More Than the Absence of School

Providing children with respect, self-direction, and the opportunity to learn from life, in spite of the way we were parented.

Even before my husband and I got married in 1970, we had decided that our yet-unborn children wouldn’t go to school. He had a poor opinion of schools. He had come to Canada as a non-English-speaking, lederhosen-wearing six-year-old, says he learned to run fast as a result, and was told in high school that he could never handle the academic stream. (He did and retired a few years ago as a senior manager at a college.)

For my part, I’d excelled at school, but had decided that all those lessons I had so carefully memorized in teachers’ college about how to manage students and motivate them to learn were nonsense. (And had quit my teaching job after just four months.) I realized that people learn things better if they are not compelled and coerced; if they are given control over what, when, where, why, and how they learn; and if they are trusted and respected. I realized that until schools get in the way, children do not need to be forced to learn because curiosity about the world and how it works is a natural human trait. I realized that memorizing material for a test (which I had done so well in school) isn’t real learning.

As I began to understand more about how children really learn, I also began to realize the amount of ageism there is in schools, families, and society. And that the prejudice against children translates into disrespect, mistrust, manipulation, coercion, punishment, and sometimes violence. I also realized how the choices we make in our personal and family lives are linked to what happens societally.

My own childhood had been a conventional 1950s one, where my compliance was one of the keys to family happiness. My transgressions now seem small and included forgetting to take out the garbage, “talking back” to my mother, not finishing my dinner, putting my elbows on the table. My mother's punishments ranged from sitting at the table until I’d eaten every cold scrap of food on my plate, forfeiting dessert, and doing without a promised treat, to a swat or spanking by hand or with a hair brush. As I grew into adulthood, I began to notice that her language could be violent in both tone and content, and that she used threats and hints to keep me in line; somebody or other was always deserving of “a good, swift kick” and she’d often say that if she ever caught me doing something or other she’d kill me. Her theory was that it had to hurt in order for the punishment to be a deterrent, but then she’d say, “Oh, stop crying, it’s just your pride that’s hurt.” Sadly, this style of parenting still exists today.

At any rate, propelled by a desire to create a better space for our children than the ones in which we had grown up, my husband and I decided that they would not only be school-free, but unfettered by many of the assumptions people make about children’s subordinate place in the world. We began to create a life that would affirm the rights of all members of our family, rather than just the adults. And with that, I embarked on my life’s work to advocate for children’s right to be raised and educated with respect and without “isms” like ageism, sexism, racism, classism, and consumerism.

In relation to education, I was never comfortable with the word “homeschooling,” because we weren’t schooling and we seldom seemed to be home! Since then, lots of other terms have been invented to describe the way we lived, such as “unschooling,” “radical unschooling,” and “whole life unschooling,” to name a few. But there was so much more about our life that was different from the norm besides the absence of school. So we began to use the term “life learning.”

That seemed to fit best, since our daughters were in control of many other aspects of their lives beyond mere academics. From birth, they decided for themselves when to eat...and later what to eat. They chose what to wear, when to go to sleep, and so on. They were, for the most part, successfully self-regulating, with whatever support they needed from us.

They didn’t have assigned chores or rewards for completing them. The tasks that are part of daily life – cleaning, food preparation, gardening, clothes making, laundry, car maintenance, yard work, and so on – had to be done, of course. But our daughters’ “help” was never required. Consequently, as they each grew to an age at which they became aware of the need for such work, they naturally wanted to participate.

We had few rules and just as few definitions of misbehaviour. Instead, we tried not to force them into situations they didn't yet have the developmental ability handle. They received guidance, not lectures, and mostly when they requested it. They were trusted to recognize their own needs and we endeavoured to provide the environment in which they felt comfortable expressing them. We weren't perfect parents, but we tried to avoid manipulation, to preserve our children's dignity, to model behaviour for them rather than dictating it, and to understand their perspectives.

My mother didn’t understand all of that, although she did eventually admit that the home-based education part was working well. (My father died when I was a teenager.) And, truth be told, I did a poor job of trying to explain our parenting choices to her. Nor did I always handle well the inevitable clashes with her about our philosophy of respect for and trust in children. But, I did try to learn from each instance about how to help our daughters buffer themselves from disrespectful, unjust, or simply unwanted adult intrusion.

One time, the eldest, who was perhaps three and valued independence, was trying to tie her shoelaces. She had her sneakers on the wrong feet and was getting the laces into terrible knots. I was purposely not getting in the way of the learning process until asked for help, which I knew from experience might happen. Otherwise, she'd just move on to something else and try again later. But my take-charge mother could not bear to watch her muddling away at it. So she took over, saying, “You’re doing it all wrong! Here, let me do it for you.” Our daughter burst into tears. I had a flashback to my own childhood and wanted to scream at my mother about all the injustices I remembered, and how incompetent I often felt as a result. Fortunately, I just asked her to back off and offered my brokenhearted daughter a big hug.

In those days, I wrote many rants in my journal, and a lot of emotional survival poetry. But still, I wanted my daughters to know their grandmother in a way that neither their dad nor I had known ours. So, I tried hard not to colour their relationship with my feelings. I also wanted to provide an example of learning and growing by dealing with one’s emotions, rather escaping from them. And so I continued to find ways to create boundaries rather than barriers in my relationship with my mother. As she lay dying 30 years later, I felt most grateful for having been able to preserve the basic thread of family, without repeating the past.

I’m thankful that we chose a way of life, of looking at the world and at children, that’s been about respect, self-direction, and learning from life and throughout life.

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