What John Holt didn't know

NOTE FROM SANDRA: I was speaking, not writing, so when you get past that stuttery beginning, it might flow.

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One thing that John Holt, when he was writing about Teach Your Own, he, too, had a curriculum in mind. He, too, was thinking, not "Teach a curriculum," but "Do this, instead of school, until school is out, and then you will be done, and it will be cool, you will have dodged the bullet, you will have missed out on the damage of school." That’s worthy all by itself.

But John Holt didn’t have any children. He didn’t actually do what he was writing about people doing. I respect him, I love his books, I am glad he did what he did. But then people come along, after that, and they do it. And then they shared that with each other, and then people did it better than they saw their families do it. Other families say, “Well, I wish I hadn’t done this; it was all right, but oh, I wish we had done this." And so entire lives of young people have been lived now since John Holt died, who didn’t go to school. And what those families discovered, that John Holt could not have known, is that if you live your life receptive to the learning around you, accepting of input, appreciative of the other people around you who know things, and of the resources around you, and trying not to be prejudiced against input like television and videogame and comic book, then what happens is, the parents' learning kicks back in. The parents, who probably had sort of calcified because of school, they soften back up, and they start to want to learn. And so they are learning along with their children, or in a parallel-play kind of way. They might all be in the same place all learning different things, sharing the good parts.

Family Bonding (recorded interview and transcript)
SandraDodd.com/familybonding
photo by Sandra Dodd
of Keith and Holly, 2015

364 Days of Learning

Sandra, from a recorded interview:

When people who are running a school, charging money for people to send their kids there, where they will keep them there every day, like the law says, and they're reporting to the state, like the law says, to then equate themselves with what radical unschoolers are doing, it’s cheatery. They are cheating, They are trying to suggest that they can do in 180 days—whatever 6 times 180 is in hours—that they can take the state requirement of hours and create, in that time, what a radical unschooling family can create in 364 days of learning.

Amy:

My audio wasn’t being recorded properly at this point, but here I said something sort of snarky, like “You mean 363 days, because of 'Learn Nothing Day',” because apparently I don’t know how many days there are in a year, and Sandra said:

Sandra Dodd:

I took out the one already, it would have been 365.

Amy:

And we had a pretty good laugh about that. But eventually we got back to talking about the other benefits of unschooling—things that people don’t necessarily think of as "education."

SandraDodd.com/familybonding

Learn Nothing Day (July 24)

Fly when ready

The words are mine (Sandra Dodd's), but I was speaking rather than writing.

I’ve talked to kids who said they were so scared and stressed when they were 17, because they knew when they turned 18, their parents were going to start charging them rent, or throw them out, or if they didn’t go to the university, they should go to the military—all this huge pressure to get... to get out. You are done now; we're done.

So people hadn’t considered that they could totally avoid that, that that would be a natural offshoot of radical unschooling.

Keith and I did think, early on, we said what we are doing is inoculating our kids against the trait of some, or the fact of some kids leaving with the first person who says “Hey baby, you wanna live with me?” or “Oh, let’s go get a house”, or, you know, that sort of energy of young people luring other young people out and away, to other states, to other places, to dangerous neighborhoods. We said "It’s going to have to be a pretty good offer to beat what they have at home."

And so that becomes a safety factor too. If the children know that they can stay at home, then someone who comes and says, "Hey do you want come do something with me? Do you want to come live with me?"—it better be a good offer.

Recording and transcript: SandraDodd.com/familybonding
photo by Karen James

Learning so many things

When unschooling is equated with alternative school, it can blind people to the possibilities of full-on radical unschooling. No matter how extremely great or different a school is from a traditional school, or the default standard, it is still a school.

Parents who are unschooling as a whole way of life, can discover what no school can find, and the core aspect of it is the family as a base for learning—for learning about family, for learning about relationships, and resources, money, food and sleep, and learning about laughter.

SandraDodd.com/familybonding
photo by Cátia Maciel