Learning as we go…

<p>What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.” ~ John Holt, in “Teach Your Own”</p>

<p>I recently saw this quote on a yahoo list. I haven’t read much by John Holt lately, and it is always so refreshing to me when one of his quotes pops up somewhere. He had such a way of really hearing children and knowing them. </p>

<p>To me, this describes living one’s own life. I remember a quote (as I remember it, and that seems to change just a little everytime I recall it) from a Leo Buscaglia book that I read years and years before my own children. It was a quote from a young woman named Michelle. Not wanting to over dramatize the point, but it was unfortunately actually a suicide note. It read something like this: </p>

<p>“Why did you have to use my life proving who you are?”</p>

<p>I do not know what Michelle meant, but when I read it and to this day it has meant to me the taking over of one’s precious life by another. This had been embedded in my head for years and years and actually has had a major impact on how I have lived my life with my children. The question has been part of the landscape of my conscience.</p>

<p>Am I using your life to prove who I am?</p>

<p>Am I creating you in my own image?</p>

<p>Am I making you into what I need you to be?</p>

<p>Are you the object of my fear, my longing for myself?</p>

<p>I have learned lately that it is up to me to fulfill me. If I want to dig for fossils, I need to go, go,go and do it. If I want to learn to drum, to understand history, to learn about other cultures and create art from them, I need to do it. I need to create my own life and help my children create their own.</p>

<p>Guess I’m in a “why we don’t” mood. I read this phrase recently, and I don’t like the way I am perceiving it. Let me explain what I am perceiving and why I don’t like it, if I can.</p>

<p>I do not see unschooling as something I work toward as if it is a set destination. I see unschooling as a process of moving one’s locus of control away from “schoolthink” (maybe that can be translated as the expertization of america as to how I should raise my children), wherever it may rear its expert head. To me, since unschooling is not the destination that I choose, I do not work toward it, especially if I allow someone else to define that for me. Now, I can break that down further and say even if I define that for myself, maybe, possibly OK, if I choose to define it very loosely. But why? Why bind myself? Why create a destination that controls me?</p>

<p>Here’s the deal. I am all for healthy family systems and healthy communications and healthy freedom…however that meaning needs to evolve for me over time. I am for the least restrictive means possible. I am for a family functioning healthily together as much as possible. I am for my children, my husband and myself.</p>

<p>Hey. That’s my definition of unschooling today, and I still refuse to work toward it. I may welcome life and all those good things that I mentioned and be the best mom and wife and human being I can be in the process. Today that included resting on the sofa with an ice pack and having my children wait on themselves. That’s it.</p>