We were having visitors and travelling last month and so I missed out on writing an entry for Unschooling Voices #2. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I had anything to write… Ron wrote it all out for me at Atypical Homeschool in a post called Unschooling and Parenting. Like Ron and Andrea, my husband and I were practicing mostly attachment parenting before we knew what it was called. And it was working. AP took several years to seep into our educational method, though, or rather into mine. (My husband has always been sort of an unschooler at heart.)
But I’m writing now, realizing that unschooling has seeped into other areas of my life. Not my parenting, but MY life. Sandra Dodd calls it Deschooling for Parents. “Weird Al says it a different way in “Everything You Know is Wrong,” and Christians say “You must surrender yourself.” Before that Jesus said, “Unless you become as a little child…””
Last year I read tons of popular psychology or self-help books, and productivity manuals, both the office kind and the home kind. OK, I may have gone a bit overboard. It was a way to think through how I saw unschooling and to restrain my desire to start structuring and assigning again. However, it was time well spent in several ways. For one thing, it was interesting how much they accorded with unschooling, how different the life wisdom described in these manuals was from the conventional wisdom about education.
For example, “Kids won’t learn X or Y unless they are forced to.” But the research in the psychology and productivity books leads to the conclusion that force and “shoulds” and “musts” usually backfire. They lower morale, invite passive resistance or subversion, and leach out incentive. Well, I wonder. If this is true of grown-ups, is it more true or less true of children? Or perhaps, equally true?
Aside from whether it was true of my children, I realized that it was true of ME. Why do I go through life listening to internal voices tell me I “should” or “shouldn’t” do this or that? Should is such a weak, carping word. I realized that if I do something because I “should” (or “have-to”), then I barely scrape by as an adequate human being, and if I DON’T do it, then I’m not even that (but at least I’m guiltily happy about not kowtowing to the tyrannic should ). An example of a book that talks about the energy-leaching effect of “shoulds” and “musts” is Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.
Another book I read called The Chilldhood Roots of Adult Happiness talks about how to give children a chance to build joyful adult lives. ” Hallowell argues that kids do not need straight As, a crammed schedule of extracurricular activities or even a traditional family in order to become contented adults. What children really need, according to the author, are unconditional love from someone (not necessarily a parent) and the opportunity to revel in the magic and play of childhood. Kids do not need perfect lives, and learn from adversity and failure, but for the best chance of future happiness, Hallowell says, they need five basic tenets: to feel connected, to play, to practice, attain mastery and receive recognition. It’s easy to get caught up in the “great riptide that sucks kids out of childhood and into an achievement fast lane as early as nursery school,” Hallowell warns. Instead, he says, parents should focus on social/emotional health and happiness, creating an environment in which kids are free to “develop the muscles of confidence, optimism and hope.”
This is so much of what unschooling is about. Not grades or crammed schedules, but a chance to develop relationships, to play; time and space to develop interests and build increasing skills in those areas. One could argue that happiness is not what life ought to be about, but classical and Christian tradition would say that it is precisely what life is about. It is what every human seeks; the question is HOW to best seek and find it. School teaches us that we are preparing ourselves to be “educated”, to be prepared for the work world, to get a good job. But I don’t want my children to seek happiness in status, in searches for love, in material things, even in their intellectual prowess. Sure, these things can help people be happy; but the operative word is “help”. There are lots of rich, powerful, attractive, intelligent people who are not happy at all, which demonstrates pretty conclusively that Aristotle was right when he said these things are not what bring joy. Sandra Dodd’s unschooling article Joy — Rejecting a Pre-Packaged Life discusses this; and it’s as much a life lesson as an unschooling lesson. She writes:
“Here’s a little paradigm shift for you to practice on. Perhaps happiness shouldn’t be the primary goal. Try joy. Try the idea that it might be enJOYable to cook, to set the table, to see your family, rather than the idea that you’ll be happy after dinner’s done and cleaned up. My guess is that such happiness might last a couple of seconds before you look around and see something else between you and happiness. Joy, though, can be ongoing, and can be felt before, during and after the meeting of goals. “
So these unschooling things have been helping me in my own life; not that they were all brand new but that they were affirmed and restated for me through reading about unschooling, and about psychology and philosophy. Many of them are also profoundly about how I understand my Catholic faith.
- Choices and options rather than “have to’s”
- Joy rather than any of its substitutes.
- Relationships, play, mastery and recognition rather than emotional and intellectual dependency, confusion and conditional self-esteem.
- And one more — Unschooling celebrates and enjoys the uniqueness of each child, each family. It celebrates freedom. One more book I read recently, Letters to a Young Catholic, talks about “freedom for excellence“. We learn to be free by practicing freedom. Another way to describe it is as living by principles, not simply by rules.
- Being there rather than always in the past or future or somewhere out in space.
- Trusting rather than coercing (this one is a healthy eating connection) “the Division of Responsibility for feeding: parents are responsible for the what, when, and where of feeding and children are responsible for the how much and whether of eating”
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