So, do you ever get tired of being asked, “what is unschooling”? Or are you someone who keeps asking but you haven’t found a person who can really put it into words for you? Neither of you are alone! I knew that before I ever conceived my son, I would be ‘educating him at home’ and so did my hubby. I never put much thought into ‘the how’ or really much thought into ‘the why’, but it only felt natural and right.

When I became pregnant, home education is exactly what I focused on…not the fact that I was about to give birth to a child! I started reading and researching everything about homeschooling. I discovered ‘unschooling’. It made sense, because that’s the way I envisioned homeschooling to be in the first place. So, I was rather shocked when I kept finding all these resources online that were VERY ’school-at-home’ orientated. I guess being an Anarchist naturally puts me  at odds with any educational system or theory that uses control of/over children to ‘produce’ results (i.e. an educated child).

I always assumed that what parents did with their children on most days before they were ’school aged’ and then sent away for 4 to 8 hours a day was unschooling. I mean, I know that no one really works at teaching their children how to talk, crawl or walk (barring some special cases) — we kind of have to figure that one out for ourselves in order to be able to communicate and interact with the Universe around us. How would this natural desire to figure things out and to explore our Universe go away if we never knew school? It doesn’t go away…until you go to school. Well, it might not go away completely, because we still (most of us) desire knowledge as adults and we find very non-mainstream ways of acquiring said knowledge at times. I have to admit though, I have been damaged by the public education system and most of those who are near and dear to me can attest to the same. As adults we spend our entire life trying to over come the damage of a childhood full of punishment and praise.

Back to unschooling. Unschooling led me to John Taylor Gatto and if ‘we’ are still naming Saints, then his name should be added to that list! Unschooling makes so much sense to me…why doesn’t it make sense to everyone else. Because everyone else has more faith in ‘experts’ than in themselves, let alone their children…not to mention that most people do not view children as real people with real feelings, thoughts and rights; they are only ’second class’ citizens who can not be trusted and need to be constantly corrected and broken like some kind of wild animal.

Respecting children as though they are real people is step one. Trusting that they know what is better for them than anyone else is step two…because I hope that you know what is better for yourself than anyone else does. Not pushing one’s own agenda onto a child or forcing them to ‘cooperate’ (read: obey without question) because you are selfish and assume that because you are bigger and older you matter more than they do is step three. Step four comes after all that…it’s when true autonomy is respected…not given, because that implies that you could take it away if you wanted. When you do not forbid something, it loses it’s appeal or never gains appeal in the first place — children can and should be trusted with EVERYTHING.

Unschooling…yes, it is in all of this rambling. Once you are at a place where you are able to put into action Steps 1-4, then it only makes sense to NOT enroll your children into ANY kind of school against their will, unless there is ABSOLUTELY NO other option. Children are unschooled from birth (or conception, depending on what team you play for) and there is no magical age at which they stop learning and wanting to learn. And right now, I have to say that if you are still reading this and saying, “yeah that’s nice, but I had to endure school and I came out alright — why shouldn’t my kids be schooled too?”, I have to say you are one selfish person to even suggest that your children deserve to endure the same pain, punishment, pressure and boredom that you endured. People try to defend school by saying that it is some kind of ‘rite of passage’, when all they are doing is trying to rationalize why they are sending their children away — even when their heart aches for them to be home and even when their children are obviously not happy and not succeeding.

I think I could maybe be swayed into believing that the school system has my child’s best interest in mind and might be more equipped to care for their education than I, if and only if, the system’s own report card was not so laughable! And if I didn’t know what the system was really there for in the first place.

Ok, so fine. Hopefully you have gotten through my very biased rant and now you are asking, but ‘how’, if there isn’t a curriculum or plan or goal of some kind in place (but there is). I’ve been trying to explain this one for awhile now. I’ve been trying to really make a fairly concise description and still get everything in there…I can’t do it. But, I can give examples of it in action and I can think of some words and I can share the words of others. One mother in New York, blogs about how she wishes she could be honest about unschooling to fulfill state requirements and she has this to say (extracted from link above):

If I could write something for this IHIP that would actually reflect some of the spirit and scope of unschooling, I would focus on the following four concepts. These are concepts that we encounter in many forms every day and that seem to flow organically from Lucia’s exploration of the world around her.

Concept 1: Information is available and abundant.
Lucia will learn that her community is rich with resources. These include, among others, public libraries, museums, colleges and universities, research centers, nature centers, theatres and performance spaces, galleries, gardens, farms, and religious institutions. She will become comfortable using these resources. Lucia will identify her own interests and learning goals. She will locate and utilize appropriate resources, critically analyze and organize available information, and apply this information in the way that best suits her needs.

Concept 2: There are as many ways to live as there are people on the planet.
Lucia will explore many cultures. She will find that ideas are expressed in many ways: verbal, visual, physical, and sonic. She will experience different concepts of family, friendship, and love. She will understand that lifestyles are shaped by many factors, both internal and external. She will come to recognize that there are many forms of government in place all over the world and that some are more participatory than others. She will develop an idea about personal freedom and individual rights. She will be concerned with issues of social justice because they affect her and the people she cares about - even some she’s never met.

Concept 3: We are part of a natural system.
Lucia will experience her life as part of a dynamic, living system. Evolution is a chance occurrence that happens in response to environmental change. It has no direction and no goal. The idea that humans are somehow separate and distinct from other living things is sorely misguided and is largely responsible for the environmental crisis in which we find ourselves today. The earth existed for billions of years before us, and it will end without us.
But before that happens Lucia will learn that natural resources are finite. Our actions have consequences. Our consumption creates pressures elsewhere. The food that sustains us is a product of the earth. The waste we generate must go somewhere. Lucia will have the power to live as a conscientious steward of the earth. She will help her family strive to reduce our negative impact on nature’s balance. This can be a challenge in our modern, technological society. It requires thought and effort. But a feeling of kinship with nature can only enhance our experience of the world, adding texture, depth, and a sense of fulfillment.

Concept 4: Everything is connected.
Lucia will notice the connections among all of the concepts above. She will see, for example, how access to information affects personal freedom, how cultural belief systems affect people’s attitudes toward the environment, how participation in government can bring about legislation to improve a community’s handling of natural resources. There are countless possibilities. And it is within these connections that Lucia’s true education lies. In making these connections, she will begin to construct new and original ideas of her own.

I can just replace my son’s name wherever ‘Lucia’ appears and I’m done…for the most part! I think this beautifully captures and explains the curriculum part of unschooling, which is LIVING A REAL LIFE and learning from it! I can not really explain it better at the moment.

“But how will they learn XXX or XXX, if they never open a XXX book or never have to raise their hands to ask permission to pee or etc.?” Well, they might not, if they don’t need to. Really, how much of what was forced down your throat during school do you remember? And more importantly, how much have you needed to know to make it ‘in the real world’? If there was a certain subject that you really loved and one that you really hated, those are the two examples that are going to come into your mind right now. The first because you were genuinely interested and the second because you were being forced to ‘learn’ something that had no revelence to your life at the time…maybe you would have been ‘better’ at say math, if you hadn’t had to ‘learn’ it until you were a teenager or out in the ‘real world’ when you needed it.

The REAL World gets a lot of attention when it comes to unschooling and naysayers. As if school is the real world! I haven’t yet come across a situation in the real world yet (mind you I am only 26 at this time), that I have been prepared for because of school. In fact, there were TONS of things that I NEVER learned in school that I have needed out here in the real world that I have had to learn post-school. This doesn’t mean that my parents and other influences in my life didn’t teach me about some of the ‘life lessons’ mentioned in the article linked to, but I wasn’t taught most of them and I can not really remember being taught them in school or if I was, the information wasn’t presented in a manner that was relevant to my present state of being. Most of the things mentioned probably shouldn’t be taught or shouldn’t be expected to be taught in schools…but really, what should schools be ‘teaching’ in the first place? I think all schools should be Free Schools — at least if children are forced into going for whatever reason they’ll have a better chance at coming out the other side practically unschooled in a public manner! Is that really possible?

I’m going to do my best to explain unschooling as this blog progresses along…be patient though, it’s not easy…like most life lessons!

On a side note: I’m fascinated by the number of Radical Unschoolers out there who are not Anarchists (quite a few are Libertarians, so that can count…I guess).

I’ve wanted to take some time to share some thoughts on Authentic Parenting, Non-Coercive Parenting and whatever else you might think to call it. I don’t have the time today, but I just couldn’t let this fantastic post that I found not be mentioned here on my blog. This post pretty much sums up the basics in an example regarding children and teeth brushing.

Enjoy this post and in the next couple of days I will have some more personal thoughts on the matter of trusting our children and not taking away the autonomy that they have a right to.

Learning in Freedom: non-coercive parenting

Cute! Something that I swear most of us unschoolers need. How is it that if it doesn’t sound school-ish then it can not possibly teach a child? Just because you don’t use (or even if you do) all the fancy $5 words to describe what is going on while “blowing bubbles in the garden”, children still have fun and make connections to apply to future experiences. Like for example, next time they see an oily spot on the ground in a parking lot, they might remember the same shimmery effect on the surface of their bubbles. It’s all connected and in their own time they’ll fill in and apply the $5 words to what they always enjoyed as a kid.

This is extracted from: the parenting pit - alternative parenting + unschooling

ACADEMIC TRANSLATOR

For those that unschool and yet have to report to some government agency… or the kids grandparents, why not buy our academic translator? simply say the activity that you have been pursuing (eg. blowing bubbles in the garden) and allow the translator to do its magic, in this case the results were: “todays lesson plan consisted of Chemistry, particularly working with the results of the saponification process from sodium and potassium fatty acid salts; Physics, examing surfactants and the Marangoni effect on liquid surface tension. A side experiment of light wave interference patterns from solar sources through viscous air borne fluids was also pursued.”

Kirsten Anderberg kindly gave me permission to post her article on her experience with ‘rogue midwives’. I like to think (and surely many people would say) that I share many of the same qualities as the midwives Kirsten speaks of. I am sure many of you might have come across this article somewhere else, but I figured it would be good to get up here. Enjoy.

Miriamma Carson, one of my midwives

Women helping other women deliver babies is as old as humanity. It makes sense. So why do mainstream doctors and hospitals act like midwifery is some radical, dangerous, medically-irresponsible quackery? In Scandanavia, the UK, and the Netherlands, female midwifery is a thriving occupation. Yet in America, it has been constructively outlawed as a profession, for 100 years. While I was in labor, during my home birth, I actually asked the midwives, “Are you sure this is okay to do at home, and not in a hospital?” They said, “Kirsten, think about it. THIS is the way women birthed for thousands of years before doctors and hospitals.” That made sense, but I had to ask, due to my years of American medical brainwashing.

My midwives were rogue outlaws, in many ways. They fully understood the political activism involved, they fully appreciated the anarchist nature of what they were doing. They birthed approximately 200 babies in the Seattle area, between the years of 1980 and 2000, and they did so with no licenses, and no medical credentials. They delivered my baby at home, illegally, and I am eternally grateful. When I gave birth in 1984, there were no hospitals allowing midwives to birth in them, no insurance plan would pay for a midwife, and Swedish Hospital was the only hospital in Seattle “experimenting” with birthing rooms. There were no single or gay mom childbirth classes, so I quit going to childbirth classes, as they were filled only with middle-class, heterosexual couples. One of my midwives, Miriamma Carson, was bisexual, spoke fluent Spanish, was a radical activist and feminist, and she offered me a safe place, when nowhere else felt safe. For $300, I was given private childbirth classes with other single moms, and pre/post natal exams, as well as a 30 hour labor and home birth attended by two midwives. When I had trouble paying it, Miriamma let me barter cooking dinners for her kids instead. I could never have afforded such superior health care under the status quo, for-massive-profit, medical system.

Both of my midwives, Miriamma and Barbara R., had sons living at home while they were midwives. And they helped homeless teens often. One night Miriamma’s son woke her up at 3 am, saying he had stumbled on a teen girl, in a car, behind the 7-11, in labor. She would not leave with him, so he asked her to wait, and said he would send his radical midwife mom to help her. Miriamma grabbed her birthing kit, and charged out the door towards the 7-11. Miriamma delivered the baby, in the car, in the middle of the night, with dignity, no questions asked. The girl refused to leave with Miriamma, but Miriamma invited the girl to her home, and gave the girl her home phone number before she left. I am wildly impressed by this. Some would say that was irresponsible of Miriamma, and that she should have called the cops, or CPS, or forced the mother into a hospital. But Miriamma understood the difference between trauma and empowerment, and via her gift of birthing assistance without authority trips, she often saved women unnecessary trauma, allowing the joy of birth to prevail.

Once Miriamma had a woman who only spoke Spanish, in labor, in her car, trying to drive her home for the birth. They got stuck in a traffic jam. Miriamma called her nearest friend and told her to prepare a room in their home for a birth. She got off at the next exit and drove to the friend’s house, where the woman had a healthy birth. Miriamma spent years living in poor Mexican villages, and she knew there had been mass marketing of corporate baby formulas in Mexico, as well as in the U.S., shaming poor moms away from breastfeeding. So Miriamma asked the friend whose house they had landed at, to start breastfeeding in front of the new mom, who just delivered, to set a positive tone for breastfeeding. Miriamma was very good at finding healthy ways for moms to learn from each other.

These midwives were also incredibly gifted at networking. They led me to Doctor David Springer, one of the first M.D.’s to graduate from John Bastyr’s Naturopathic College (http://www.bastyr.edu/), with an N.D. He became one of Seattle’s finest holistic health pediatricians and took grand care of my son for 18 years. They hooked me up with La Leche League (www.lalecheleague.org), when I had breastfeeding problems. They taught low-income moms about the WIC program. They facilitated safe homes for domestic violence victims. They arranged safe abortions when asked. As a matter of fact, Miriamma took me to a safe abortion clinic, when I asked, years before she attended my birth. She bought the equipment abortion clinics use, and hid it in her basement, when she feared abortion may become illegal again. Miriamma is from a long line of radical women who saw access to safe birth control, abortion and delivery, as a woman’s right. Emma Goldman took formal training in midwifery in 1895, and was saddened by the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, as a matter of fact.

Long have the fields of midwifery, women’s health care, witchcraft, and feminism, been associated. In the article, “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses,” (http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/witches.html) by B. Ehrenreich and D. English, they say, “Women healers were people’s doctors, and their medicine was part of a people’s subculture. To this very day women’s medical practice has thrived in the midst of rebellious lower class movements which have struggled to be free from the established authorities. Male professionals, on the other hand, served the ruling class…Witch hunts did not eliminate the lower class woman healer, but they branded her forever as superstitious and possibly malevolent.” Calling self-help, preventative and traditional medicine a “radical assault on medical elitism,” traditional healers named “King-craft, Priest-craft, Lawyer-craft and Doctor-craft” the “four great evils of the time,” according to the article. By the 1840’s, medical licensing laws had been repealed in almost all of the states. But by the 1900’s, racism was also playing into the sexism, classism, and medical elitism, and since it was mostly immigrant and poor women who were having and assisting home births, white women of the Victorian brand, were asking for the white male doctors in sterile hospitals for birthing help, not poor immigrant midwives with birthing experience and herbal knowledge. And elite, white, women doctors, such as Elizabeth Blackwell, turned on the women midwives too. The article says in 1910, 50% of all babies born in America were delivered by midwives. And although traditional medicine was primarily a political and economical issue, the mainstream medical profession tried to say it was a medical and/or scientific issue. The medical profession has attacked the autonomy of midwives as health care providers, yet DIY women’s health care continues, as a liberating force.

When I was about 20 hours into labor, I started wimping out, and asked to go to a hospital for drugs, as I was exhausted, and sick of the pain. But my midwives reminded me that if I went to a hospital, the midwives would be locked outside, I would be forced to do a lot of authoritative things I would want to rebel against via doctors, and it could end up in a C-section. Those threats kept me at home trying to birth naturally, which finally did happen. And I am so thankful for them talking me through it. Miriamma died in the mid-1990’s, due to cancer. It was an emotional loss for the community. Her memorial had a cast of hundreds. Woman after woman bore witness to how Miriamma saved her life when in crisis, giving her dignity and comfort, when many of us had felt like “untouchables.” Whether we were homeless teens, battered wives, single welfare moms, gay moms, Spanish-speaking moms; we were all welcome on earth, according to Miriamma’s open-arm policy. We all deserved superior health care. We all deserved safe births and breastfeeding without stigma. Due to these beliefs, my midwives were two of the most radical anarchists I have ever met.

My friend Beth, in Santa Cruz, Ca., gave birth to her daughter, at night, on the sand, at the beach, with the help of her friend/midwife Moon Maiden. Birth is a tremendously powerful event and being drugged in a sterile hospital with paternalistic doctors is not the ultimate birth experience for many of us. Many of us want to birth, with our friends and families, in nature, without drugs. And such freedoms around birth are barely legal, if at all. So rogue midwifery continues on, under the radar of the mainstream, as political activism, as feminism, as alternative health care. Even with the recent advent of birthing rooms and licensed midwives, this field is a rogue one at best. Even mainstream midwifery resources, such as Midwifery Today magazine (http://www.midwiferytoday.com), and Midwives Online (http://www.midwivesonline.com) have a very anti-authoritarian tone. Doctors are not women’s bosses, and radical midwives understand this. Groups such as the Radical Midwives group (http://www.radmid.demon.co.uk/) in the U.K., see midwifery as a political issue, as well as a health issue. Midwives have been doing this as long as humans have existed. No laws can change it.

Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.

Doupě Čas! Běh čichat nějaký bláto a dát spropitné tebe ar kráčení dále tvůj Matka. Činit něco druh do tvůj Matka Doupě dnes. Dát spropitné ačkoli , denně is neurč. člen Doupě Čas!

For those of you who don’t ‘do’ Czech, here is the translation:

Earth Day! Go smell some dirt and remember you are walking on your Mother. Do something kind for your Mother Earth today. Remember though, everyday is an Earth Day!

Over the last couple of weeks the kiddo and I have been venturing outside to tend to the yard and garden areas. We are about to get some plants into the soil.

Today we planted some really old cucumber seeds, poppy flower seeds and sweet basil seeds to see if they were any good. It was just something to hold over the kiddo until our local nursery (The Urban Gardener) opens up in a couple days.

Our List of Things to be Planted:

• Lemon Balm (melissa officinalis)
• German Chamomile (matricaria recutita)
• Apple Mint [woolly mint (mentha suaveolens)]
• Bergamont Mint (mentha citrata)
• Spearmint (mentha spicata)
• Dark Opal Basil (ocimum basilicum “purpurascens”)
• Lemon Basil (ocimum x citriodorum)
• Catnip (nepeta cataria)
• Oregano (origanum vulgare)
• Rosemary (rosmarinus officinalis)
• Garden/Kitchen Sage (salvia officinalis)
• Divining Sage (saliva divinorum)
• Lyre-Leaved Sage (salvia lyrata)
• Red Raspberry (rubus strigosus)
• Red Clover (trifolium pratense)
• Carrot (novelty cultivars: red, purple, yellow and white)
• Radicchio [”italian chicory” (cichorium intybus)]
• White Clover (trifolium repens)
• Wild Strawberry (fragaria virginiana) (rosaceae)
• Low Sweet Blueberry [”maine blueberry” (vaccinium angustifolium)

There’s also onions, garlic, tomato and broccoli among other things, but I think most of those will be saved for the community garden we are involved with.

I usually hate working out in the yard, but this year I have been looking forward to it. It’s nice to feel the soil between my toes and to get my hands in the dirt. Elijah is sure enjoying it too.

We have signed ourselves up to work in the community garden that is just getting started in our neighborhood. It’s located in the yard right behind The Vault, our neighborhood coffee and tea bar. This will be a wonderful adventure.

More garden notes to come.

…birthing as it is at home and should be elsewhere!

I still cannot figure out why more midwives do NOT know how to NOT do anything when attending breech births and other births exhibiting variations of normality. This midwife didn’t do anything but talk to the mother and let her know what was going on…is there anything else she SHOULD DO? NO!

Learn from this video what you obviously aren’t learning at your clinics and hospitals.

I recently read a posting over at Midwives Alliance of Pennsylvania that talks about Diane Goslin and what will become of her and midwifery in PA.

It’s a very interesting concept…the government controlling women and their needs/wants. One of the questions that has been brought up by the courts and commoners (ha!) is whether or not a woman has civil liberties and constitutional rights to birth with whomever she damn well pleases. Of course I say that it’s a resounding yes and a real no-brainer!

I left the following comment for the posting mentioned above:

”Namely, they wanted to know if a woman has a Constitutional right to birth her baby at home with whom she wants.” Yes! If not for every woman…then at least for those whose religion supports and often requires that a midwife be used over or rather than a physician and that the birth take place at home and not a medical facility.

Due to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 the government is pretty much required to err on the side of religious freedom in all cases. This should guarantee birth freedom for women and their midwives.

Due to the Religious Freedom Protection Act of 2002 in Pennsylvania, women and their midwives have even more legal and constitutional support and protection. If the Act above fails, this one is even more stringently in support of the religious victim in many ways.

It is a matter that I’d like to see ACLU get involved with.

And I say it again…I’d really like to see the ACLU step it up already! Why this hasn’t been turned into a real religious or civil rights battle I don’t know, because that’s how we get everything else we want! I mean for G-d’s sake, if members of O Centro Espirita Benficiente Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) can get high on hoasca for religious purposes, then I had better be able to squat a baby out wherever and with whomever! I am not knocking the religious community mentioned here either — I support them and I am rather impressed by their efforts to keep their freedoms intact.

Keep in mind that hoasca is a scheduled one narcotic and in order for these church members (and anyone who comes to ritual) to take part of the hoasca tea, it must first be transported in LARGE quantities across International, Federal and State lines — that’s a HUGE felony for people outside this church, in case you didn’t know. I don’t want to transport illegal substances ostensibly scheduled as “worse than cocaine (it’s a schedule two drug)” across any line, breaking any trade agreement or federal law — I JUST want to birth my babies and educate them in a manner that I see right.

I have two final thoughts: 1) If you don’t want me feeling like I have no other choice than to birth unassisted, then let me have my midwife of whatever stripe, credential or non-credential that I choose and 2) Keep your laws off my body, birth, baby and my constitutionally guaranteed metaphysical/spiritual experiences.