Click here for more “20 Questions Answers from Unschoolers” around the world. If you’d like to answer these questions yourself, please read this post. I welcome all Unschoolers (adult and child) to answer any or all of these questions! E-mail me with your answers and photos! Contact me through the Do Life Right form to get my direct e-mail address.
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DoLifeRight: Tell me a bit about yourself and your family (name, children’s ages, where you live, etc.):
Linda: We are a Victoria, BC, Canada-based family of 4. I am Linda, and I have two daughters (Janet, 20, Fiona, 18), one currently living at home and studying professional photography, the other on her own living and working in the downtown core. I was born and grew up in Victoria, something of a rarity for this Lotus Land community that has attracted migrants from across Canada and around the world –so were both my kids. Dad and I met when he came here with the Canadian military, and we’ve been married 24 years.
DoLifeRight: How long have you homeschooled your children? Do you consider your family an unschooling family? What does this mean for your family?
Linda: Forever. We are definitely unschoolers –although, like many I take issue with the negative reference to school. What we’ve lived all these years has no reference to school at all.
DoLifeRight: Did you plan to homeschool your children before you actually had children? What is your own educational background?
Linda: I had never heard of it, but long before I got to grade 12, I considered the time I spent in school to be a massive waste of time. I was tested in grade 4 to see if I should be skipped a grade and when my placement came back as post-secondary (except math because I had no idea what algebra was), they decided that wasting the next 8 years of my life was completely acceptable. You will be surprised to find I’m still quite angry about this.
DoLifeRight: Why did you decide to not send your children to school?
Linda: Tentatively, I’d decided by the time Janet was 3ish… for sure the day we went for ‘visiting’ the kindergarten. Not only did they serve low-grade cookies she thought were horrible, and apple juice which she’s never liked, but we had 2 three-year-olds who didn’t want to leave. Janet walked around the room pointing to the ‘baby’ toys and the stuff she used to play with when she was little and the things that were the same as her little sister’s… I noticed that we were easily 2 years too late for the introductory curriculum of that year. I had thought kindergarten would be ‘fun’ for her. Ha ha. Because of some other life experiences, I knew that Janet would get to sit and wait –possibly for years– until something happened that introduced her to something she didn’t already know, and in the meantime she’d be marked as ‘a pleasure to have in the classroom’ on the sole grounds that she was well-behaved and quiet.
I decided, eventually, that they were not allowed to attend elementary or secondary school until they were adults… I mean, if they want to attend grade 1 when they’re 22, go for it. Grade 12, too, if that’s what blows their hair back: but they were not allowed to ‘decide’ to attend school. It has been my opinion for a long time that a great problem caused by public education is the implication that anyone knows for you what is best for your future life. I just don’t buy it. In fact, I think it’s indefensible. The travesty of ‘objective’ evaluation, or even objective standards adds to this, but more than anything else, I never trusted that what was actually best for my children –overall or in any given moment– would ever be as important to any teacher, administrator or curriculum writer as it was to me. The stupid rules –not allowed to eat or pee when the body needs to is not only stupid, it’s dangerous– just confirm my suspicions that the system has a real mandate, hidden underneath the one they state, and it’s not ‘how to live as a healthy, thoughtful individual in the future.’
DoLifeRight: What research did you do to make this decision? Were there any books, magazines, or websites you would recommend new parents (or parents who are new to homeschooling) read?
Linda: I read a lot of Holt… most of Ivan Illich’s writing and some of Gatto’s articles. I loved ‘Family Matters’ by David Guterson, although most of it didn’t apply to me. His reminiscences about life as a homeschooling public high school teacher are a scream. I recommend Alfie Kohn’s ‘Homework Myth,’ ‘No Contest’ and ‘Unconditional Parenting’ to every parent, homeschooling or not. ‘No Contest’ is a thesis-length work filled (as he is inclined to) with evidence found in research, but it really pulls apart the whole idea that competition is good for anyone, or relevant to real life in our real world -it blew my mind when I first encountered it.
I knew a collection of homeschooling parents in real life, although none who took unschooling so far over the edge as we ended up… they didn’t lead us to it as much as their children demonstrated that they were normal, healthy active kids, more capable than the average at holding a conversation with an adult, but also eager to. That was a novelty.
DoLifeRight: Did you consider yourself an “Attachment Parent” when your children were infants? How did this (or didn’t this) affect your choice to unschool/homeschool your children?
Linda: Yes, although I didn’t hear the name for it until the kids were older. To me, there is a strange break in logic: when selecting a daycare, go through all these complex and careful steps, checking their philosophy and how they handle the children, etc; when you walk your kid to kindergarten what you’re allowed to know is the teacher’s name and who employs them. So, when I’d spent the last 5.5 years being intimately connected with this little person and on Tuesday in September, I just hand her off to…oh, anyone. Um. No?
But thanks.
DoLifeRight: What specific benefits to your children (or family as a whole) have you actually seen since you became unschoolers/homeschoolers?
Linda: Well, that’s a little hard to say. To me, personally, the advantage of having no reference to school-based education for years and years, with all that handy, obvious evidence in front of my face (with my reading, money-savvy, sociable little children), the major advantage was getting to take apart my personal lifelong indoctrination in ‘high school diplomas are necessary.’ There is so much of that, it’s so insidious, and so pervasive… it took a long time to take it all down and examine it through a skeptical adult brain.
DoLifeRight: Do you have a regular schedule in your life? How does this work with outside commitments and responsibilities?
Linda: Yes… twice a month I lead La Leche League meetings, and twice a month I participate in a public speaking club…
Oh, you mean ‘as a family’
Dh is a sailor, so he comes and goes and has a fair amount of time off between deployments. One real advantage of homeschooling was not having to play along with any schedule outside our house –if dad was home on a Friday, the kids got to be there, too. If he got home at 11:30 at night, we could pick him up and enjoy a few hours with him without worrying about an early schedule the next day. We could drive him to the ship, even if he had to be there at 5:30am, and could be there when the ship came in, even if it was a Tuesday in January.
The kids have been enrolled in a variety of classes, and those were pretty much the only schedule apart from the habit of going to the library on Tuesdays.
DoLifeRight: How important have support groups been for you? Do you have online ones, in person ones, or a mixture? Please list any you want to share.
Linda: I have 2 online crowds: hs-ca@yahoo.com and unschooling_canada@yahoo.com. There is apparently a huge, vibrant homeschooling support network (two, I think) in my area, but as I said: I live where I grew up. My family is here, I have friends from high school here. Having carefully selected my friends and family, they are all respectful and supportive of our choices, so I never needed to find a ‘tribe’ of people who agree I’m doing the right thing. My inlaws don’t comment on it, but they live in Hamilton, so I don’t really know how they feel or what they say to anyone else on the subject.
My online friends have been an excellent source as a community-of-thinkers, and apart from sharing jokes and successes and struggles and books and websites and a loosely-similar lifestyle with our kids, has largely functioned as a ’salon’ for me: it’s a place to think, challenge thinking, explain thinking and delve deeply into parenting, childrearing, pedagogy and human development… I stay for the keen, incisive minds I’ve found there. In my experience, these two email lists are more rigorous and more vibrant than the Mensa lists.
DoLifeRight: What resources do you use for your children’s “educations”? Feel free to comment on the word “education”.
Linda: Our world. We’ve camped, done a little bit of travelling, used the library, the internet and other people… but only inasmuch as we would have anyhow. Both dh and I are avid readers and moderate book collectors, we love to be able to find out (we have more than a handful of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference books on all kinds of bizarre topics) –we love to be able to find out who was in that movie, who did that song, which character it was in Othello, how high the highest lake is… so when we talk about things (which is nearly non-stop) we also end up looking things up. If the kids were in school, we’d still have globes and thesauri and natural things we found on walks (bird skulls and hummingbird feathers and snake skins and interesting rocks…) we’d just have had to clutter up our days with a lot of busywork and someone else’s agenda.
We used to have yearly passes to an excellent natural history and social museum here, as well as some of the more interesting tourist traps (passes for residents are to encourage taking along out of town visitors, but we’d just go every few weeks or months when we felt like it)… we wander through the shops, we visit friends and family. We live.
I often say ‘it looks like an average Saturday’ when people wanted to know what homeschooling was like.
DoLifeRight: How did your friends and families react when you told them your children wouldn’t be going to school? Have their opinions changed over the years?
Linda: My mom was curious and supportive, and now thinks traditional schooling is not only unnecessary but it is often child abuse. My dad was skeptical, but mostly quiet –he’s an observer so he mostly refrained from comment and watched to see. Initially, he was confused why anyone wouldn’t just send their kids to school ‘like everyone else,’ and now wonders why anyone ever did.
I have no idea what my inlaws think.
My friends have always been supportive, some curious, some not. I’m respected by my friends, so they respect my intelligence and the thoughtfulness of my decisions, even if they have no interest in replicating them. I respect them by not proselytizing about homeschooling at them.
DoLifeRight: What have been the benefits (unexpected and expected) to homeschooling?
Linda: An utter lack of sibling rivalry.
Oh, and a total absence of ageism –they don’t care what year their friends were born, although they have excellent memories for birthdays and tend to know. They both still have friends ranging from 12 years younger to 20 years older.
DoLifeRight: How does your family make money? Do you have a job? Full-time or part-time or something in between? Can you tell us about your choices and how you made these decisions?
Mostly, dh is in the navy. I’m a stay-at-home mom who does a few things in addition: I umpire fastpitch softball, I own a small business (parenting coaching, speaking publicly about parenting, and teaching parenting classes), and I write for a variety of paid sources (a local parenting magazine, a local online newsletter, an online magazine site, my own blog). Oh, and I get paid for some of my public speaking.
When Janet was born, I knew I wouldn’t be hiring any replacement parents to raise her. I often said that I didn’t have kids so someone else could mother them. We made a lot of conscious choices for our lifestyle and how we use money and credit, in order for me to stay home… and I know I led that decision, however much it was convenient for dh to come home to dinner already cooked and not really be involved in the childcare (or worry about us being frantically over-burdened by his sea time). I know he also would have just as happily have gone along with the way-more-money option of me working, too.
A few of the lifestyle choices we made: We had the same car for 21 years (buy high quality once and you too can have a car that lasts 2 decades) and only replaced it 4 years ago because it was getting more expensive to run than it was worth. We live within walking distance of dh’s work, so one car was enough. We bought older homes in ‘walking’ neighbourhoods, and all of them had not been updated significantly. We have purchased very few new pieces of furniture ever, have a lot of hand-me-downs of both furniture/appliances and clothes. Mostly, we don’t spend time figuring out ways to replace what we have unless there is a significant need to do so –that it’s old, or out of style or we got it free is never a reason to replace anything. We have had things that died or got lost, stolen or broken that have never been replaced. We keep the heat set low in the winter, and open windows in the summer –we have no a/c, and lower heating costs than friends who have smaller, newer (and better insulated) homes. We line-dry clothes all year ’round, when it’s dry enough. Still, we have acquired a fair amount of debt, knowing that I’ll still be young when our youngest is ‘done’ at home, and my income can more than take care of that –conveniently also right when our mortgages end. We’re fortunate that our housing has always appreciated, and extremely lucky that every time we’ve renewed a mortgage, the interest rates have been lower. We went from having a 30 year mortgage 20 years ago to having less than 4 years left on it.
DoLifeRight: How have *you* personally grown since you started unschooling/homeschooling your children? How has your relationship with your spouse/partner grown?
Linda: This is hard to tease out from ‘the rest of life’ because more than anything else homeschooling has just been ‘life’ –so, what would have been different if we had not homeschooled? Who knows. I know that dh was initially extremely skeptical about the idea and its effectiveness, and now having watched the whole evolution and having worked with hundreds of parents who struggle daily with their kids and the school system, he’s an avid promoter of homeschooling. He went into the military at a young age, convinced that ‘they’ were right and knew what they were doing, and it was best for everyone to just go along with it. I don’t know if it’s the homeschooling or just being married to a total maverick, but that’s worn right off, now.
For me, I don’t know what is different personally or maritally as a result of homeschooling. I know I have altered some fundamental expectations about life… but don’t know that I can attribute that to homeschooling or just growing up or simply being a mother the way I want to be a mother. I do know that no one will ever know my kids the way I do, and I deeply appreciate the gift of being able to be at home with them their whole childhoods. I regret that dh wasn’t able to know them this way and feel that he is culturally ripped-off as a result of the expectation that he will earn a full-time salary… even as I revel in the fact that it freed me to live with my kids every single day.
DoLifeRight: Are you able to find time to have your own hobbies, interests, and friends? Beyond your children (of course), what are your interests?
Linda: Well, for a long time, my children were my interest… but yes: I am not a martyr and I’m too self-involved to ever give up having my own life just because I have children. Of course, a lot of my life changed dramatically –and living what was ultimately AP, it meant either having the kids right there all the time, or just not doing it. So, my interests used to be pursued by reading and whatever I could do with kids in our city… and now as they move on in life, it’s broadened to include fielding invitations to speak at conferences in other cities. I’ve been to lots of conferences, but since they were mostly La Leche League before the kids were 10 or so, they came with me. I’ve been to public speaking conferences in the past 7 years, some were close to home and others further afield, but I went alone. They were allowed to come –they just didn’t want to, so they stayed home with dad. Writing, obviously, doesn’t require me not being home, and I’m an easily-bored eater, so we’ve eaten out a LOT with the kids, in a huge range of ethnic restaurants that Victoria is fortunate to have, and I’ve spent a lot of time cooking a wide range of ingredients and cultural styles… which I can obviously do with kids, too. My business is primarily home-based, so that didn’t require them being away from me, just being capable of not having an emergency for an hour or two while I work.
My friends have changed over the years, but I suspect that would have happened, anyhow. Some friends I still have and see pretty regularly –others have drifted in and out of my life as my kids grew, I grew, they grew –and we grew together or apart. Some went back to work full-time, which is not conducive to indepth friendships with friends with kids, others didn’t have kids, or had them much later than I did, so their lives and mine have little in common now. It’s all good –we have a lot of good friends, some of whom we see regularly and some who we are thrilled to run into briefly less than once a year. Some people who used to be friends I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even recognize today.
DoLifeRight: How do you respond to other people’s questions about the following: completeness of education, socialization, college plans, etc.? Do you give different answers to different people? Why?
Linda: You’ll find the Complete Education right behind the Perpetual Motion Machine, next to the flying monkeys, in the room next to the Tooth Fairy Booth. Yeah… a ‘complete education’ exists. Ha ha. Right. Every education makes compromises: in public school it is ‘what can be done with 30+ students in a box with one teacher.’ With a tutor, it’s the extent of the tutor’s willingness to pursue (or validate) any field of study and the extent of the local resources. With every learner, it’s restricted to the things they are willing to learn –actually willing to absorb, understand and apply: not just what they are presented with or pass tests on.
I usually joke, now, about socialization being easy: just take the kids to the bathroom once a week and beat them up for their lunch money. Make fun of their names and their clothes. Slam them into walls as you pass them. Ignore them for the whole day and pretend you can’t hear or see them. Pressure them to drink homemade wine, or stolen gin. Give them cigarettes.
Initially, questions about socialization offended me: no one ever questioned my ability to teach my kids (or see that they were actually learning without teaching), but somehow ’socializing’ them was out of the realm of possibility. Yeah –how could I act like a bunch of 5 year olds, taunting and teasing one child? How would they ever learn to deal with taunting and teasing if they (like the rest of us) weren’t subjected to it as ‘normal socialization’? Well… it’s not normal –it’s vile, largely illegal and inhumane. What a lovely thing to ‘need’ to learn, in order to be considered ‘normal.’
Regarding college: it’s a business. They like to suggest they are something else, but their marketing (to other students, and for grants and fundraising) is based on the quality of their grads. That’s why it’s hard to get in. Appear to be one of the students who will be a star –in any way– following graduation and they’ll pull you in so fast you’re bootlaces will break. The admissions office is one way in, and they will never publically acknowledge that there is any other way in, but there are many. Auditing courses and standing out in the lecture halls as a keen and engaged learner is one. Taking courses elsewhere (community colleges, even distance-ed programs) with really good marks and transferring in works. Taking up arguing (on the comments pages of journals) with the lead authors of published research is a good one. Signing up for the faculty head’s courses works pretty well. In fact, impressing the faculty head is a pretty good way in, even when the program is ‘full’. Even courses with mandatory attendance have empty seats every single class.
In general, I respond pretty lightheartedly to all but the most obnoxious of questions, and to the obnoxious ones I either ignore entirely or respond with deep sarcasm. I have actually said to someone, ‘no, you’re right, I could never homeschool your kids either.’ It was provoked and I wasn’t feeling charitable that moment… I messed up whole moments of my karma enjoying that quip, and the face it produced on the interrogator
DoLifeRight: If you have more than one child, how do you handle their different interests and desires? If you have one child, how do you handle his/her desires to be with other children? How do you reconcile these interests with your own?
Linda: My kids had tons of opportunities to be with other kids –we have a lot of friends and family with kids, for one thing. The parks are full of them. They did homeschool gymnastics for a while. Took choir and joined softball teams. For a while, one daughter was hanging out at the local high school sewing class. We used to walk up the street to ‘recess’ and lunch at the local elementary a couple of times a week. There were lots of kids in our neighbourhood. They took dance classes at the same studio for more than 8 years.
1. There are kids all over the place, it’s impossible to throw a half-brick without hitting one, and;
2. Kids don’t need other kids, they just need people –all ages. Preferrably upstanding, respectful people who are accepting of a wide range of lifestyles… kinda the opposite of what’s available in bulk at school.
DoLifeRight: What are the biggest issues you are currently having, or have ever had in regards to parenting and/or homeschooling/unschooling?
Linda: All of my issues were personal. My kids learned and lived in mostly contented exploration of the world at their own pace. Whenever I was having a wobbler about something, it always turned out to be because I believed some fantasy about children, about education, about the pace or reality of life with kids. Eventually, I learned that whatever was going on in me was not only no one else’s business, but I had no right to spread it around… so to this day I recommend that parents who are freaking out about… whatever, really… lie on the living room floor, staring at the ceiling, until the feeling passes.
DoLifeRight: Any regrets? We want to hear the good and the bad! This is tfe best way to make informed decisions.
Linda: I wish I’d spent less money on workbooks, textbooks and resources that I didn’t want to use for my education. All the stuff I thought was a good idea for them was never opened, or it was solely used to make book-walled forts. Mostly, I wish I’d figured out earlier on that my kids education was their business, not mine.
Do you have any websites, yahoo lists, etc. that you run or maintain? Please list them here with descriptions.
My company website is www.raisingparents.net and it has information about all kinds of things: why sibling rivalry is optional, why teen suicide is aimed at parents, why ‘getting away’ from kids is no help at all in de-stressing, particularly for a large, demanding family… a lot about trust and connection, and the importance of seeing children as whole, complete people, right from the start. I also have a blog: www.lindaclement.blogspot.com.
DoLifeRight: Any last thoughts or advice for DoLifeRight’s readers?
Linda: Relax. Take it easy. Don’t rush. There is not only lots and lots and lots of time, but children –like all people– know more, about a wider variety of subjects, than you would ever guess. Just because they haven’t shared it with you doesn’t mean they’re not discovering the most important and amazing things in the world. It is unlikely that either they or you will be shot if they don’t know everything by the time they’re 20. I still don’t know everything and so far no one’s killed me for it — I’ve even been gainfully employed, kept a marriage together through thick and thin, avoided bankruptcy, and failed to kill either of my children by accident, so something’s ’sufficient’ to date.
Oh, and there is no behaviour that justifies doing damage to the parent-child relationship. There just isn’t. Every action a parent takes to control a child or what a child does or thinks puts distance between the parent and child. Enough distance and a parent loses the ability to influence the child in healthy ways –sometimes for life. As I pointed out to one of my children during her ’socialization experiment’: you only get to jerk someone around as long as they are willing to be jerked around –you may be in control of that right now and maybe for a long time to come, but when they cut the line, it’s over and there is nothing at all you can do about that. The age of the victim doesn’t enter into it.
Linda
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