A homeschooler wrote me that she leaned towards unschooling, but had spurts of
parent-directed learning. Home life was strained during these periods of enforced
academia and the children seemed to learn as well without them, but she still needed the
structure, occasionally, for her peace of mind. Patrick Farenga in the summer issue of
Mothering, described unschooling similarly, as: "allowing your children as much freedom
to learn in the world as you are comfortable with."
In my family, our daily schedule includes short periods when I read aloud. It doesn't
much matter whether it's biography of famous Roman generals or fantasy novels. My
son's attention span for listening to me read without a break has shrunk to almost
nothing. But he will sit at the computer reading for hours, interrupted only by his routine
leg stretching every ten minutes. For, unlike me, the computer doesn't get up to start
something else every time its audience needs a minute to digest information.
Actually, I hadn't realized how much time he spent at the computer. Usually I hear
him rattling the china cupboard in his thinking around the house. But my husband sees
our son poring over the screen. He recently boasted to a visitor at the Minnesota
Homeschooler's Alliance State fair booth about how much our son does read. My
husband didn't say it (because to him reading is reading), but almost all of our son's
reading is on the computer or comic books.
My classical background makes me cringe a little thinking he's not getting enough
"culture." I keep remembering the time in graduate school when I realized that in order to
understand literary criticism I had to be familiar with about a hundred major works of
literature I'd never read. I couldn't understand the references during the quarter, was
frustrated, mocked by colleagues, and graded down for it. Still, there was a simple
solution. The following summer I picked up a copy of the English department's MA
reading list and read all the prose works on it. From then on, I had little problem with
arcane references. So I know--intellectually--that when my son needs to be familiar with
Hirsch's scope and content, he'll be able to.
I know this. I also know that my son's now using the internet for writing (finally,
after years of dictating), learning rules of grammar as he asks me to check his work before
e-mailing it off, learning to summarize in order to make contents sections for his web
pages, and most of all, learning to research as he takes it upon himself to find the answers
to questions other kids have about video games. He continues to learn about home
economy as he decides which projects we should be allocating funds for. Should we pay
thirty dollars for membership in the nearby video store or should we spend the forty
minutes each way walking (physical education/health) to the cheap video store once a
week? Should we put the money in a jar to save for an upgrade to a 28.8 modem or
should we wait even longer until we have the money for a whole new system? He's also
making decisions about how much he wants to work. He decided $3.00 an hour wasn't
enough for handing out pamphlets to strangers. Every Friday he decides whether
vacuuming and emptying trash that day is worth the $4.25 an hour in video-game store
credit. While he's in the store, working or browsing, he chats with its two computer gurus
(socialization/science). He's also willy-nilly learning about therapeutic herbs
(health/science) when he visits me at work at the nutritional supplement store.
I can look at such lists of his activities and accomplishments--gratefully, because they
help me fill out the mandatory school forms--but I still worry. I can listen to how worldly
and knowledgeable he is on affairs of state, but worry because he may one day have to take
the social science section of a standardized achievement test. Math is no longer fun for
him. He resists making calculations about how many hours it will take to earn a video
game if I'm there to figure it out for him. As long as he stays above the thirtieth percentile
on the standardized tests, all's well, but I keep wondering how he can keep it up if he
doesn't do the stuff that's tested in them. So we buy a study guide and train for the test
for a few weeks in April. For a few weeks a year, we work on workbooks.
If only that were all mother's comfort level required. Unfortunately, my comfort level
requires that he spend a few half hour periods a week working on math and Latin. It
wouldn't much matter which subjects I picked. They're not his choice. Most of the time
he sees no immediate utility in them--although he once admitted that Latin helped his
reading and he knows he needs math for a career in computer game-making. But without
immediate purpose it's torture--just like the fetid teeange skin medicine I oblige him to take
that cleared up his incipient acne in less than ten days. I only hope my imposed
schoolwork will be as efficacious.
John Holt said we should live our lives as though the world were the way it should be.
I wish I could, for then I think I'd let my son make all his own academic decisions. I
can't, though, and neither can most of the unschoolers I correspond with. It's an ideal to
strive for, but we're still unschooling when we impose just enough curriculum to keep us
parents comfortable.
© 1996 N.S. Gill. All rights reserved.