Posts on unschooling

Since Carey turned me on to The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, by Grace Llewellyn, I've adopted a pretty critical stance toward formal education. (Actually, my husband would probably tell you this is a vast understatement.) Subbing in the Chicago Public Schools for six months and dealing with inane school assignments at the library for three years have not improved my opinion.*

I was very successful in school, and school did benefit me in certain ways, but I cannot say that it was a very happy experience over all or that I think my time couldn't have been spent more productively elsewhere. My real life as a teen was outside of school: Girl Scouts, art classes, camping and camp counseling, church choir, church youth group, GLBTQ youth group. Going to the theatre with my parents, riding bikes and hanging out in the woods with my friends, writing stories in my notebooks, baby-sitting, riding my bike to the library, sketching in the park, learning to cook.

I realize I was very lucky. I grew up in an area where there were lots of outside-of-school opportunities and you didn't need a car to get everywhere. I had smart, supportive parents. And I'm a pretty driven person who does well with self-directed learning and self-discipline. In other words, while unschooling may not be the right thing for every kid in every situation, I think I would have been an ideal candidate.

I think most smart adults become autodidacts once they get their diplomas—taking up a new musical instrument or developing their skill on an old one, learning a new art or craft, studying a foreign language, traveling the world, writing books, making films, reading about everything under the sun. It stretches the definition of autodidactism, but I think taking community center classes should count, too, because they're voluntary and you do most of the work independently. No one is grading you. It's all up to your own interest and self-discipline.

Don't you ever wonder what you could have done if you'd had all those hours you spent in classroom drudgery to pursue your interests? I didn't need formal schooling to become a librarian, writer, or web designer. I might even have found my path sooner without school in the way.

Anyway, enough kvetching about my misspent youth. (It's all grist for the mill, after all.) The other day Collecting Children's Books mentioned a book called The Day I Became an Autodidact and the Advice, Adventures, and Acrimonies That Befell Me Thereafter, by Kendall Hailey. It's the memoir of a teen girl who left formal schooling in high school and pursued autodidactism. Clearly I needed to read it.

I started it today and am already in love. The narrative voice is charmingly old-fashioned (though it was published in 1988), and there's so much humor to it. I've wished it wasn't a library book so I could go through with a highlighter. There are so many gems. Some snippets that have stuck out to me already...

Upon receiving a summer reading list:

I read (rarely skimming) everything school tells me to from the middle of September to the middle of June, but the summer is mine. And being told what to read during summer suddenly made me realize that I don't really like being told what to read during the fall, winter, and spring either. (foreword)

Upon reading about the life of Tolstoy:

It turns out that to be a great literary genius, not only do you not have to go to college, you don't even have to be very good at educating yourself. I always like to begin a new phase of life on a comforting note. (p. 4-5)

Upon finishing Anna Karenina:

His novel has aroused in me many doubts about how we can hope to do good things. I dreamed last night that the only way I wouldn't feel guilty spending my life being a writer would be to cure cancer first—and even then I would still feel a little guilty. (p. 5)

On sleep:

I hate sleep and I hate how much time I spend doing it, but, quite frankly, I think it is the only thing that keeps human beings from going mad: the illusion that life is not one continuous stream, but the more manageable concept of days. A day, contemplated in its entirety, is hard enough to deal with. A life, contemplated in its entirety, is an impossible concept. (p. 10)

I could go on, but you get the picture. I look forward to reading more!

*No offense intended to the teachers out there. I know you do the best you can with what you've got for curriculum, NCLB standards, etc. And there are tons of families out there that could never pull off unschooling, and those kids need you! But is school everything it could/should be? I don't think so.

I chatted with Brian Mandabach at the First Annual Kidlitosphere Conference, and got a brief sneak peek at his debut novel, …Or Not? (Flux, 2007) I was enticed, but had five long weeks to wait before I could get my hands on a copy for real. (Note to library users: put quotation marks around the title, or the Boolean search engines'll get you.) Now I’m back to talk about it.

Just reading the jacket copy, you might think …Or Not? is the story of a confrontation between pinko Cassie and the right-wing jerks at her Colorado middle school. As it turns out, it really isn’t. Misconceptions aside, however, I enjoyed the story all the more for what it is.

Cassie Sullivan feels very deeply; I can think of no better way to put it. She’s smart and introspective and extremely sensitive to the pain in the world, particularly the pain of innocents. That’s why she’s a vegan, and that’s why she opposes America’s war in the Middle East. What sense does it make, she wonders, to counteract the terrorists’ killing of innocents on 9/11 with the killing of innocent families in Afghanistan or Iraq? Unfortunately, voicing her views in school does put her in a spot of trouble with some of her teachers and fellow students.

But as I said, that’s not where the real story lies. It’s just a catalyst for the real conflict: Cassie’s existential crisis. Living in a world filled with people doing such terrible things to each other and the planet, trapped in our routines of endless test-taking and kowtowing to authority, being so small and insignificant in a universe so vast, how can we go on living, day after day? Many days, Cassie wishes she could escape to her family’s rustic cabin in the mountains; some days she wishes she could escape the tethers of life completely.

In Jay Asher’s big debut Thirteen Reasons Why, the main female character finds reasons not to go on living. …Or Not?, in contrast, is about Cassie’s discovery of reasons to live, even when she’s feeling weighed down by the tedium and sorrow of life. It’s about finding the resolve to hang on, even when she feels helpless and hopeless.

I enjoyed and identified with Cassie as a character. You get the impression that she is a true individualist – not going against the grain for the sake of turning heads, but because she’s being true to herself, even when it’s unpopular. She does have a touch of righteous indignation about her, but Mandabach successfully prevents her from being insufferable by surrounding her with characters who respectfully disagree with her, and whom she respects in turn. Cassie’s prickly and wants to be left alone, yet she also longs to be loved. Kirkus' reviewer calls her "spoiled", and it's true that Cassie isn't facing dire circumstances; but as anyone who suffers from depression can tell you, life doesn't need to be dire to be difficult.

The whole time I was reading the school scenes, I wished I could break into the story and give Cassie and her parents a copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn. Cassie seems like a natural candidate for unschooling. She’s mature, intelligent, and driven in her particular areas of interest. She’s tortured by the rote learning, test taking, and stifling atmosphere of her school. Outside the confines of formal schooling, who knows what she might achieve? I can envision her writing books, learning to live sustainably, traveling the world to help people in need and causes she believes in. For that matter, her friend DJ might also be a good candidate for unschooling – not that his mother would ever go for it. He’s obviously remarkably intelligent (he writes a helluva love poem, anyway), yet barely scrapes by in school. He just doesn’t seem to be cut out it.

…Or Not? isn’t perfect. It runs almost 400 pages, which felt slightly long. The school harassment issues, which initially seem like the book’s focal point, drop out of the plot almost entirely, about a third of the way in, only to pop up again at the end as another incendiary event. Meanwhile, it’s suggested that a former friend of Cassie’s is behind the harassment, but the reasons for the end of their friendship and the ex-friend’s apparently extreme antagonism are never explained.

Nonetheless, I found …Or Not? to be a very enjoyable and thoughtful read. I imagine many teens will read Cassie’s story and think, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way about life!” And that by itself will give them hope as they learn to be.