unschooling Archives - waiting for the machine to stop

unschooling and the pandemic

Written 9 June 2020.

When my friend told me she was worried that her daughter would “get behind if she did not go back to school soon”, this got me thinking. While these are very real concerns for parents, who know how fiercely competitive the job market is getting, I started to think what does ‘behind’ mean? Perhaps now, in the midst of the Pandemic, is the time to reassess what education is actually for, and doing. Education should not be about content, that if we miss it, we will get ‘behind’, but should be about exploration, development and growth. These are very personal things, that should not solely be tied to a national curriculum and a keeping up with the peer group, and are not solely experienced within the four walls of the school building.

Since the beginning of Lockdown, when kindergarten closed, now reaching 9 weeks for us, I have witnessed my nearly five year old son grow exponentially, and we have not even opened a text book. We have been juggling full-time home working, temper tantrums, no outdoor space, the draw of screens, parental arguments, Ramadan fasting, elderly parents’ struck down with the virus, and all this involves learning and growth. My son has learned, and is still, learning so much.

He has grown taller, he is has cycled through, and emerged from, various stages of early years development, including the stealing ‘treasures’ from the kitchen stage; playing with knives stage; experiments with blackmail and manipulation stage. Left completely to his own devices, we have discovered he loves: taking apart electronics; music, dance and percussion. He – as I am sure heightened for many of us in the Pandemic Lockdowns – has been struggling with addictions: ‘just one more biscuit’; ‘I’ve got to watch the next programme then I’ll do my chores’; ‘I’ve just got to scroll ten more, then I’ll go to sleep’*.

In todays age, GCSEs should be measuring how clearly you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day; if you can be faithful and trustworthy; if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can live with failure; how well you can sit with pain in the empty moments when all else falls away.**

The best thing you can do is nurture children’s spirit and desire to learn, to want to explore, to find out. The rest will follow. Many more parents are ‘unschooling’ now, which is a deliberately provocative term, but nevertheless useful one. At the centre of this, is allowing children to learn in a self-directed manner. That is giving them freedom to explore, and to support what they want to learn about.

pandemic NHS appreciation rainbow drawn by 4 year old

For more inspiration on critical and alternative approaches to education visit these two projects.

One of which is very resonant with me:

Disco Learning by Lucy Aitken Read is an unschooling course giving parents the courage to unschool.

The other of which I am a founder and governor:

Arbol Madre Holistic School is a Waldorf-inspired school aiming to educate mind, body and soul.

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*Thats me, not my 5 year old. My 5 year old is not scrolling before bed. It’s not that bad. Yet.

**Credits to The Invitation, a poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

What is Work?

‘You are not working at the moment then?’ I was recently asked. This is probably something that makes most stay-at-home-mums wince, as you are working so hard on a daily basis you literally fall asleep in your dinner. As a couple who are ‘not currently working’ but raising a toddler ‘on the road’, this question prompted a wider discussion between my partner and I about what is work and, perhaps more explicitly, what is work that is valued?

I’ve written a blog post about how it’s almost impossible to be lazy travelling with a toddler in a campervan, as alongside the work that’s involved in travelling (route planning, driving, packing and unpacking), parenting and daily survival tasks take up the entirety of two adults’ time, and we are still knackered at the end of every day.

However, while we feel like we are constantly cleaning and tidying up in the van, we find we interact with the task more, and appreciate the work done because it becomes our daily focus. When you have children it feels like all you are doing most of the time is cleaning and tidying anyway. However, having to fit paid work in around childrearing and these daily survival tasks makes these tasks feel like ‘extra’ chores rather than what we should focus on. When daily survival tasks feel like extra chores we rush them, we cut corners, we eat badly, the environment suffers (‘I haven’t got time to think about it!’) and we feel unsatisfied, harassed, overburdened.

Alternatively we don’t do these daily survival tasks at all: we outsource them. As I did when I worked a fifty hour week. We work so long we have such little time for child-rearing or cooking and cleaning that we subcontract all or some of these tasks to childminders, cleaners and restaurants. We are then unavoidably alienated from these basic survival activities.

189FACA8-3E27-488D-AA71-406C905CC06F With life on the road we have found those daily chores become our life: preparing food, cooking, washing up, sweeping, making beds, airing furnishings, washing the vehicle and vehicle maintenance, washing the baby, hanging out laundry, washing and grooming ourselves when we find campsites with showers. In London I outsourced every single one of these tasks, I even tended to outsource grooming: with routine visits to beauticians for hair cuts, waxing, pedicure, massage.

When daily survival chores are done by us for us, we focus on them, we appreciate them, we take pride in experiencing them and perfecting the skills involved.

This takes me to a wider connected point about parenting. These daily survival activities are not only appreciated more but they are also the daily activities that our son sees us doing, emulates and takes part in. Without even knowing it, he is learning to cook, how to clean, how to clean and dry clothes. Not only is he learning how to do these tasks in a very real way, moreover he is learning that these tasks exist rather than them being hidden, as they are when they are outsourced. Nor is he learning them in a synthesised way that he might do at nursery (using a pretend washing machine or cutting pretend plastic vegetables).

That’s not to mention he is learning the other tasks that are routinely necessary for surviving Van Life such as filling up the water tank, charging the batteries, emptying the grey waste and the toilet. All these tasks connect us to, and remind us of, our water use, energy consumption and our waste in a way that house dwelling, again, alienates. (More on this in another blog piece).

Of course not everyone has the ability to focus on these tasks because not everyone is able to get away from doing paid work. This is not an attempt to say that we are doing a better job of parenting than anyone else. I think what I want to do is draw attention to the way that capitalism devalues these tasks (which are of course of great value and necessity to us) while valorising paid work, which is in the interests of capital.

Feminist writers have drawn widespread attention to the devaluation of domestic work in the home, referred to as the ‘second shift’ (clearly highlighting its secondary place). However feminist ‘answers’ have usually focused on:
a) giving women equal access to the ‘first shift’ of paid work, and
b) attempting to raise the status of domestic work as akin to the importance of paid work
Rather, perhaps, what we should all be doing is challenging the very notion that paid work is a necessary, useful or desirable pursuit for any of us.

Survival or specialisation?

what do we want for the next generation?

As I was growing up, I never had to do any chores or anything to help in the home. No washing up, no laundry, no cleaning, no cooking. The most I did was take my plate to the kitchen when I’d finished my dinner. At my dad’s house he expected us to offer to wash up (that’s polite) but we rarely actually did it. My mum’s reasoning was that she wanted us to focus on our school homework, so she didn’t want us to be distracted with chores. My mum’s goal was for us to have a good education and for that to give us the best opportunities in life. Her approach certainly worked for these purposes: my sister and I both worked and studied hard and got excellent academic results. I guess what my mum’s approach enabled us to do was to specialise – it has enabled us both to access good careers but neither of us can cook and we are embarrassingly undomesticated. Furthermore, my partner says if I was left to fend for myself in the wild I wouldn’t last two minutes. He’s right.

In the context of 1980s feminism and rising possibilities for social mobility, my mum’s focus on her daughter’s education was an understandable goal. But what are our goals now, today, in 2018? Do we want our son to specialise on his one career? My partner certainly doesn’t want that. He wants our son to be self-sufficient; an ‘all-rounder’; multi-skilled; survivalist.

Is not the era of specialisation dead anyway? There are no more ‘jobs for life’. Most people, we are told, will have three or four different careers in their lifetime. We are told we need to be ‘Entrepreneurial’ – adaptable, flexible. As a parent, what’s the best way to achieve that for a child? Should we be raising our children to be flexible to the needs of capitalism; to be able to adapt and survive in an ever-changing technologically advancing job market? Or do we want to bring up our children to be able to survive, to know themselves, to feed their basic needs, when all this melts away?

In my research on the London middle classes, we found parents who talked about ‘global travel’ as a kind of ‘cultural capital’ for their kids, an experience that they can ‘cash in’ for a university place or a job. In my experience, the middle classes always talk in this way: searching for ways to capitalise on something. (This is not their fault but the system). I hate to think of our travels with our son in this instrumental way. And I know my partner doesn’t. But I am burdened with a sociological knowledge and understanding, which is just that: a burden, that prevents you from just being. How can you know ‘game theory’ and not apply it, right?

So I guess it’s what you do with that knowledge. We want to think beyond the instrumental. To provide our children with the (multi) skills to be of value in the community, rather than be of value to an employer; to share skills rather than compete for them. When we are deciding what to teach the next generation, what to guide them to study, we want to always hold in mind ‘what is of value to the community?’ (I.e. all of us) rather than ‘what gets them ahead in the rat race?’.