A Map back from the Island

Now, about the island that I was trying to get to in my earlier post about classical unschooling:

About a year ago, I was getting restless with the kind of unschooling we were doing. So were the kids, though in a different way. It felt like drifting or worse, like we were following the wrong map and getting too far off our course. I finally figured out it was because I was trying to do "unschooling" like school; in other words, trying to do it someone else's way, following various rules I didn't really understand or in some cases agree with.

Of course, there is some value in taking things on faith sometimes, when one is reasonably convinced that it is a good thing to do so. It is one thing to reach beyond one's comfort zone -- that can be very worthwhile. For a long time, unschooling was productive for me in this way. But it's another thing to work against one's own intuition. It's difficult to describe the difference, but it reminds me of the "good pain" you feel during an intense workout, vs the "bad pain" when you are injuring yourself and ought to stop before it gets any worse. You usually recognize the difference if you allow yourself to do so.

I also realized that to my kids, there wasn't such a line between "school" and "not-school" as there was for me. For them, the division was more between what was boring, meaningless, too hard and what was OK, meaningful and challenging and enjoyable. If I am going to respect my own intuitions about "good pain" and "bad pain" I need to pay attention to the same thing in my kids, too. I find that it gives me more freedom to explore and try new things with them if I am prepared to drop it if for some reason it isn't "taking". The things that aren't working can be easily replaced with something else or approached in a different way.

To get past the "schooly" and "unschooly" divisions that were causing the problem, I started trying to picture how I would raise the kids if we somehow got stranded on a deserted island or on a distant planet or something (the Robinson Crusoe Curriculum, or Lost in Space model of education).

If you want to try it, I recommend the exercise. How would you educate if everything else was out of the way? It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices and requirements out there. I notice that the most difficult temptations for me are fear ("You must do this, or else this will happen....") and greed/wishful thinking "If you think through/do/buy this, then everything will turn out great." Other people may have different issues -- perhaps pride ("I want to produce super-kids, because I can"), perhaps false humility ("There is no way I can do that, so I may as well not even try...").

So, now picture the deserted island, with no hope of rescue in the near future. What then?

• Well, our first priority would be gathering, organizing, developing skills and constructing shelter so we had some confidence that we could deal with eventualities. In other words, physical security.
• At the same time, it would be a priority to maintain a level of human dignity in our treatment of each other. ...kindness and justice, acceptance. Both emotional and physical safety and belonging (see Maslow's Hierarchy of needs) are prerequisites for the leisure, the space necessary, for learning to take place. It is hard to learn in unstable, unsafe environments.
  

So now, let's say the basic needs were met, and the bulk of the work was now to do with maintenance and preparation for inevitable contingencies, rather than sheer battle for life. In other words, now we have some leisure, the garden soil for learning. Now what would I do?

I found that question remarkably easy to answer, considering how much I sometimes agonize between this method or that. When it comes to this, I would find it quite natural to:

• Instruct the children in the truths and practices of their faith, through discussion and example.
• Tell them stories: family stories, funny stories, stories from history, stories of heroes, precautionary tales from my own life and from the lore of our culture.... all the stories I could remember or make up. I will include songs in this category too.
  
• I'd teach them how to read and write and cipher, even if there wasn't much immediate purpose to these skills. But once lost to a generation, these skills are extremely hard to regain. Besides, they are worthwhile in themselves for the reflective and categorizing abilities of the mind.
• I'd observe nature with them, and learn alongside them. I'd rely on their observations and judgements on the world around us. I'd tell them about nature in other regions not familiar to them, in order to expand their understanding by comparison and contrast.
• To sum it up, I would want them as conversant as possible with the distant civilization they came from, both its dangers and its treasures, so that if they ever returned, they would have some familiarity with it.
  
• I would learn with them how to adapt to our present conditions -- in this aspect of our life, we would be much more like colleagues.

• If I had books -- say, a Bible -- I would make sure they internalized its contents, hearing my commentaries and over the years developing their own internal commentary.
• If I didn't have books, I would try to use whatever materials were on hand to develop some sort of written culture -- writing down some of the cultural stories and also keeping a written record of what was going on.

• I would try to teach the older children in such a way that they would be able to teach and provide an example for the younger ones.

• As time provided, we would try together to add some beauty and ingenuity to our basic standards of existence.
  
• We would build some traditions and family customs and jokes.... a domestic culture unique to us.
  
• I would model and teach problem-solving and flexible thinking so that when inevitable difficulties arose we would have some resources to deal with them.

None of what I imagined here has anything to do with school, except that "school" is a means by which some of these things are sometimes accomplished. In past days, parents planned the education of their children according to their means, their manner of life, and the abilities of their children. Their goal was two-fold: enculturation into a heritage, and preparation for adult life. Of course, the limitations were many, too. Educational resources were not readily available; survival took the bulk of many peoples' time and energy; and so on. Schooling arrangements often made quite a bit of sense in these circumstances, though these had drawbacks too -- inadequate materials, corporal punishment, prejudice and so on.

Now back from my imaginary deserted island, my family is blessed with a fairly secure existence, and access to countless educational resources. My kids can easily learn things that I don't know; there is everything from other people, to books, to DVDs, to exploration and trial and error. They can learn things I would like them to know, but written or said in the words of the best thinkers of all times. This is the blessing of our society. Education is everywhere. You don't have to go to school to find it.

The downside of course, is that there is plenty of trash and trivia available too. It can obscure what is important. There is also the tendency to specialization, and dependence upon "experts and "entertaining" education, that seems to work against general competence.

That means that it is a priority to ensure that my children acquire the "tools" (as Dorothy Sayer says); to be able to locate, evaluate and properly employ information -- to discard the trash and put the trivial in its proper place, while holding fast to the good and true. We are on a different kind of island, with slightly different dangers, but in many ways the task is the same: to transmit and protect a cultural heritage that is at some risk, in this case both from exploitation and from neglect.

So that was what came up from my journey to the deserted island. It doesn't HAVE to be a deserted island: I could substitute an Irish hedge school, or homeschooling up in the Alaskan bush where I lived for a few years in childhood, or the Israelites by the rivers of Babylon.

That is my form of unschooling. I think it is still unschooling, because it's independent of the modern school assumptions and objectives, though it doesn't spring from the same source as some other models of unschooling I have seen. You can see what it has in common with some classical and Charlotte Mason ideas. It has an element of the subversive, because I agree with Gatto and the hedge school teachers and Karol Wojtyla that education and culture are revolutionary(in a good way) -- educational endeavours ought to be inextricably tied to to freedom and independence and reform. (Heraclitus said you can never step in the same river twice, and I think it's the same thing with civilization -- you need to continually renew and revise your efforts in every new generation)

But education is also an inheritance, tied inextricably to competence and responsibility and tradition. (In a way the river is still the same river, though the water has all changed). Tyrants fear true education and anarchists attack it before almost anything else. It is a call of "Mon Joie~" ... a "freedom for excellence...the power to act freely with excellence and perfection".