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.
