Re-imagining School
Public Educators & Unschoolers May Have Much in Common
By Eva Swidler
As much as unschoolers dislike the
idea of compulsory schooling, a growing number believe that finding common
ground with progressive school teachers is the key to creating real educational
change.
You’re homeschooling??!! Many of us in the progressive
political world are familiar with the double take inspired by saying that our
kids don’t go to school. Isn’t homeschooling for supporters of the extreme
Right, creationists, militia members, libertarians, child abusers? Doesn’t
homeschooling mean also supporting the privatization of public schools, school
voucher programs and the creation of unequal access to skills, training and
credentials? How can a progressive be a homeschooler?
Well, leaving aside a dissection of the media presentations and sensationalism,
let’s first remember that homeschooling isn’t actually much of a descriptor; at
base, all it really means is that children aren’t going to school. Are there
deeply reactionary homeschoolers who want to protect their children from rubbing
shoulders with Black people? By all means. Are there homeschoolers who are peace
activists, social justice workers or feminists? Yes, actually, there are many of
us. In fact, by some estimates and despite most news stories, the proportion of
homeschoolers who self-identify as members of the Christian Right is about the
same as the proportion in the U.S. population in general. Just as those who send
their kids to school run the gamut from Republicans to communists,
homeschoolers, too, span the political and cultural spectrum. And actually, many
of us homeschoolers consider ourselves radical educators. So while I don’t
pretend to speak for homeschoolers as a body, when I say “we” I really am
referring to a whole world of progressive homeschoolers like me and most readers
of Natural Life – homeschoolers who seem to be beneath the public radar.
Some progressive parents – those who are dissatisfied with not
just the problematic particulars of many contemporary public schools but also
with the current mainstream educational model in general – opt for
unconventional free schools, democratic schools or other kinds of alternative
yet institutional educational options. Or such parents might also instead decide
to homeschool, simply as a fall-back choice preferable to participating in an
alternative private school that is too socially exclusive or too expensive. But
many other progressive parents homeschool as an active choice that we would make
in any social circumstances, not just because we are feeling forced out by the
troubled details of the current educational system.
Just as those who send their kids to school run the gamut from
Republicans to communists, homeschoolers, too, span the political and cultural
spectrum. And actually, many of us homeschoolers consider ourselves radical
educators.
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Unschoolers have fundamental disagreements with the concept of
separating learning from society at large and with the premise of
institutionalizing children, as well as with the idea that compulsory education
produces real learning. But while such disagreements get a lot of press, the
potential overlaps between progressive homeschoolers and progressive public
school teachers in pedagogical approach, social vision and unconditional support
for public educational space are surprisingly large. I know that public school
teachers and progressive homeschooling parents could draw more support and
inspiration from each other, and I’d really like to see that happen. Many
progressive homeschoolers already avidly read educational theorists, peruse
teacher resource and book lists and follow local school politics. And I think
that, in turn, we’d have some insights and possibilities to offer teachers.
(Yes, maybe prime among these offerings is the idea that those students who
aren’t going to flourish in school might just do better if encouraged to go
home.) But to get our offerings heard, we have to distinguish ourselves from the
public image of homeschoolers as ardent Rightists.
Homeschoolers who specifically don’t engage in what is known as
a “school at home” model, (one which faithfully reproduces conventional school
and is most typical of homeschooling political conservatives), are sometimes
variously known as unschoolers, deschoolers or life learners. Sometimes, like
me, they just throw up their hands and don’t call themselves anything at all.
Such homeschoolers draw inspiration from well-known educational theorists such
as Ivan Illich, John Holt, or Frank Smith. They share some of the foundational
assumptions of learner-centered education, place-based education, progressive
education, service learning. They also share many other pedagogical theories
that also circulate among many school teachers: that meaningful and positive
learning is an active process, which must proceed by the choice of the learner,
that real learning starts from the reality of the learner and builds outward,
that learning is an emotional as well as intellectual activity. They reject the
banking theory of education, student sorting and grading and the idea that life
is a competitive race. Staying out of school and, instead, being in the world
(not really “at home” at all) is a logical extension of those understandings and
values.
For all our well-grounded critique of
school, we progressive unschoolers aren't willing to walk away from the kids in
school and leave them to the grim realities of the system until the Grand Day of
School Abolition.
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But for all of our well-grounded critique of school, we
progressive unschoolers also know that school is realistically where the vast
majority of kids are and, most especially, kids from working class households or
families of color whose parents often have multiple jobs to hold down and
insufficient time to be with their families. And we aren’t willing to walk away
from those kids and leave them to the grim realities of the system until that
Grand Day of School Abolition. In fact, public school teachers are well
represented among us homeschoolers, or at least among the parents in our local
support group ranks. (My husband just started his sixth year as a high school
science teacher in the Philadelphia public school system.) We want the schools
that do exist to give all their children as good a life as possible. We want
schools to be nurturing, caring and inclusive. We want them to be exciting,
stimulating and thought-provoking. We want them to confront race and class and
gender, to promote social and ecological justice. And we want them to be free
and public, not accessed by tuition or run by corporate and religious sponsors.
We also support the public educational ventures that model the
non-compulsory offerings we’d like to see expand (and hopefully someday replace
compulsory school): public libraries, community and recreation centers and
classes, park Nature centers. In the recent battles to protect Philadelphia
public library funding, homeschoolers were among the groups that sent the most
letters and showed up at the most rallies. All these hopes for the content
and structure of public schools, as well as other public services, are the
shared visions of unschoolers and progressive school teachers, and I believe
that these points of unity are core.
But our support for public resources and humane schools seems to
be poorly recognized and rarely heard. Many supporters of public schools instead
fear homeschooling is a Trojan horse, leading the way for vouchers,
privatization or other forms of undercutting a general cultural commitment to
freely available education; for them homeschooling is also a racist venture
which will end up denying the social provision of education to people of color.
Unfortunately, there are doubtless homeschoolers whose views fit these
descriptions. And perhaps those of us whose views don’t fit them haven’t lived
up to our responsibility to be vocal and present in the public discussions ,
clearly identified as dissenting homeschoolers.
Many progressive homeschoolers, on the other hand, counter that
the history of public schooling is not a benign history of social equalizing.
Instead, they see the invention of compulsory schooling as an elite strategy to
socialize a restless populace to dutiful national loyalty. So while we may
advocate for public schools as they currently exist to confront the power
inequities and injustices of society, we prefer to reject the premise of the
system entirely as our first choice. As the Black homeschooling author and radio
show co-producer (Radio Free School) Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko says, “But why not
consider raising them for an entirely different paradigm? The master’s tools
will never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lourde wrote.”
Many progressive homeschoolers believe that the history of public
schooling is not a benign history of social equalizing. Instead, they see the
invention of compulsory schooling as an elite strategy to socialize a restless
populace to dutiful national loyalty.
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Public school advocates frequently take on the mantle of alleged
protectors of opportunity for the children of poor and oppressed communities.
They justify their dismissal of – or even attacks on – homeschooling as a
necessary part of advocating for their underserved students; if homeschooling
flourishes, the reasoning goes, then education for students in exploited
communities will inevitably suffer. But a review of the assorted websites and
list serves of African American, Native American or Latino homeschoolers shows
an intense consciousness of racial dynamics and a highly politically-considered
decision to opt out of public schooling rather than reform it.
Certainly, homeschooling parents want their children to have the
tools they need to make their way in a society that values only certain skills
and only certain dialects. Parents from oppressed social groups live this social
reality every day and don’t need educational authorities to point out these
harsh facts to them. However, they also know that many of their children will be
permanently turned off from acquiring exactly these skills by moving through the
compulsory educational system. Public schools will not present standard English,
for instance, as a useful dialect to be mastered for strategic reasons, but
rather as the “right” way to talk instead of students’ own “defective” speech.
Telling children that they must go to school to really learn, because their own
culture isn’t good enough to teach them, elicits the natural and devastating
classic response from so many of the most lively children: “Then I won’t learn
from you.”
On the most practical of levels, protecting children from these
negative side effects of cultural self-defense motivates many parents to
homeschool. In a positive way, however, many parents approach homeschooling as a
way to pass on their own values, history and community in a commodified and
institutionalized world that leaves increasingly little space for independent
social networks and discussion. Homeschooling affirms the worth of what children
learn in the bosom of their communities and their families, however defined. It
rejects the governmental claim of the culturally deprived, linguistically
impoverished Black community or the portrayal of “cultures of poverty” as the
main enemy of success for the poor. Homeschooling is the ultimate in cultural
self-determination, that often touted but poorly observed human right. Keeping
our children out of governmental institutions can be a way of keeping them in
our community’s cultural commons.
Homeschooling is the ultimate in cultural self-determination, that
often touted but poorly observed human right. Keeping our children out of
governmental institutions can be a way of keeping them in our community’s
cultural commons.
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But here we approach a crucial fork in the road. Whoever we are,
rejecting the government (and increasingly corporate) rearing of our children
via compulsory state-run education doesn’t have to necessarily mean supporting
privatization, whether in the form of corporate sponsorship, for-profit schools
or vouchers supplemented by cash (as they are to be used in the U.S.) Compulsory
institutionalization in state schools (with a governmentally determined agenda
that we the public might hope to influence or re-create) and a private free
market in education (with no possibility of public input) are not the only two
alternatives out there. John Holt and Ivan Illich laid out visions of socially
funded, universally accessible, free – i.e. truly public – learning
outside of any kind of compulsory school system decades ago. These offerings
they hoped for would be far different from just making public schools
non-compulsory; they instead would reflect what the public wants and not what
the government wants. Their de-schooled hopes for the future were far from
privatization or vouchers!
But in the meantime, while we work for and wait for such a new
system of freely accessible, non-compulsory public offerings of knowledge and
learning, I believe that we have to remember where the kids are. The vast
majority of children are in schools. Since the children of so many citizens
attend public schools, there is widespread social support and potential power to
pressure those schools to serve the interests of the public, not the interests
of the government. We unschoolers can and should be part of that kind of support
for public schools – a support that works to make public schools public in the
best sense of that word.
Unschoolers have adopted public national parks and public
libraries as our own; why not public schools? While homeschoolers (and
unschoolers perhaps in particular) have many important battles of our own to
fight, as long as by law (and often by household financial necessity) our
society’s children and especially our poor children are in school, for me there
is a moral imperative to support the struggle for a generous and humane public
education which responds to and serves them. Supporting and restructuring the
public schools may yield merely reforms rather than the radical rethinking of
education that we ultimately strive for, but ignoring the lives and needs of the
children that are there can boil down to elitism.
In supporting the fight for really public education, unschoolers
can not just do the right thing, but also potentially contribute our insights
and philosophies to the open-minded among the teachers and administrators in
public education. In fact, there are a number of ways in which I see progressive
homeschoolers potentially aiding progressive public educators and the students
in public educational institutions. And though this coalition may seem unlikely
to ever flourish, in a post on his website, Pat Farenga (formerly publisher of
John Holt’s now-defunct Growing Without Schooling magazine) recently
highlighted a joint “reimagining education” three-day conference and on-going
project in Michigan started by unschoolers and attended by public school
superintendents, principals and teachers. At this event, he writes, “The school
officials weren’t trying to get homeschoolers to conform to their model of
school, but instead were asking homeschoolers, along with the others who were
present, for ideas they could use to help the children in their districts learn
more effectively.”
“The school officials weren’t trying to get homeschoolers to conform
to their model of school, but instead were asking homeschoolers, along with the
others who were present, for ideas they could use to help the children in their
districts learn more effectively.”
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There is possibility! But how can we work to move the possible
to the actual? First, homeschoolers have created culturally independent
educational models – many different models, in fact – based on very different
pedagogic forms and content than the compulsory schools, which are necessarily
shaped by governmental mandates. Being able to mingle in a welcoming homeschool
world of alternative educational outlooks might yield a multiplicity of
inspirations and new insights for progressive educators. And if we want to be
heard by those educators, it will be up to us to create a publicly visible
unschooling discussion that actively rejects the media image of privatizing
homeschoolers and instead invites in the progressively minded public school
workers.
Next, homeschoolers also support public space and resources for
all children outside the compulsory and regimented school walls: libraries,
parks, rec centers, museums, etc. We can be mindful that our advocacy for these
resources should include assuring their accessibility and relevance to all
children, including those currently institutionalized. We progressive
homeschoolers also frequently have an abundance of a resource scarce in 21st
century society: time. We often use it to celebrate and strengthen the cultural
or cognitive commons that form the alternatives for all of us to massification
and the corporate conquest of popular culture. With our time and unschooling
consciousness, we can particularly work to form a bulwark against
commercialization for all children. And finally, of course, we can offer
unschooling as the ultimate refuge for some of the smartest, most rebellious
kids, those who just say no.
Do I want to see compulsory public schooling disappear?
Absolutely. Do I feel an obligation to support public education against its
privatizers? Without question. Do I see a contradiction between advocating for
public support for all learning spaces and being a confirmed unschooler myself?
Not at all.
Eva Swidler lives in
Philadelphia with her husband and daughter, who has never been to
school. She juggles spending time with her family, being part of an anarchist
bookstore collective, seeking out community and teaching history. One of the
places where she teaches is Goddard College in Vermont. Goddard has been a
self-directed learning, low-residency college, based on progressive education
principles – no grades etc. – since the 1960s.
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