34 newyork| march30–april12, 2020
itwasmychildhoodobstinancethat
causedmymothertoembracea moreradi-
cal,hands-offapproachtopedagogy.As
shetellsit,whenI wasinfirst grade,
I wasadvancedat math,andmy teacher
wanted me to skip ahead. When the princi-
pal refused, my parents decided they would
keep me home and “fill my head with facts”
and make me into a prodigy. Workbooks
were purchased and a curriculum devised,
but things didn’t go as planned. It wasn’t
long before I rebelled, adamant that I didn’t
want my mom to be my teacher. “We had
a lovely relationship, and then there was a
power struggle,” my mother recounts. In
the midst of our battle, she noticed an ad
in the local paper for a homeschool group
that met at a nearby park. My mom hoped
they could teach her how to bea good
teacher, but instead she met a woman with
a trunk full of books on child-centered
learning and copies of a magazine called
Growing Without Schooling.
From that day forth, my siblings andI were tasked with teaching ourselves—we
were “unschoolers,” a word we used to dis-
tinguish ourselves from those who dutifully
replicated school at home. Our peers rode
the bus, attended class, took tests,and got
graded;weplayedgames, read books,
madeart,ordidnothingat all.
Mymotherwasa quickstudy where
unschoolingwasconcerned.As a teenager,
shehadat tendeda freeschool for a year in
Canada’s Yukon Territory, a place where the
kids were included in decision-making
alongside the teachers and staff. The fact
that my sister is physically disabled and
would have been cloistered from able-
bodied students in the local school system
also strengthened my parents’ resolve. We
were privileged, to be clear—fortunate
enough to be raised in what I’ve often
described as a nutrient-rich environment
well stocked with food, books, andmusical
instruments. My parents believed learning
was its own reward, something we would
pursue because it was in our nature to do
so, not because of gold stars or demerits.
In the words of John Holt, aformer
elementary-school teacher who coined the
term unschooling, “[T]he human animal is
a learning animal; we like to learn; we need
to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to
be shown how or made to do it.”
That the drive to learn is something that
needs to be unleashed, rather than instilled,
is something you’ll hear over and over fromunschoolers. In our house, the adults
encouraged our interests, even those they
found inscrutable, but did not instruct us
or judge our progress. I spent months
obsessed with making balloon animals.
Not long after, when I was 11, I started an
environmental newsletter, a project that
would become my focus for two years and
that did instill many skills quite relevant to
my current work. In between clip-art illus-
trations, I worked through my sadness and
anger about our society’s mistreatment of
the natural world and commissioned pieces
by my limited circle of friends, including an
article by my middle sister abouther dis-
ability, which had been caused by military-
industrial pollution that seeped into our old
neighborhood’s public water supply. I can’t
help but think a similar endeavormay be
worthwhile for older children today, offer-
ing them a forum to research, reflect on,
and process the issues that are no doubt
weighing heavily on their minds. Unlike
me, they won’t have to do extra chores to
cover the cost of photocopies andpostage
since they can use the internet to freely dis-
tribute the results.
But even as I thrived as an unschooler,
I had doubts. I knew we were charting an
experimental course, and I fretted about
our progress despite my parents’ confident
nonchalance. Would I be able tojoin the
regular world as an adult, or would I be
forever marked an outcast or afailure?
(I eventually went to a public high school,
while my siblings unschooled untilcollege.)
When my youngest sister was 9 and still
not reading, my brother and I both tried to
intervene, offering more formal tutorials to
no avail. All she wanted to do was peruse
vintage dolls on eBay, even thoughshe had
no money to buy them, but she needed help
inputting search terms and deciphering the
descriptions. Within a few weeks, we
couldn’t stand to scroll through any more
results and effectively went on strike. With
no one to assist her, my sister became liter-
ate almost overnight.
That doesn’t mean unschooling is always
easy or that boredom isn’t a challenge, but
unschoolers tend to see boredom as some-
thing to be passed through, a pit stop on the
way to figuring out what fascinates you.
(“When you’re bored, you’re boring,” my
mom would respond whenever we’d
whine.) “There is nothing calamitous about
downtime. Boredom and unstructured
time can be really important,” says L. A.
Kauffman, an author and activist based in
Brooklyn who homeschooled her twins for
12 years. Kauffman suspects one epiphany
that may emerge out of mass school clo-
sures will be about time management. A lot
of time is wasted with busywork at school.13
Or Don’tTeachThemAnything