met adult as a potential friend.

Yesterday, at a little gathering of unschoolers that I orchestrated at a park in Monroe, kids sat chatting with us moms at least half the time (with the rest of their time spent running around the tennis court and playground with the other kids in joyful abandon). The kids ranged in age from 12 to 16; nobody's age mattered, nobody was too cool to play, nobody was too young to be included.

Why do people cling to the idea that socialization only happens in school?
I have my own theories about why people cling to this idea so vociferously. There's the self-aggrandizement or self-delusion of the educational establishment. There's the self-protection of adults who suffered in school and can't face the prospect of it having all been for nothing. There's even my conspiracy theory about our government's continuing need for an obedient proletariat. But I'm afraid the real reason is simply that many of us are too well schooled to question our beliefs.

For any who are ready to start questioning, this page provides links to studies that support the ideas in this post:
http://atypicalhomeschool.net/general-information/the-cultural-myth-of-socialization/