Confessions of a Liberated Learner
I hate high school.
To make one thing clear, I do not have an issue with Hampshire Regional. I have found nothing but nurturing staff, a supportive environment, and a veritable cornucopia of personalities to befriend in my time as a student here. That said;
I hate high school.
As young children, we begin our lives inherently curious. Who among us cannot remember pressing our elders with incessant questions pertaining to every aspect of life? From the seemingly insignificant (“Why is the sky blue?”) to the [unknowingly] deeply philosophical (“Why are we here?”), we spend those first five years exploring, learning, and nurturing who we are, in our own time; our own way. Some of us may dedicate our days to writing stories about everything under the sun. Others may find contentment in structuring cities and nations from Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs. Still others choose to run and play outside, reveling in the delights of being able to act as what they are; a child.
Advance the reel a year. Backpack strapped on, lunchbox clutched in one hand, we are bundled off into the Big Yellow Schoolbus that seemed almost legendary to us before this day; our First Day of School. Arriving at school, we are surrounded by those of our kind, a crowd of tiny, chattering people! A revelation, we think to ourselves as we divide off in twos and threes to play. Suddenly, our exuberance is cut short as a shrill tone peals over the playground, startling us into attention. Adults called ‘teachers’ begin to separate newfound friends, and herd their eager, inquisitive flocks into classrooms. We sit in desks, marveling at every detail of the room; the long stretch of slate in front of us, the pointy yellow pencil we’ve been given, with its oh-so-chewable nub of pink rubber on the end, and this strange adult before us, who can capture and hold our attention simply by exuding an aura of authority, something tells us that we must listen, must follow, must obey this new person.
Books are distributed, and all of a sudden, we have responsibilities, aside from the feeding of the household pets, or keeping our rooms “tidy” (read: shove everything in the closet and hope the doors hold). At age six, we are told that our future is in our power, reliant on our success as students over the next twelve (or more, also dependent on that success) years. Cracking the spines of these thick books, we see text and equations that we once knew as fairy tales and how many M&M’s we shared with our brother. At the end of the day, a day spent absorbing the information splashed across our minds like so much water over a sponge, we receive one more thing from this School place. Homework? It does not compute in our young minds. Home, the place where Mommy and Daddy are, where our toys anxiously await us, and where we can zone out in a Sesame Street induced stupor, should be alienated from the work we’ve spent the past seven hours doing. Yet, our backpacks are loaded with folders of worksheets that demand answers, and we trudge home to spend an hour or more in varying states of frustration and exhaustion. At the end of the day, we drift to sleep, dreaming of anything but how we spent our day.
Skip ahead eight years. A new sort of First Day of School awaits our now teenage selves; Freshman Year. Woken at 6:00 in the morning, or even before, we’re loaded once more into the schoolbuses that lost their charm and enthrallment seven years ago, and half-asleep, we arrive at the final stage of our “development”. High school.
Somewhere along the years, we’ve suppressed that child-like curiosity and readiness to learn, rendering the tasks assigned to our dedicated educators nearly impossible. Attitude problems and attention deficits run rampant, and sometimes simply settling the class down and quieting their incessant cacophony enough to begin a lesson is a goliath task for our teachers. Here, this writer wishes to make herself clear. Some students indeed have adjusted well, and flourish in the school environment. Most, one might argue, emerge relatively unscathed and as well-rounded, well-adjusted individuals into our society. Some, on the other hand, do not. Personally, I was of the latter category. In eighth grade at my local high school, I found myself thoroughly disillusioned. A straight-A student at the time, I dreaded going to that building every single day, dreaded the environment, the people, everything. One day, an idea was proposed to my mother and I that changed everything.
Enter unschooling.
A concept first verbalized by John Holt, founder of the magazine ‘Growing Without Schooling’, unschooling is closely related to what we all know as homeschooling.
“I know what you’re thinking. Homeschooled kids are freaks.”
- Cady Heron, in Mean Girls.
While related to the concept of homeschooling we all understand, unschooling is in a category all its own, and occasionally defies even its own definitions.
My complete introduction to this idea came in the form of my introductory meeting at North Star: Self Directed Learning for Teens, an unschooling center located in Hadley, ironically next door to Sylvan Learning Center. Upon sitting down with the founder and head “teacher” of North Star, Ken (first name basis for all adults, no Mr./Mrs. formality), I was informed that I would not have to learn anything I did not want to, ever again. My head spun. No algebra? No chemistry? No memorization of dates like July 14, 1789? Something about this just didn’t sound right. How could I get through life without the knowledge I’d been told for years was crucial? It was then that the key point to this “unschooling” concept was revealed. I would learn those things, and more, because I would want to. My chosen methods of learning might be alternative to my original concepts, those being seated in desks with thick textbooks and mountains of worksheets to complete, but I would learn. That, in itself, was certainty.
After that first meeting, my parents and I walked out to the parking lot, where I, if I remember correctly, squealed and danced in sheer delight. The next few days at school passed by achingly slowly as withdrawal forms were filled out and goodbyes were said, and as I walked out those double doors on my last day, garbage bag loaded with the contents of my locker in hand, I could not think of one thing I’d miss.
That weekend seemed to drag on forever. I spent my time plotting out pages and pages of curricula, lists upon lists of what I wanted to learn, to do, to read, and how I was going to accomplish said learning. Finally, Monday morning arrived, and with it, yet another First Day. Waking up an hour later than I had every day before for school, I had time to get myself ready, to wake up, and even to have coffee before getting in the car and being driven to my new “school”.
I wish I could say that my first moments at North Star were spent eagerly learning all I could, right off the bat. Alas, that would not be entirely truthful. As the doors opened at 9:00am, myself and about two or three other “members” (as North Star students are called) trickled into the common room; an average sized room in the center of everything, with three couches and a fireplace. Having no idea of what exactly I was supposed to be doing, I followed two boys into the classroom and soon laughter and shrieks could be heard as we took it under siege with a bottle cap war. World War III was soon put to a stop, however, as the first class of the day, Social Issues, needed to commence.
I realized then that it was up to me, for the first time in my life, whether or not I wanted to stay for the class. Classes at North Star are not mandatory; you can attend as many per week, or as few, as you want to. Also, run like college courses, they do not take place daily, allowing for a broad spectrum of choices. I decided to stay for the class, and settling myself in a chair, I waited for my classmates to join me. Clearly, being early for a class you don’t have to go to is a sign of being a nerd. I did not have to wait long, however, before more members filtered in, seating themselves around the table, settling onto on the couch, sprawling on the floor, or “puppy-piling” onto each other. Ken, the teacher for this particular class, came in momentarily, and most of the chatter ceased as he began writing topics for discussion on the white-board. We spent the next hour engrossed in conversations and debates about the political chicanery of the time (this was early 2003), the impending War on Iraq, and whatever else came up, as a focused, one-subject debate is fairly impossible to maintain in a forum of eager and energetic teenagers.
The other classes I took in my time at North Star were run in a similar fashion. A writing workshop, maintained by published author and home/unschooling advocate Susannah Sheffer; allotted members 90 minutes to just write, about anything, at the end of which we had approximately 20-30 minutes to present, if we felt so inclined, and receive critique on the work we had produced. Classes were never conventional (the fact that there is one classroom in the entire North Star space made sure of that; more than once, I attended class in a huge tree on the Hadley Common), never tedious or monotonous, and always engaging. A Philosophy class pitted member against member in an active demonstration of Machiavellian ideals, as with the work ‘The Prince’ to guide us, we formed alliances and rivalries as representatives of every country in the world, each vying for top billing as “the Prince”.
Of course, a key point of unschooling is also learning on your own. While North Star’s class topics were amazingly diverse, some subjects did indeed require self-teaching. Resorting to the classic textbook method, I found myself learning Algebra, when in school I had been in the “Integrated Math” (read: basic math that we’d been taught year after year) class that most of the grade 8’s were in. History, on the other hand, was a subject I’d always been deeply engrossed by, and I realized that I had been learning it, without intending to, or even knowing, for years! A book series I’d read since age seven, ‘Dear America’, chronicled the lives of teenage girls throughout various eras of time in diary form. Based heavily on fact and true accounts, these books made history both fascinating, and brought it to a far more personal level than the Social Studies classes I’d always taken had. Granted, at age 13 I could have made more responsible decisions pertaining to my education. An avid reader, I was perfectly content to spend most of my day curled in the comfortable furniture of the common room with a book, completely oblivious to the world around me. ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, ‘The Red Pony’, and ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’, among others, were read in this fashion, and I remember and absorbed far more about and from them than any book I’ve ever been made to read. While this practice of mine was frowned upon by any adult opposed to unschooling,(“What about science?!” “How can you be learning?!”), I found myself completely content, and knew that I was indeed learning. Regular meetings every couple of weeks with Josh, North Star’s co-founder with Ken, assured that I was indeed keeping with my [self-planned] curriculum, and I carried on in this fashion for about a year. At the end of this year, circumstances beyond my control led to the decision to remove me from North Star, and after being homeschooled by my grandmother for the remainder of my public school’s first semester, I returned to high school in January, 2004.
My time at North Star, while shorter than I would have liked, had easily the most profound effect on me of any other period of my life. Friendships formed then carry on into today, and I visit on a regular basis. I learned, in that year, that freedom and independence are traits we all have, yet simply suppress, and it’s by our own choice, our own efforts and acknowledgement, that we can set ourselves on our own path. Wherever we are, be it private school, public, or no school at all, we each possess, as we have from the start, that inherent curiosity and readiness to learn. It is simply a matter of whether we decide to take the initiative, and a risk or two, in order to do so. You will always be learning, always be growing, it’s just up to you how much you let other people guide that learning, and how much you allow yourself to chart the way.
~Laura Gilbert
--For more information on unschooling, check out: Grace Llewellyn’s “The Teenage Liberation Handbook” and “Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories”, also by Grace Llewellyn.
