Unschooling
(Aus: The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education)
This book is built on the belief that life is wonderful and schools are stifling. It is built on an impassioned belief in freedom. And it is built on the belief that schools do the opposite of what they say they do. They prevent learning and they destroy one’s love of learning.
What the educators apparently haven’t realized yet is that experiential education is a double-edged sword. If you do something to learn it, then what you do, you learn. All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship. In school you shut your notebook when the bell rings. You do not speak unless granted permission. You are guilty until proven innocent, and who will prove you innocent? You are told what to do, think, and say for six hours each day. If your teacher says sit up and pay attention, you had better stiffen your spine and try to get Bobby or Sally or the idea of Spring or the play you’re writing off of your mind. The most constant and thorough thing students in school experience — and learn — is the antithesis of democracy.
Would you continue to enjoy (and improve at) skateboarding or hiking if someone scrutinized your every move, reported to your parents, and acted as if you’d never succeed in life if you didn’t finesse your double kick flip before Friday, or add ten pounds to your backpack and reach the pass by noon?
Obviously, we all need both privacy and respect to enjoy (learn) any activity.
We need to develop a similar respect for the natural processes of human minds.
The most difficult thing most people ever learn to do is talk. Yet, everyone learns it on their own, without a teacher or a briber or a threatener or props or games. In families where adults read to children and read in front of children, leave all kinds of books around for children to look at, and answer their children’s questions about reading, people learn to read with the same pleasure and confidence that accompanies their acquisition of speech. In general, people learn and grow as long as they are not prevented from doing so.
In general, school screens us off from reality—no matter how we define reality.
Is reality in books, in the intellect? School censors more than it reveals. Does reality lurk in raw adventure? In religion? In culture? In friendship and community? In work? School just gets in the way.
Not only does your actual time in school block out learning, but it also prevents you from learning outside of school. It drains your time and energy. After you write your descriptive essay and review your Spanish verbs and it’s time for bed, how are you supposed to think or write the poem you were imagining in history? How are you supposed to find energy to want to go outside and look at the newly sprung buds on the cottonwood tree?
School wouldn’t be nearly so oppressive if it didn’t demand center stage in your life. More times than I can count, I’ve heard adults tell teenagers, with appalling arrogance, that if they don’t start getting their homework in on time, they’ll have to quit drama, or chorale, or hockey, or their job, or sleeping over at friends‘ houses, or whatever it is that they love. Imagine a concert pianist getting ready for a performance. As she throws on her coat, her husband blocks the doorway. „Oh, honey,“ he says, „I’m afraid I can’t let you go. You haven’t prepared next week’s menus, and you’ve left the music room in a mess. Until you get your priorities straight, you’ll just have to stay at home.“
You wouldn’t suggest that you can’t learn without school, if school hadn’t torn your faith in yourself in the first place. Before you went to school, you taught yourself to speak. After you leave school, you will teach yourself how to live on your own and how to find out answers to questions that interest you. Even now, you learn on your own, every time you do anything of your own free will—kicking a soccer ball, falling in love, playing on computers, riding horses, reading books, thinking, disobeying rules.
All the people we call „geniuses“ are men and women who somehow escaped having to put that curious, wondering child in themselves to sleep. Instead, they devoted their lives to equipping that child with the tools and skills it needed to do its playing on an adult level. Albert Einstein was playing, you know. He was able to make great discoveries precisely because he kept alive the originality and delight of a small child exploring its universe for the first time.
If so, we might have had one bonanza extravaganza of an educational system, one in which children were legally guaranteed their basic material needs—shelter and food—until a certain age—sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, whatever—and allowed to freely explore the physical and cultural worlds. Libraries and books could have been accessible to all. Tutors and academic specialists could have been paid by the government to answer people’s questions, to teach them more intensely when a student wanted that. Apprenticeships could have been available, as well as open laboratories staffed by scientists ready to let young people assist in their research.
Children and teenagers could have roamed around sticking their hands into frog ponds, bread dough, and art supplies. They could have invented gadgets, cataloged fossils, and written poetry at will.
