Thanks for putting this concept so clearly into words. I agree that statements like “They’ll read when they’re ready” assumes that children have supportive, privileged surroundings where they absorb hard skills as if by osmosis. As Scott Nine puts it, it’s important to teach young people to access power—that is, to be able to read, write, and do basic math, and to be able to speak the language of those in power.

Adults have a natural authority—look at any tribal culture for examples—but that doesn’t mean they have to be authoritarian. We can find a balance between giving kids autonomy and teaching them how to thrive in the world. We can teach them that in order to have freedom to do as they please throughout their lives, they need to have to know and be able to do certain things.

Khalif, I love ‘ya!  I love your speeches and writings.  This one makes me curious for more. 

We all see things from our own perspective, of course.  I know that I stand in a place of privilege, as a white man not in poverty.  So, you could say that I can’t have the understanding of people in certain oppressed categories, unless you allow for empathy to be an accurate translator, or unless you give credence to my belief in past life memories, which I don’t expect anyone to (and it wouldn’t change the fact that I presently stand in a place of privilege).  OK, there’s the perspective I’m looking from.

So, I had gone to an education symposium that has a strong focus on race, class, and public education.  It is a odd conversation for me take part in.  I understand that there have been many, many people who have fought for the right to be able to go to public schools, and many people today fighting the gentrification of public schools, particularly in urban settings.  Schools get shut down all the time in black and Latino neighborhoods to make way for primarily white charter schools.  ESL students aren’t given the resources they need.  So, I understand that this is a great fight that has gone on for a very long time, and will continue far into the future.  I also look at public schools and see the racism and classism, not only in the accessibility but in the euro-centric, standardized, compulsory system itself.  It’s not just the funding, it is not just the teachers or administration, but the whole system itself.  So, without judgment to those in it, I feel upset to see so many people fighting this fight. 

The ability to have your child homeschooled or private schooled is very tied to class.  I understand people seeing private schools or homeschooling as elitist, and particularly in the case of the majority of private schools, it is definitely true.

I am an unschooling dad.  Coming from the same education philosophy, I’d love to see the same level of community organizing that goes on for public school accessibility go on for providing children with a learning environment that supports self-determination.  That is what my wife and I, with other people, are working on with our ecovillage planning.  This is also something that could be done in any neighborhood, yet we have had a big loss in a connection to community over the years.  With community support, a child, even from a family, in poverty, with two working parents, could grow up with educational freedom.

I’d like to ask you, Khalif, why you see the approach of letting the kids initiate the learning in regards to reading and math as a privileged perspective.  It’s hard to speak for every unschooler or democratic educator, but the perspective I run into on this is not about reading and math not being important, but just that the learning follows the curiosity.  I have never come across a child that does not have interest in reading or math, unless they are told they have to know them, or unless they were put down for not being good at them, and eventually even these kids have the interest after they decompress from a compulsory environment.  I don’t see the spectrum of full child initiation to compulsory curriculum as being a gradient of how important someone sees learning.  I have never seen an education philosophy that ignores math and reading, or puts little importance on these studies.

When I was involved with a democratic school in CT, there was this student who felt self-conscious about being “behind” his public schooled friends in Math.  Because of this, he then had a strong interest in learning more Math.  The following two weeks he spent focusing strongly on Math, and learned what would be two years of Math in those 2 weeks.  This was a Sudbury School.  Sudbury schools have a strong culture of not proposing activities to students, but waiting for them to initiate.  I have differences with this philosophy.  It seems, to me, an overreaction to the worry of adult influence.  I talk to my kids about what I see as necessary topics to learn if they want to reach their goals.  I propose activities, and they tell me if they are interested or not.  Maybe you are speaking of something more internal. . . an inside worry for your kids, rather than a judgment on those who wait for their child to initiate the studies.  I’m curious about what this looks like in your family if one were a fly on your walls.  Is this worry about Math and Reading an issue of waiting for the kids to initiate versus suggesting learning topics to them?  Are your kids required to take Math and Reading?

I’d love to hear you elaborate on the statement, “We can find balance between giving kids autonomy and teaching them how to thrive in the world.”  To me, giving kids autonomy is teaching them how to thrive in the world.  Because it starts with self-determination, it creates self-confidence and self-motivation that translates to any topic or skill.  The discussion of authority and adult influence is a sticky semantic one.  Obviously, adults watch out for the safety of their children, and would force a child out of the street if they were in danger of being hit by a car.  Is forcing a kid to learn Math and Reading authoritarian to you?  Do adults have a “natural authority” to tell them who they must become?  Is the natural influence that a parent has a natural “authority”?

Peace,

Abe

Another context to this discussion is that Math and Reading have been forced on children out of racism and classism.  Public schools were nationalized in this country to indoctrinate the influx of immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century to become “good workers” in the factory and “good citizens”.  It was not out of an intention to empower everyone, and equalize everyone’s access to power through education.  It came out of fascism and was taken up by socialism.

Hey Abe,

I was hoping this post would elicit just such a thoughtful and provocative response.  You asked me a lot of questions, brother.  So I’m not sure I can do justice in my response here.

First of all, my post was written in response to the specific comments from acquaintances referenced in the post itself.  And yes, you are right, I am referring often to an internal process we undergo rather than an outward critique of unschooling at large.

Second of all, I agree that homeschooling is a privilege, and we know it.  Believe me.  But I think if you saw how my family lived in order to make it possible, beautific as it is, it might stretch the definition of privileged, at least in this country.
I don’t believe that child-initiated learning itself is a privileged value.  But I think that relying solely on child-initiated learning as one’s recipe for their freedom and success in America perhaps is.  Let’s discuss this one over tea at AERO this year.

And I, like you, don’t run into unschoolers that believe reading and math are unimportant.  Didn’t mean to indicate that.  But there are those who feel a “survival pressure” about grasping these skills in order to make life work at all, and there are those who have faith that their station in life can bend, flex and provide enough shelter to allow them to learn in their own way and at their own pace.  Not suggesting these are the only two ways of being; merely illustrating the polar nature of two educational impulses in discussion.

As a fly on my wall, you would see a mixture of things.  My sons happen to be very interested in math and reading.  We’ve been able to follow their interest and help them develop concrete skills.  But, being unable to afford our area’s only alternative school, and knowing that if (heaven forbid) our income were to shrink and my wife needed to get a job, our options for our children’s education would be limited to the local public schools.  Well, we could move, right?

Since my family sacrifices my wife’s potential income in order to homeschool, we are unable to save money that would allow us to simply pick up and move.  So we feel compelled, in the most unschoolish way possible, to keep our kids’ reading and math skills at “grade level”, offering them more options if our situation should change.  So teaching those skills at least in some ways in keeping with convention feels compulsory, even to us as parents.

So the definition of “compulsory” is very multi-dimensional.  Depending on your class, you can be “compulsed” by different things.

In the last paragraph of your comment you seem to be reading Melia’s comment for mine.  I’ll let her elaborate on her statements, but your questions written there display some of the more critical cultural differences between how many people of color and how the progressive end of the Euro-American paradigm view adultism. And this split might be at the heart of why free schools and other alternatives have had such a hard time attracting people outside that Euro-American paradigm.

Forcing a child to learn the 3 Rs is, still for many people the world over, just as crucial to that child’s survival as pushing him out of the way of a speeding car.
This “survival pressure” is alive and well, right here in America. 

Again, tea at AERO please.

Peace,
Khalif

Abe, regarding your comment at 1:36 PM:

Great point.  We have to keep this big picture in mind.  But beyond the nefarious plots behind Big Education are legions of people, my father being one, who put bread in their baby’s belly by jumping through those hoops, and could have done so in almost no other way.  It’s complex. 

There’s a baby in that bath water.

Khalif

Khalif,

Thank you for this.  I find that the honest sharing of a parent’s struggles with integrating contrasting belief systems will advance the conversation further than the existing literature on unschooling that tends to be boilerplate “that is bad and this is good.” 

I have been reflecting on precisely what your post is about—cultural differences in beliefs about child-rearing, parental authority and what exactly children are.

I wrote a paper that touches on all that.  Here’s the link:

http://www.realitysandwich.com/initiation_learning_and_failure_regimented_education

The main idea in it is that the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, the obvious and unnoticed fact is the direct link between schooling and tribal initiation.  That has helped me understand a lot of the absurdities and ironies of education and child-raising.

I am currently working on a sequel to that piece.  It seems that its main idea will be that by unschooling children we are removing from their lives a necessary function of adult society that corresponds to a deep developmental need in children.  However perverted and destructive it is, coercive schooling is our version of initiation into full membership in society. 

When we remove kids from it, we have to provide some replacement in their lives in terms of values transmission and, for lack of a more neutral term, “sacredness.”  Adults who practice a totally “secular” version of unschooling may not realize that the kids will simply absorb their late 20th century, liberal, rebellious, allergic to any formalism, value system—*because they need to absorb something*.  There is no such thing as not shaping a child’s worldview if you are an adult in that child’s life.

Coming back to your post, you make a very useful point that treating children as full-fledged persons with total autonomy is a very peculiar cultural trait, basically confined to post-1968 North America and—to a lesser extent—Western Europe. 

It is crucial for us to understand how unusual that attitude is in the history of human societies, and to understand how it came about.  That way, we won’t keep that blind spot about how we influence kids the most when we convince ourselves that we are not influencing them.

Sorry about the long sentences.  I could clean that up but I have to go to work.

I meant the dominant culture of North America and Western Europe.  Obviously the minority cultures in those regions bring a whole other set of concerns to the table and that’s what makes your post so thought-provoking.