I have a chip on my shoulder, and I need to do a little venting. So bear with me please.

As an unschooling parent, I get tired of hearing about socialization – as in: “Yes, I know that Kodiak and Jupiter are doing fine and you’re doing a good job with them, but since they’re not in school, I just worry about their socialization.” I really don’t like that word, “socialization”. When I hear, “Hey Minke, how’s the kids’ socialization going?”, it sounds to me like, “Hey Minke, how’s the meat processing going?” My kids are not objects in need of having something done to them.

Allow me to explain. For starters, the word socialization implies the verb: socialize. But in this case the verb is used in its transitive sense rather than as an active verb. There’s a difference between saying, “Bob goes to his local pub after work to socialize,” (active verb) and alternately saying, “Bob is being sent to prison to be socialized (rehabilitated)” (transitive verb). When we talk about how school socializes our children, we’re using the transitive form of the verb, meaning we are doing something to the children. Maybe you think I’m gnit-picking here, but stay with me. This is very central to what unschooling is all about… and why I’m thankful to Joy for winning me over to the concept… and why I’m very glad not to have our kids in school.

Somehow, I think, a lot of people unconsciously equate school with civilization itself. It’s like they think that homeschool kids will turn into feral children or something if they aren’t getting “socialized” in a classroom environment. These people will cling to this ridiculous notion despite all the evidence right before their eyes. They may know your children intimately, or even be related to them… and they see with their own eyes that your kids have perfectly good social skills… and still they will worry about the lack of “socialization”.

Does this even make the slightest bit of sense? Really? State-run classroom style education for children is a very recent invention. Schools weren’t really a wide-spread phenomenon before the Mid-19th Century. Before that, were kids doomed to become feral children because of a lack of school socialization? (rhetorical question) Can anyone point to any evidence whatsoever that social behavior and interpersonal skills of children have actually improved since the invention of school? Seriously, the biggest things parents, students, and teachers worry about in schools are student violence and anti-social behavior. Is that the kind of socialization we’re missing out on by unschooling?

Yes, I think school has a function in our society. I support the existence and funding of public schools. It’s part of a wide range of options that I think should be available to all children. I just don’t think that school should be the only option. Nor do I think it’s necessarily the best option for most kids. And trying to make an argument in favor of school on the basis of “socialization” is a farce if you take the time to deconstruct the idea.

How much socializing is there really time for in a classroom? School kids spend the bulk of their day sitting silently in a classroom listening to or ignoring lectures. This is what the school experience amounts to really: sitting silently in a classroom almost all day long. Your chances to socialize are really limited to lunch, recess if you get one, and the bus to and from school if you take it. All of that social time is outside the confines of what school actually is. So how exactly is the school itself providing social time? The obvious answer is that it really isn’t providing social time at all in most cases.

So what then is this mysterious “socialization” that school provides? This gets back to my original point: socialization in this context is something the school does to the child rather than the child actually doing the socializing. What is this thing that the schools are doing to the children? What they were designed to do: indoctrination. Given that most schools are run by governments, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the agenda of that indoctrination might entail. At some point I will compile references about the origins of public school and this agenda of indoctrination. But I don’t want to get sidebarred with that right now. This post will already be long enough as it is. It’s fairly common, I think, for people to acknowledge this agenda of indoctrination, and even admit to the more egregiously brain-washing aspects of it, but still condone it due to what they see as the “upside” of the whole process. They might say, “Yes, it’s true that the schools fill you with loads of propaganda about how great the rulers of the country are and how noble we were in every war we ever fought, etc, etc. But even so, at least they’re instilling good moral virtues and teaching the benefit of honest work….” This will segue quite nicely to a discussion of why I think unschooling’s approach is superior to the school notion of “socialization”.

To the topic of “instilling virtues”, let me offer this quote from Aristotle, “Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. ” In other words, we don’t act good because we have good virtues; we have good virtues because we act good. So the idea that children will act virtuous as a result of pedagogy is really wishful thinking. In reality, we learn virtuous behavior the same way we learn everything – through practice. This is the unschooling way to doing everything. It is an active approach to life rather than a passive, sit-silently-in-a-classroom-and-listen-to-lectures approach to life. At its best, unschooling frees the child to use all of her natural faculties to investigate, experiment, and experience the world around her without being encumbered by the external agenda of a pedagogue. The biggest form of that encumbrance is by way of the principle lesson taught throughout the entire school experience: the lesson of obedience. If school serves any purpose at all, it is to teach you to be obedient. The knowledge you are allowed to gain in school comes at the price of your obedience. While unschooling doesn’t exclude this dynamic from happening too, it’s not the actually purpose of unschooling. At least it’s contrary to my purpose in unschooling. I want my children to continue to grow and live as autonomous individuals. I want them to choose their own paths in life and enjoy taking them.

Kodiak and Jupiter socialize all the time. They socialize with each other, and with me and with their mother, with friends of all different ages (as opposed to age segregation that you get in school), and with new people they meet every day out in the real world instead of a classroom. They socialize. They aren’t being socialized.

A woman I know adopted a girl last year that was in foster care and public school. The girl was bright and outgoing but struggling in school. The problem was that she kept getting in trouble in school for talking too much. Shortly after adopting the girl and learning about these school problems, the new mom decided their best option would be to homeschool. It wasn’t something she previously had imagined doing, but her instinct told her that this would be the best thing for her new daughter. The point is that the girl was getting in trouble in school for trying to socialize. So much for the idea of school socialization! The question is, what was so wrong with the girl’s desire to socialize? Doesn’t that desire seem perfectly natural to you? I mean, here’s a young girl that’s been taken away from her biological family, put into foster care and moved around between schools. Of course she’s going to want and need social connections with people. There’s nothing pathological or deviant about it that warrants punishment. But that’s the approach of the school system. One size fits all. What is deviant in my estimation, is the idea that a young girl should be cut off from her natural social need to connect with other people… to feel like she belongs… to know that there are people who care for her and that she’s not isolated in a rigid system she has no control over. So like I said, her new mom decided to homeschool (with a definite unschool approach, I’m happy to say) and it’s working out well for them. How ironic that taking an extroverted girl out of the supposedly social environment of school to become a homeschooled, only-child actually increased her opportunity to socialize! And most importantly for her, she’s now spending the bulk of her time getting the steady nurturing attention of someone invested in her emotional wellbeing (her mom) rather than at the mercy of people who consider her a burden in their job as a teacher or social worker.

Maybe I’ll leave it there for now. I think I’ve made my point. Either you get it or you don’t.

- Minke

Thursday:

Horse riding lesson for Kodiak. I didn’t have my act together very well. We set aside her riding helmet but forgot to actually bring it. Luckily Jessie had a spare helmet that fit her. I also forgot to bring my mud boots, so my shoes got a little muddy. Jupiter was miserable there. He didn’t want to watch the lesson and he didn’t want to wait in the car with me. We agreed that next time we would bring a good assortment of toys for him to play with. Kodiak did great, from what I could see. She’s learned how to tie harness knots, groom the horse, and help with getting the saddle and blankets on and off. She said she trotted for a really long time. It was around 30 degrees outside, but Kodiak did pretty well except her hands got too cold.

Afterward we went to the library, then shopping for toys. I also got a set of roll-around plastic bins for Jupi to store his Legos and Bionicles in. That’s going to be a good solution because he can wheel it around between his room and the living room. Hopefully it will reduce the mess from all that stuff.

Friday:

The kids decided to dress identically today. They are pretending to be identical twins born one second apart from each other.

We went to Safari Sam’s where they ran around the play structure and played mini-golf for over three hours. Afterward we got Cantonese food and came home. We’re listening to a book on tape called “Witch Cat”.

Saturday:

Caught up on house work today. The kids cleaned up their rooms too. They get 25 cents each time they clean their room. We went to Coastal Farm and Ranch supply store today. They had kid’s gloves that would work for riding gloves for Kodiak but they didn’t quite fit. We did get her some new snow boots there though. Now we’re all geared up for winter sports. I may try taking them sledding next week. We also got Kodiak some Carhartt pants for horse riding.

Kodiak worked on her kiddie laptop for a while. Jupiter made new creations out of his Bionicles. He made a set of twins that could do circus acrobatics together. He also made a bipedal creature leashed to it’s quadrapedal pet. For a while this morning the kids took digital pictures of the creations so we can post some on lego.com. While Jupi was making his twins, we talked about where twins come from. Twins are a recurring theme this week. I told Jupi how identical and fraternal twins occur. He then extrapolated to figure out how you could get triplets with two of them identical and one fraternal.

- Minke

Yesterday I made reference to the post-modern world we’re living in. The crux of this age seems to be a clashing of different world-views. These world-views have been with us for centuries in the case of some, and untold millennia in the case of others. It’s yet to be seen whether we will merge those world-views to synthesize new ones, or whether certain ones will die out, or whether we’ll move beyond them all to other ones that expand our understandings of our selves and our universe in massive, profound ways. These are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about lately. And I found a book along these same lines that I started reading yesterday: Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas. So far it is a very well written book on the subject.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how to talk to the kids about world-views. It can be a complex subject, and I imagine that it will be an ongoing discussion as the kids grow. But it seems to me to be a very important subject, since as I said, this is the crux of the age we live in. At this point I will try to keep it simple and let them show me how much of this topic they are ready to digest. Today I think I’ll take them to see the movie Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep. It’s a kid’s movie in live action about a Scottish family who finds and raises a baby Loch Ness monster. This mixture of reality and fantasy is everywhere you look these days. This is yet another aspect of the thing I’m talking about. Anyway, it should be a good opportunity to talk about different world-views with the kids, and see what they understand about that topic.

- Minke

As a father, I always keep an eye fixed toward the future, trying to discern what we might collectively be leaving behind for the next generation. I look at my children and realized that most of the major events that will fill their lives will take place beyond my control to do anything about them one way or another. This weighs heavily on my mind when I consider the tumultuous times we live in.

Kodiak is 8 years old, and Jupiter is 7. The changes shaping our world today are mostly invisible to our children at this point. They are appropriately sheltered from the worst of it, so far.

So how to best prepare them to face all that when they’re grown up? That’s the essential question that guides my choices as a parent. I don’t know what jobs Kodiak or Jupiter will choose some day. I don’t know who they will love or where they will live. What’s more important than any of that to me is that they both grow up to be good, responsible, self-actualized, happy people who live their own lives on their own terms. For their parts, Jupiter and Kodiak couldn’t make me more proud of them. And I’m thankful to have such an intelligent and perceptive co-parent in their mother Joy. All three of them inspire me to be the best father and the best man that I can be. And because of that, whatever may transpire in this strange, post-modern age will all be part of our amazing adventures together.

- Minke

Hi Mama and Papa,

Since you both were concerned about what’s happening with the kids’ education, I decided to giving you an overview of some of what we’re doing now. (btw, I just now finished writing it and I can’t believe how much there is here for all my answers of we’re not doing anything formal… you can see why it took me a while to get around to this)

The kids are doing a unit about trees with their nanny, and lots of art with her. They have a scheduled day, library time, stretching time, quiet time, math time, etc, with her.

Kodiak has started Horizon math (level 2 book 2), which we are just doing ‘for fun,’ but in a more structured (ie, in order, only write the real answers in the book) kind of way. So far she already knows everything in it, but I think it will challenge her as we get through it and give her good practice/reinforcement. Jupiter has level 2 book 1, which is conceptually way beneath him, but good for putting what he knows in pictures/writing. Both have enjoyed workbooks in the past, but I just used the grocery store impulse buy ones and let them do them independently. Since those are too easy now, we’ve moved onto these.

We continue with the real math learning, which mostly happens in an organic way. Both kids like to make up problems/find problems in real life and then we do them verbally. I always ask if they want to see it written down. Kodiak generally does. Jupiter isn’t interested at first; usually he likes for me to give him a lot more problems verbally. I always create problems that follow the same pattern, starting easy, then getting more difficult, bearing in mind what he knows or has touched on in the past. Eventually they get too hard, then I tell him that writing it down will make it easy to see the pattern. That always gets him excited. Then we write down the new problem, leave the answer blank, and write all the other problems we did. I show him or he figures out on his own how to apply the pattern to the hardest one, then we do more on the difficult level. Both kids also like to use manipulatives. Most of our formal mathy ones (weights, abacus, etc) have been scattered to the four winds, but they make do with legos, lentils, tangrams, tinker toys, fingers, toes, and whatnot. Both kids can add and subtract carrying and borrowing tens, can multiply and divide (though don’t know notation for the long forms), understand fractions, understand symmetry, know many shapes, understand positive and negative integers and using number lines, can solve complicated story problems including time, speed, and distance with some help, can measure length and weight metric and ’standard’, can use a calendar, count money, create and read some kinds of graphs, and have other skills I’m forgetting to mention. Areas I bear in mind which need reinforcement/I am presently focused on: multiplying and dividing larger numbers, decimals, place value, properties of the unit circle, setting up written problems from a story.

The kids are going to do the Mad Science NASA program, a 6 hour course over 3 months. We’ve done Mad Science before and they hate going but always thank me for it on the way home. The classes have about 20-30 kids in them, ages 5-10 and involve reading, math, the scientific method, trivia, lecture, and fun experiments as well as classroom basics like raising your hand, lining up, sitting still, working in a group. On our own we’ve learned different kinds of soil, the water cycle, life cycle of salmon and the environmental implications in our area, native vs invasive species, gardened together, taken nature walks, made a sundial, used compasses, learned the directions, played with magnets, learned about volcanoes, climbed trees, made bottle rockets, etc. We’ve done experiments about pH, sound, light, heat, flight, polymers, electricity, potential and kinetic energy, states of matter, and the like. We have lots of books around the house with experiments for rainy days. We use the scientific method. Both kids are interested in anatomy and health as well.

I’m encouraging both kids to write more. Kodiak has to regularly write reports for her Girl Scouts badges and take notes during Girl Scouts. This is generally a fight, mostly because she is slow at writing and perfectionist about it, and is afraid to misspell things or make less than ideal letters. She loves to write in her journals, btw. To help with this, I’ve promised a calligraphy set for Kodiak (she would like to make pretty letters). She also helped me pick out two workbooks: Spelling Workout C and Write! which introduce parts of speech (which she knows about to some extent already), help with spelling confidence, and are generally fun. I do not force the workbooks, but we do them correctly and with pages in order. We do Mad Libs and come up with stories together.

Jupiter can write his name and can copy writing. He knows all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers. He likes to have someone else write things which he transcribes. He did not want a writing/spelling workbook, so I didn’t get him one.

Both kids have some basic computer skills and can browse the internet for games, play movies, and research toys on line. Jupiter can’t read yet, but he can find exactly the Lego set he wants, and tell you the price, the code, how many pieces it has, what set it goes with, and on and on. Kodiak knows how to Google subjects of interest and read up on them.

Kodiak enjoys reading and often stays up late at night with her books. She reads short chapter books and can tell me the plot, make guesses about what will happen next, tell me the funny parts, and read passages aloud. I have never formally taught her to read. She can sound out words and has sight words. She still makes lots of mistakes, but is at about grade level. (btw, Rachael dropped some assessments by for me and is a qualified administrator, so we can find out for sure. But honestly, I’m not concerned about this). She can read instructions in her other books, on games, and can read websites that interest her and figure out instructions on forms.

Jupiter got interested in reading about 6 months ago. He enjoys reading repetitive books with words he can guess or recognize on sight, and when motivated will spend hours with that, looking up words he’s seen before by reciting the book and following along, then matching the pattern of letters elsewhere. He didn’t make the leap to phonics until recently, and now he can sound out short words if they fit a pattern he knows. My approach has not been a daily beating of the head against the wall, rather I have reintroduced skills and concepts briefly and repeatedly, at intervals of days and weeks, in the context of regular life, only pursuing them when the spark is there. We’ll have weeks of seemingly nothing, then one day of learning what school would consider months worth all at once.

Kodiak is taking piano lessons and Jupiter is taking ‘not-lessons’. Both kids actually enjoy practicing and while last year it was a huge fight to get them to practice, this year it’s been really easy.

The kids like maps and geography. We’ve made maps before, and use them on an ongoing basis. I recently got some cool maps… a huge National Geographic atlas, an illustrated flip chart. The kids have had a United States puzzle for a while. We have a game called ‘Hop-Off’ which they love which is basically hop scotch with the United States, and they like to play it as Twister as well. We also play a United States version of Sequence, which reinforces capitals and state names with their shapes. We often get the globe out as well. Since I’m probably taking the kids to Romania and the UK this Spring/Summer, we’ve been touching on those areas from time to time.

The kids have been learning about the solar system on and off. We’ve done the thousand yard model of the solar system, learned about the different planets, and learned what makes the days and seasons, why solstices and equinoxes happen, etc.

Both kids did their white belt test in Aikido. They’ll get the robes and belt they’ve earned. Sensei made it pretty clear they passed, though the results are not official. In the past few months they’ve gotten much better at bahaving in class, and they are both motivated and focused to learn. They also took a soccer skills class last term as well as continuing with gymnastics. We go roller skating a couple times a month (well, they go with their Nanny now), it’s an independent social time for them as well as good exercise for Kodiak. Jupiter doesn’t like to skate. Kodiak is going to have her first Horse Riding lesson soon, and may continue with that if she likes it.

Both kids love documentaries… we watch a lot of Nature and similar films. Kodiak especially likes things documenting historic events and people (she was really into the story of Typhoid Mary, likes History Detectives), and Jupiter likes documentaries about people and current events. For instance, Jupiter stayed up late to watch one about Ralph Nader, and enjoyed one about Percy Julian quite a while back. It’s in my plans to get these kinds of documentaries on a more regular basis now that I have Netfilx and the time to watch with the kids, since the topics can be pretty heavy and need interpretation for the kids.

I have a time line set up (we made it out of tape across a 12 foot span of wall… there are 5 different lines for different parts of the world, and another for pre-human history. We have color coded areas of interest, and cards to write political and economic events/people/cultural stuff/discoveries/natural history on and tape to it). The kids are really excited about this. We’re going back and think about the people and places we’ve touched on and put them on the time line… and continue putting stuff on the time line as it comes up of course. We also got a fun new set of books all about what it would be like if you lived in the time of… you name it. So far we’ve read the one about the great SF earthquake of 1906.

Sometimes we listen to Spanish tapes. The kids like to repeat the phrases. I’m trying to get the kids interested in watching their favorite movies in Spanish, which they used to like doing but lately hate. They know some Spanish phrases and a tiny bit of Japanese (mostly counting to 10 from Aikido class).

The kids work on story telling and dramatic play with their puppets and other toys, and sometimes make and act out skits or come up with songs. Jupiter especially loves to build things from his own imagination and from instructions. He can do complex Lego things above his age bracket without trouble. He likes to figure out how things work. Kodiak’s interest in animals continues. She pores over magazines and books about animals.

So here I’ve just touched on what we’re doing in the different areas, but truth is they don’t feel separated out like that on a daily basis. While Minke and I do not follow a set curriculum, I hope you can see that we *do* have things in mind which we focus on, and the kids *are* learning. I haven’t even mentioned here the things he is doing with them, since I’m not around for it.

We opt for an approach of relaxed encouragement, and feel that our kids are thriving. We have been through many transitions in the past year, and have had to work really hard and sometimes focus in places other than the next thing the kids might learn, or getting the newest materials for them. Sometimes I’ve felt I’ve had to spend too much time on errands or work rather than on the kids. But they have made it through that, and the hard work has paid off in a more organized home, enough money to buy them more focused time, and a basic continuity of life which has helped them adjust to the divorce really well. They are happy kids, overall.

The kids get the experience of working toward goals and ‘having to’ do things in other arenas than learning the basic skills of math, reading, writing, and the like. They get this in their play, whether it be building a very challenging Lego set, getting to the end of that novel, and they get this in their chores, Girl Scouts (I’m trying to get a boy’s campfire club put together for Jupiter this year) and sports classes.

As far as the three R’s, I believe that the schedule set forth by the schools for those skills makes a lot of sense in the classroom setting, but is not as critical in a home environment. A child in second grade who is not reading near ‘grade level’ will fall behind in all subjects. Not being able to read a math story problem fast enough will result in that child missing assignments, tuning out, and giving up…. in addition to not learning the subject. This applies across the board, to math skills, critical thinking skills, writing skills… if one is weak, it will create a negative feedback loop, causing that child problems all through school, and probably for life, just for being a few months behind the curve.

However, at home, it’s a different story. If a child can’t yet read on a fifth grade level, but she loves science, she can still DO those ‘fifth grade’ science experiments. If a child isn’t much for reading on a first grade level yet, his mom can read him the instructions for that ‘third grade’ math workbook, and he can do the problems. Eventually the other skills catch up, because they become more interesting, the child is more developmentally ready, or to progress to the next level in an area of interest, it’s necessary.

Pushing on these skills creates resistance, and when a child is not developmentally ready for the next step, just makes him feel stupid and frustrated. When working in a preschool years back I remember part of the curriculum included learning to use the calender. I taught this every day, exactly as prescribed. Some kids got it, others didn’t. Some kids got it the first day, others 3 months later. Was it my teaching? I doubt it. Kodiak learned how to use a calendar because we had one on the wall and she liked the pictures so she looked at it lots. Every now and then we’d mark a special day and mark them off until it came. It didn’t make sense to her until one day after we’d been playing battleship. She noticed that it was a grid, like in the game. She had also recently started to be able to read some words, and she realized that the days of the week were across, and that they corresponded to the numbers below, and that the numbers followed a pattern across, then down on the next row… suddenly she could use it. If I’d spent the past three months working on that calender with her, she might not have gotten it until that day. And if she had, I’d have attributed it to all my teaching. Jupiter learned about calendars because he devised his own method to count days until going to Daddy’s house! Most learning seems to me to come when connections are made, when the person is ready, or there is a perceived need. I try to create an environment and talk with my kids in such a way that I’ll facilitate those connections.

As for the testing, it is no longer required that test scores be submitted. It is required that the kids be tested, and we have not yet met that first benchmark, which comes at the end of third grade. Rachael has offered to administer the tests if we choose to do them. She is a certified primary school teacher and thinks the kids are doing just fine. If the kids were in school Kodiak would be starting second term of third grade, and Jupiter would be in first grade. Minke and I are philosophically opposed to the state mandate of registration, especially because of the military industrial complex’s hold and right to our children once they are entered into the system. We do not see the benefit to the children of enrollment, either.

So, I hope this has put your minds at ease a bit…

Love,
Joy