Unschooling Is About Context

Posted in DemEd in Real LifeParentingSocial Justice on Mar 19, 2010 - 08:31 AM

When my family decided to give homeschooling a try, we knew we wanted to define our own philosophy and approach. Being huge fans of the unschooling concept (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling) we began our adventure with the assumption that our children's curiosity would drive our inquiry, explorations, and adventures. We even use the term "unschooling" often to describe that to which we are up. This term keeps us grounded in our primary motivation for the endeavor: freedom and success.

But, my wife and I both have brown skin, and come from backgrounds that don't privilege a free-form attitude about freedom and success, even defined simply as having enough food, clothing and a safe place to sleep. America hasn't been too eager to simply grant economic or social access to people of Mexican and African descent, like my wife and me.

We have many friends who are also unschooling families whose attitudes about teaching their little unschoolers to read and solve math problems are very relaxed. As we sit and talk shop with this growing tribe, we often hear this sort of thing: "We don't do math lessons. They'll learn a ton of math just by helping me bake muffins. And when they are ready to read, they'll let us know. We don't care if they wait until they're 12."

Our question is often, "What if they decide they want to go to school but are completely unprepared?" or "What if they never feel like learning to read?" Simple, practical questions that a lot of unschoolers grapple with, right?

But inside we are feeling something very ancient and very potent: Having come from people for whom there simply was no cultural/economic safety net that could deliver any real quality of life, much less survival, the idea of getting around to literacy and numeracy skills when we feel like it simply reeks of--dare I say it---privilege; the sort of privilege our unschooling friends would intellectually reject.

My great-great-great grandfather was murdered for teaching his family to read. That was right here in America; a brutal execution of the enforced illiteracy regime of the era that was accompanied by systematic rape, physical abuse, and family separation. While both my wife and I revel in our sons' freedom to learn what and how they choose, we also ferociously guard the freedoms our ancestors snatched from the gaping maw of oppression, partially by making reading and mathematics their central priorities, rivaling eating and breathing.

As my wife and I walk the hazy, confusing, sometimes mote-like, sometimes fine, line between unschooling and school-prep, we are faced with contradictions. I've reconciled this particular contradiction by exploring the context of my family's freedom. And it turns out, in our freedom's case, whether expressed as unschooling, voting, or buying groceries, context is everything.

Tags for this entry:
unschooling, math, reading, priorities, privilege

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