The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
From fairies and the Fall of Man, to geopolitical and domestic intrigue, a gardening project gave me a lot of time to listen and learn.
EDIT: I forgot that I started listening to this fantastic conversation between Joe Rogan and Jimmy Dore!
I became a radical unschooler when I realized that learning outside school parameters is the norm, not the aberation.
Whenever I am curious, I independently seek knowledge. My job as an educational facilitator is to guide my sons on their journey and provide opportunities and resources.
I use “radical” a bit tongue-in-cheek. It seems to me that if you believe in something, you commit to its fundamental principles and act them out until you encounter a flaw. Then, you figure out if the flaw is in the principles, or your understanding of them.
Unschooling appears to be a complete learning system, whenever I find myself considering a certificate or other stadardized metric, I reevaluate the value and decide whether it is worth compromising the unschool principles. I rarely find it necessary, so I’m radically committed to this learning lifestyle.
My sons are 13 and 15. Ten years ago, we started homeschooling without a driving philosophy, it was a practical decision. Being a curious person, I discovered and dove into deschooling and unschooling. Through experimentation and meditation, I found these approaches to be most valuable in fostering an environment of physical, mental, and spiritual health.
Home education has radicalized me as a follower of Christ, an anarchist (although I give in all the time when I’m asked to license my business or pay my taxes), and an unschooler.
Like actual Christian Anarchy?
So it went like this:
When I came home to care for my sons (<1 and <3) fulltime, I was an ideologically captured Neocon addicted to 24/7 cable news/c-span. I turned the TV off whenever they were in the room, which, helpfully enough, they always were.
Obama’s presidency challenged my deepest beliefs in foreign policy. He continued and accelerated the Bush wars, but I was supposed to oppose those things now. The anti-war left disappeared and it was only proper to support interventions in Lybia, Syria, Yemen…
I was wavering, so I tried to figure out how I would explain all this to my sons in a clear and logical way. I couldn’t.
In 2014, we started homeschooling and I sought out podcasts to inform myself about how to go about it. I found an episode of the Tom Woods show on the subject. Maybe it was Lenore Skenazy or Ana Martin, The Libertarian Homeschooler. Either way, I loved the format of Tom’s show and started to connect with libertarian thinking.
There was nothing special about me and my wife, but we were educating our children, something we had been taught that only government (or a fancy, government-approved “private” institution) could do.
I remember sitting outside by our fire pit after the boys were in bed and sharing my new, “radical” libertarian thoughts with my wife. We had agreed on a conservative upbringing for our children, I wasn’t sure how my, “If we can do this without government, what else can we achieve?” would hit. It did. She seemed to already be ahead of me and we started leaning into a voluntarist mindset.
As a father, I stayed with the principle that I must live the same truth I try to instill in my children. The stakes were getting higher and I was searching for foundational truths.
I had become hooked on the Tom Woods Show and in addition to being a homeschooler, historian, and libertarian, he’s also a Catholic. He doesn’t produce a ton of religious content, but as someone seeking deeper truths, I was fascinated.
In 2016, he interviewed Jordan Peterson and I discovered Peterson’s lecture series on Genesis. Through a Bible study group and a lot of meditation, I found Christ in my heart in 2017. We were baptized as a family that September.
This was the same time frame I quit voting (the 2016 Republican primary was my last) and became interested in anarchism. Michael Malice remains a huge influence on that subject. While he doesn’t take a Christian perspective, he did introduce me to the ideas of Tolstoy and other Anarcho-Christians.
Politically, I’m comfortable with being identified as an Anarcho-Christian, however, it’s more accurate to call myself a follower of Christ. If a political position doesn’t fit in that matrix, I’m not going to accept it as my own.
New families joined our Lego Unschool Club this week and we had a wonderful time building and breaking down.
Since I started carrying a permanent image of a dreaming Jacob, he’s been showing up more often.
Isaiah 41:13-14 KJV — For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee. Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the LORD, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.
This Scripture appeared in my devotional reading and it struck me that I have read very little of the book of Isaiah. My Student Bible contains a plan to read it in 63 days. I’m looking forward to my first independent study of one of the books of the Old Testament.
Our gifted programs were called LEEP and PROBE. I forget what the acronyms meant, but being labeled “gifted” was an invaluable experience.
I was an energetic kid (this won’t be this story’s last shocking revelation). Luckily, even with ADD (ADHD wasn’t mainstreamed yet) diagnoses on the rise, I had parents who inherently resisted systemic pressures and honored my Tazmanian Devil-style of learning.
Wildly sober, I wasn’t considered for the gifted program in early elementary. Midway through 4th grade, a teacher finally insisted that I be tested. I was excited to get to miss classes once a month with the smart kids (we were bussed to a special learning center). They were less enthusiastic. They all got tested in 1st grade, logically concluding that it wasn’t anything special to pass the entrance exam after three more years of school. It was an IQ test, not age dependent, but no one cared to explain the nuances to us subjects.
For the next eight years, I existed in a liminal educational space. The smart kids never accepted me as one of their own, but everyone else saw me get on the gifted bus and go to honors and seminar classes.
For good and ill, I had inherited an inclination to not give a shit about other people’s opinions.
LEEP and PROBE offered deep dives into subjects that were hardly broached in school. Genetics, computer programming, environmental studies, photojournalism, and filmmaking were highlights of those years. I also had my first experience with a Muslim convert, observing my favorite teacher, Mr. Lowe, change his name and appearance to conform to his new beliefs. These buildings became a symbol of a world of possibility where I was free to explore. The day-to-day of the regular school building was a constant battle to resist grey standardization.
The meme above has little to do with my experience. The late bestowing of the label “gifted” forced me to embrace my independent nature. God set me against these social anxieties (he had a whole other set of difficulties picked out for me).
I was blessed to be largely free of the academic pressures. I’m doubly blessed to be able to offer a similar freedom to my sons in our home education environment.
I heard this guy was a trouble maker, so I thought I’d give him a listen. I really like his perspective and it’s the first time I’ve really enjoyed new hip-hop in a long while.
Isaac started his Saturday with Junior Rifle Club then jiu-jitsu training at Elevated Studios.
Westen started his day as an assistant instructor at Elevated then spent six hours at summer camp aide training with Delaware Nature Society.
Kristen began a massive mural at By Her Hand Tattoos, I helped with that and trained jiu-jitsu, and we both carted the boys around to and from their activities.
By late afternoon, we were all toast.
My words to my wife were approximately, “If I can’t teach numbers, letter, and colors, you can fire me and we’ll send him to first grade next year.”
We planned to commit to a year and then reevaluate.
We were questioning our decision within two weeks. Then again a month later, then six weeks…the horizon kept growing as we made mistakes and found our way. Eventually we determined that this was the only path for our family. We’ve now been home educating for a full ten years.
It’s a remarkable, difficult, and wholly worthwhile journey.
I’m a fundamentally optimistic person. I’ve had a lot ton of harrowing events turn out to be benefits and I’ve listened to a ton of doomsayers who turn out to be wrong.
Several interactions with young people have got me slightly pessimistic about the direction of our culture (hold on for the silver lining, I cannot help myself).
A few months ago I was at a bookstore looking for material by Carl Jung. I was unsure if he would be in Philosophy, Psychology, or Religious Studies. When I asked an employee, he had no idea who I was talking about. He wasn’t a kid, certainly well enough into his 20s to have heard the name of the second most famous psychologist of the 20th century, yet he struggled to understand the mere spelling of the name.
I wrote this off at the time. I’m a weirdo and I know Jung was largely ignored for Freud in my schooling. I thought he was experiencing a resurgence in popularity, but what do I know of modern trends?
A couple months later I was at a library and my son was interested in reading The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. Libraries sometimes separate Literature, Fiction, and Paperback Fiction in ways that I don’t understand, so I inquired at the reference desk. Again I was met with ignorance. Neither the title nor the author seemed familiar to the employee.
Yesterday, I was looking for books by and about Desmond Tutu at another library. This time, a young lady at reference didn’t seem to recognize that I was saying a name, answering, “Oh, what’s that?”
I’ll grant that I’m not familiar with his work, but I knew the name and his fight for equality in South Africa.
I don’t expect most people to be aware of these important figures, but the employees of book stores and libraries should have a foundational education when it comes to general literature.
This is one of my problems with the “Banned Book” craze. When an institution decides to use one book, many others must be excluded. Scarcity of space, time, and resources requires choices.
Our educational institutions are excluding deep, important texts. Without knowledge of the texts that have shaped our civilization, we become ignorant of ourselves.
Here’s the good news. These institutions are crumbling under their own incompetence. People are asking, “Why didn’t I learn that?” Independent thought and action is on the rise. Through home education, students can forge their own paths and avoid the mind numbing propaganda of a failing empire.
