GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING
by Susannah Sheffer
I got involved in homeschooling through my friendship with the educational
critic John Holt, who wondered why the children in his classroom weren't
learning what he was trying to teach them. He began to see that many of
the things that he was doing as a teacher, things that he was told by the
school to do--testing, grading, making the kids do certain tasks--were actually
working against learning. He began to look at what it was like for kids
to learn outside of school. At first, he looked at really young kids who
were curious and enthusiastic and good at learning. He asked what was going
on in school that took that away or changed it. When he began to hear about
families who were actually letting their kids learn outside of school for
longer than just those first couple of years, that interested and excited
him. He founded the magazine "Growing Without Schooling" twenty
years ago. It's been growing ever since.
Homeschooling benefits both boys and girls, but I focus on girls in "A
Sense of Self: Listening to Homep;schooled Adolescent Girls" because
so much recent research says that adolescence is particularly difficult
for them. I'm thinking of, for example, the reports from the American Association
of University Women, studies from Harvard, the book Reviving Ophelia , and
other books. Girls in these studies find disagreement with others increasingly
threatening as they get older, admitting, for example, that "I think
of what I ought to say to be liked, rather than what I really think."
The research included statements like "Adolescent girls are a picture
of quiet desperation."
Yet the girls I knew did not fit this description. When I ran a weekly discussion
group for homep;schooled teenagers and acted as a writing mentor to
several, these girls kept impressing me with how self-confident they were,
how well they knew themselves, how they looked at the world. They were the
picture of insight and confidence, perception and enthusiasm. So I wondered
if the experience of growing up without schooling actually makes a difference,
and I began to interview them in a systematic and formal way. The result
is my book.
Girls today as young as nine or ten are worriers, saying," I'm too
fat," "I'm ugly"-an incredible preoccupation with appearance
and a narrow definition of beauty. People talk about this preoccupation
as if it goes hand-in-hand with puberty: girls supposedly reach a certain
age and lose their voice, lose their sense of themselves. But it doesn't
have to be that way.
Let's look at the context in which girls are living. Let's look at how they're
treated, at what they get to do, at how much control they have over their
lives. I interviewed fifty-five girls with a set of questions--some that
Harvard researchers posed to girls they interviewed and some adapted to
my concerns about home schooling. I was fascinated by their responses.
When I asked open-ended questions like "How would you describe your
relationship with your mother-how are you alike, how are you different,
do you disagree, and what happens when you disagree?" I got a picture
of a girl's life, how she sees herself, how she sees herself in relation
to the key people in her life, how she feels about various facets of her
life.
Almost all the girls in my study said that it didn't matter if their friends
agreed with them; they could live with disagreement; they could handle being
different from others. With regard to the mothers, too, they would say,
"My mother and I often disagree; we argue, then we come back and hug."
They were comfortable with that kind of volatility; they didn't need everything
to be fine all the time. The book includes various occasions in which the
girls were able to be true to themselves, to do what they thought was right
for themselves, rather than simply what others wanted.I asked the girls,
"Are there things you think people don't understand about you because
you homeschool?" and almost in a chorus they say, "They think
I sit at a desk; they think I do school at home." One girl said, "They
can't understand the freedom." People can't imagine that these girls
are not replicating school at home, having math at 9:00 a.m. and something
else at 9:42. They are doing something quite different. It's that difference
that interests me.
Basically, school tells kids what they need to learn, what they need to
do, when, and how. In homeschooling, kids and their families can decide
these things for themselves. Kids learn at their own pace, learn what they
love and with whom they choose, and choose their teachers and mentors rather
than have them assigned. When girls have this kind of choice and control
and freedom, it's no surprise that they end up seeming more confident and
more sure of their own goals. They've had a chance to set their own goals
and to work toward them.
One of the psychologists looking at the problem of adolescent girls said,
"How can we get these girls to identify more with their goals? Why
are they so estranged from their goals?" When I look at that through
the lens of compulsory schooling, no wonder kids are not identified with
their goals! School doesn't let them choose their own goals! It says, "This
is what you've got to do. You've got to proceed down this road. We'll tell
you how and when and where and why!" Homep;schooling changes all
that. It isn't a formula but a condition, a process.
A primary question is: Who gets to decide what the young person needs, wants,
or should do? When I meet with a girl who has recently left school, I ask,
"What are your interests?" and we begin to brainstorm how she
can pursue those interests, how she can find mentors, how she can find books,
how she will plan her day or her week or her year. I see something come
over the girl's face as she begins to realize that, for the first time,
education is going to be about figuring out what she wants to do, how she
will pursue it. She is going to be in charge.
All kinds of amazing things follow from the change in who's in control.
A girl might say, "I'm feeling that I need to hook up with more groups
of people or get out into the world and volunteer with a veterinarian or
join a local theater group or take my time and not rush through the book
I'm reading--actually linger with it--or whatever." Their strength
comes from getting to look inside themselves and determine what they want
to do and how they want to do it.
I think that we're born dependent, but also curious, passionately eager
to learn, to make sense of the world, and to grow up and join the people
around us that are busy doing things--the "big people," as John
Holt has called them. This speaks to the question of socialization as well.
I think that kids can learn in the stream of life. The whole notion of school
is to take kids out of the stream of life in order to prepare them to return
to it later on, whereas, kids who are allowed to grow up without school
are right there in the stream of life and feel, as one girl said to me,
"more a part of the world."
Most people, unless they really have had their interest and curiosity deadened,
have something that really excites them that they love to do. Watch a baby
learning to walk. Watch how that baby does not need to be forced to do it
or told to do it or rewarded for it, how desperately eager that baby is
to do it. I know 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds who have--commensurate with their
age and development--an analogous kind of curiosity and passion for the
world. The stereotyped teenager that's in most people's minds is apathetic,
jaded, alienated. The ones I know are not. Capacity is not fixed. It can
change. That's what I've seen in kids whose circump;stances have changed,
who turn to homeschooling after being in school for years.
I couldn't put a date on when "socialization" came into our vocabularies,
but people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s now often report that when they
were younger, they knew that they had a life outside school--both friends
and intellectual pursuits. School didn't dominate their entire lives. Now,
it seems that people's imaginations are as imprisoned by school as their
bodies. Now school is something that takes all their time, something they're
asked not just to attend but to believe in.
The question is: Can a young person who doesn't attend school make any friends,
hang around with peers, do things with kids around the same age? The answer
is absolutely yes. A young woman interviewed in my book says, "It was
only after I left school that I opened up and made friends." If you
talk to people about their actual memories of social life in school, you
find that they often had good friends, but they also had many nightmares,
especially in high school, about the pressure to conform, about being the
excluded one, about wearing the wrong thing on a given day, about being
made fun of, about not having a date when everybody else did.
It's a rare person who says, "I've got no complaints about the way
social life was organized in my high school." So the question is: Is
school the only way? If you don't go to school in America, are you a social
outcast? The answer is no, you're not. When our Growing Without Schooling
magazine had its twentieth anniversary not long ago, I was facilitating
a discussion with about 45 teenagers. I had to stand back and smile to myself
at the wonderful, adept, smooth, and kind way they were socializing--and
with what good humor.
On any given day, there are hundreds of examples just like that of homeschoolers
getting together informally as friends or in theater groups or dance troupes
or in book discussion groups, and so on. There are many other ways to make
friends. The deeper question for most of these kids is: "What kind
of social life do I want? And can I make for myself the kind I want?"
just as the question is "Can I make for myself the kind of learning
experience that I want?"
When they're not "in school," they're doing a whole bunch of things.
They're reading; they're exploring the library; they are hooking up with
adult mentors like volunteering with a veterinarian or meeting with a marine
biologist. Or they're running a store that they themselves have created.
One young woman had been interested in business for much of her young life,
and at 17 she opened a retail store where she sells products for people
with disabilities. That grew out of a great many service-oriented, volunteer
projects she had done over her life, and with her interest in business,
she was able to pull all that together.
There are many interesting projects like that because the young people have
the time to get really good at something. They're doing whatever it is that
they love, and they can control the pace. They can sleep late if that's
what they need to do. An article in the New York Times a while back stated
that teenagers are the most sleep-deprived segment of the population. Apparently,
because of all the growth that's going on, teenagers need about as much
sleep as toddlers. Teenagers who go to school are up at six in the morning
and go-go-go until late at night. They read the assigned book for class
and then maybe--if they're not exhausted--get to read a book that interests
them. Homeschooled teenagers are able to get the sleep they need, yet when
they get up, they can do things that are meaningful and important; they're
not squeezing their interests in at the end of the day. These kids place
their own passions and concerns right at the center, so they're doing a
number of things working in a lab, working with a math mentor, or whatever,
depending on their interests.
Many homeschooling parents are looking critically at conventional work structures
and creating all sorts of innovative situations. One is the conventional,
two-parent family, homeschooling setup of one parent working full-time outside
the home and the other one foregoing that for a while. Other patterns are
parents splitting work-shifts, parents working from the home, kids coming
into the workplace with the parent, and so on. And as the kids get older,
it's less necessary that they have a parent watching them all day. They
don't need or want that. When I was facilitating a discussion group for
five homeschooled teenage girls, three were living in single-parent homes.
It wasn't a problem for them because what they needed was their parent's
support and guidance--not their custodial care all day long. So home schooling
is possible for a great range of people demographically. It's by no means
just for the well off.
Many homeschoolers are now going to college. A recent article in The Christian
Science Monitor reported how college admissions officers are welcoming homeschoolers.
The Stanford Admissions Officer for example, stated that they often found
homeschoolers attractive candidates. But some choose a path other than college.
Since they've been learning independently all along, they find they can
continue that as adults. Homeschooling presents options--a sense that one
is choosing one's life. So kids who go to college are there because they've
chosen to be, whereas many of their friends are there because it's the thing
to do; it's what middle class kids do after high school.
It is very empowering to have the sense that you have alternatives and that
you have chosen this particular option.
Susannah Scheffer edits the publication Growing Without Schooling and is
the author of A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls.This
edited article is taken, with permission, from an interview of Susannah
Sheffer by Jerry Brown on the We The People radio program.