By Diane Flynn Keith, https://www.homefires.com/
At this stage of my life, I don’t have much respect for schooling – especially high school. I surprise myself sometimes with my irreverence. I just think there’s a whole lot more that young adult people are capable of doing than sitting at a desk all day regurgitating facts and figures from standardized textbooks. In my role as a homeschool coach and mentor, I’m seeing more parents and teens themselves who are fed up with high school. They’re leaving “Lord of the Flies High” to seek sanctuary from the physical, intellectual, and emotional brutality of some schools. I get phone calls and emails all week long from parents inquiring how they can homeschool through the teen years. Inevitably, they want to know what curriculum to use – as if they think they can spoon-feed nonsense to a teenager. I mean, did you ever try to make a toddler eat something they didn’t want to eat? Same thing.
In my opinion, people lack imagination when it comes to homeschooling through the high school years. Even some eclectic homeschoolers or unschoolers atrophy to conventional schooling and standardized curriculum when the high school years loom ahead. That’s because the noise from our culture has brainwashed us to believe that following a standardized curriculum is the only way to get the carrot – to get into a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can make lots of money, so you can buy cool stuff. It’s hard to conceive of what would happen without high school. What did people used to do before high school was compulsory?
High school was not and did not become accessible to the majority of adolescents until the mid-1930s. The Depression Era, starting with the stock market crash in 1929, made jobs scarce for adults. It was a feat of social engineering to take teens out of the labor pool and warehouse them in schools for four years under the pretense of giving them a higher education that would better prepare them for the industrial management jobs of the future.
Does that sound familiar? Aren’t we hearing over and over that teens need high school and college to prepare for the tech jobs of the future? Is that true? It seems awfully suspicious to me when you consider that most of the guys who started the tech firms didn’t complete college. John Taylor Gatto, the author of the book, Weapons of Mass Instruction, has made a study of this and wrote:
“Bill Gates of Microsoft dropped out of college his freshman year. And how was it that from among millions of college-trained techies, Gates decided to hook up with another dropout, Paul Allen, to found Microsoft?
That could have been a million-to-one coincidence, of course, except for the fact that Steve Jobs, the brains behind Apple, dropped out of Reed College after one semester. Was it only an accident that Jobs chose to partner with another dropout, Steve Wozniak, in the founding of Apple?
Michael Dell of Dell Computer didn’t bother with college either. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, said he didn’t have the time to waste on college.
These multi-billionaires, who’ve changed the face of the global society in technology, were all dropouts. What do you make of that?
Ted Turner, founder of CNN was pitched out of college on his ear, flunked out just like Al Gore did at Vanderbilt.
Ray Kroc of McDonald’s told his mother at age 15 that he didn’t have time to waste on high school, dropping out at almost the same age that the female auto-racing phenomenon, Danica Patrick did. Danica dropped out at 16, went to London on her own and signed herself into a course on how to sustain speeds above 200 mph on a racetrack! At 26 she became the first woman in big-time auto-racing history to win a major race.
There is documentation aplenty that institutional schooling has always been about creating a mass of clerks for the prevailing bureaucracy. Not educated people who can think for themselves, but clerks – parts of a social machine. Deep down inside, you knew that, didn’t you?”
We are sold FEAR – fear that if our young adults don’t go to high school and college they’ll have just three choices; become a drug addict, go to prison, or spend their lives asking, “You want fries with that burger?”
It’s just not true. But because we are afraid, we surrender four years of young adult life at its most productive and creative stage to traditional schooling because we think we have no choice and we can’t imagine it any other way.
We make our teens endure four years of forced educational servitude for what amounts to a false promise for many – a pathway to college, career, and bling. As I’m sure some of you can attest, the promise is often not the reality. There are no guarantees. Nevertheless, even if we ourselves, have experienced disappointment and missed opportunities by following the well-worn sheep’s path – we still insist that our own teens line up to be fleeced!
We rely on the only educational model we know for the teen years – high school. The educational sausage factory. We treat the kids’ brains like they’re empty sausage casings – just hog intestines waiting to be filled with whatever we want to cram into them. Chicken feet, pig brains, cow lips and other leftovers go into sausage. It’s the same as cramming our kids’ brains with academic dates, facts and figures like when the Magna Carta was signed, the atomic weight of Radium, or the definition of a dangling participle. It’s all junk. It’s not the real meat of life. It’s filler. It does little to prepare them for the real world.
At the end of four years of enduring mind-numbing curricula that includes English, Math, Science, Social Sciences, Foreign Language, and P.E., the students are issued a diploma saying they’ve satisfactorily completed the credits needed to be proficient. At what? All they had to do was show up and learn enough to pass the test (and then most students promptly forgot it). That’s high school. And in this traditional scenario teens are forced to:
- Do only what they’re told
- Work within artificial timed sequences usually regulated by bells
- Ignore their own interests and talents
- Do meaningless assignments
- Compete for grades rather than personal satisfaction and gratification.
No wonder so many teens are ticked off. The question is, why aren’t all of us angry about this agenda? Why don’t we insist on change? It doesn’t have to be that way. You can do anything you want in unschooling. The sky’s the limit. Your teen can have freedom from state-mandated curriculum, and the liberty to learn what they want, where they want, when they want, with the materials they find. And what’s the worst that could happen? They fail. Failure isn’t final. You learn from every failure – and with that information you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and try again. Maybe you even reinvent yourself. We have a short amount of time on this planet. I think teens should make the most of it – follow their heart’s desire to live the life they want. It’s what we all long for.
My sons did not do traditional high school. We bypassed it altogether. We simply explored their interests. They set personal goals and we implemented plans to achieve their dreams.
- They both learned to fly – one earned a private pilot’s license the other a solo helicopter license by the time they were 17.
- They both explored nature and learned wilderness survival skills.
- One spent a couple of weeks every summer in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, tracking wolf packs for research.
- One went to Costa Rica to help researchers with giant sea turtle hatchlings.
- They both took music lessons and performed in bands. My husband and I schlepped them to every dive rock venue in the San Francisco Bay Area – so they could get the experience of playing a live gig.
- They were both active in Xtreme sports and martial arts.
- One volunteered over 1,000 hours at a local zoo.
- One learned a specialty field of plumbing and worked full time.
- The other worked part-time jobs at retail clothing stores, as a grocery clerk, as a flower delivery boy, and as a barista at Starbucks.
- Both traveled extensively in the U.S. and Europe.
Their days were spent engaged in activities of their choice. When there was a lull, I simply took the time to expose them to new topics and ideas that generated some discussion and action. Unschooling can be chaotic and messy. It’s trial and error. It’s the scientific method at work. Your teen may try things you never considered and you’ll discover it has great educational value. They might decide to take classes at the community college. They might get a job. Or their intellectual curiosity may lead to a series of incredible adventures that practically guarantees their entry into college if that’s a desired goal. Sometimes they’ll figure things out on their own and other times you’ll collaborate. Whatever unfolds in the unschooling process is human life expressing itself unencumbered by false agendas. The journey is what it’s all about – magnificent quantities of time to wonder, engage, and reflect so that your teens can figure out:
- who they are,
- what they’re good at,
- what they want to contribute,
- how to develop the skills they need to achieve their goals
- and ultimately how to be happy.
Unschooling can be challenging – but the return on the investment is a sense of utter fulfillment and infinite joy as your teen becomes the author and editor of his or her own life.
