How I Learn Stuff

Hand me a Band-Aid. Make a Xerox of that. Get some more Kleenex. FedEx that package. These are all examples of a synecdoche. That’s when one kind or form or part of a thing is made to stand in for an entire category. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except when language becomes a prison. Xerox is not the only company that makes copiers. FedEx is not the only package delivery company. We know that.

A more insidious and sad example of synecdoche is that a lot of people say education when they mean schooling.

Schooling is an approach to improving education. Another approach? Just living and never going to school. Extremely different paths, yes, but both result in some sort of education.

My definition of education is the mind I have constructed and my process of constructing it. This definition is consistent with deep nature of education as no mere collection of static facts and formulae stored on your hard disk between your ears. Your education is the sum and synergy of all that you have become. Not just your experiences, but what your experiences mean to you, and how they helped you shape yourself. (Notice when I speak strictly, I don’t say that experience shapes you. Experience can’t shape you. Your own mind shapes itself in reaction to experiences, and there are many ways to react to the same exact experiences.)

Unschoolers believe that a rich education can be gained without schooling of any kind, and certainly without compulsory schooling. Schooling, or some parts of schooling, may help, but it isn’t necessary. This truth ought to be obvious to anyone who studies how people learn, or looks at the history of education among the peoples of the world. But there are rich and powerful interests dedicated to promoting formal (and invariably expensive) schooling as the ONLY way– THE ONLY WAY– to gain an excellent education, or even a barely adequate one.

This is a terribly uneducated point of view, ironically.

Anyway, I’m going to be speaking about this at the East West bookstore in Seattle, next week. Come argue with me! (or not…)

I will talk about the Buccaneering way of self-education.

My brother, Rob, taught me to fly in 1991. I thought it would be weird, spending day and night with him as a student. I assumed there’d be lots of sibling tension. In fact, it was glorious. We had a great time. I went from neophyte to solo cross-country flight in three-weeks.

Being a pilot is automatically a sort of buccaneery thing, if you want to be a GOOD pilot. You can get the certification, but that’s just the beginning. An excellent pilot does a lot of extra self-education to learn his aircraft inside and out. After years of not flying, I’m going through training again (this time my father is my instructor.)

Rob is an airline pilot, inventor, and antique aircraft restorer. He never went to college, and none of the things he’s famous for were taught to him in high school.

Here’s Rob talking about how he built his latest plane.

I wish I lived nearer to him, so we could build a plane together.

About five hundred folks, from young children to adults, gathered at the Marriott in Westlake, Texas, last week, for the Rethinking Education conference. The event took place all over the hotel: hallways, lobby, lounge, even the space in front of the elevators on several floors. The whole place had been converted to a free kid zone (the opposite of “kid free”).

The event seemed to stratify into young kids, younger teens, older teens, and adults. I saw not much mixing between the groups, except that very young kids sometimes orbited their parents as they attempted to listen to a keynote talk, causing bit of tolerable noise and disruption.

I spent most of my time with the adults, but I saw lots of kids, who were for the most part friendly and exuberant. Just as I would expect in a self-organized five-day gathering, there were some difficult moments. Someone broke the glass in the elevators, and there were at least a couple of little fights among the kids, including a little kid in a dinosaur outfit whom, it was rumored, walked around making dinosaur noises and punching other, bigger kids.

(My father, hearing about these events, is scandalized. I think he imagines a prison riot, and nothing I say has succeeded in creating a category in his mind mid-way between “prison riot” and “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.”)

I appreciate the patience and forbearance of the parents in reacting to these events. Unschooling requires patience and trust. I think that is the number one requirement for unschooling parents: saint-like patience and trust. We want our children to be safe, but we need our children to gain experience, too; to try things, even a lot of things that could end badly, so that they learn about the consequences of their choices. My own son has a habit of making sardonic comments worthy of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I wish he would say friendly things instead and open his heart to humanity… and yet, I sorta remember being like that at 15, too. Today I am occasionally capable of kindness, and I have good theoretical knowledge of polite behavior, so there’s hope for him, too.

I did a couple of talks about being a high school dropout surrounded by college grads. These went over very well, much better than I expected, actually. Being a technical guy in a non-technical environment, I worried that I’d come across as an alien life form. Apparently that was not a problem. I was happy to see a few young adults in the audience, too. I videoed the talks, and I’m thinking about putting them online.

The most exciting and satisfying part was being with all these other adults for whom unschooling is normal. These are people who don’t panic at the thought of not knowing exactly what their children will do for a living, in ten years.

You know, the idea of not sending your kids to school AND not driving through any sort of curriculum at home is truly bizarre and frightening to most educated people in the world (who are themselves products of compulsive schooling). I regularly fall into debates with folks who imagine that unschooling will cause our very society to unravel, and then implode– as if that hasn’t already been happening despite widespread kid imprisonment call public school! I think, rather, that rejecting compulsory schooling would renew society, because we need a society of self-created hard-to-manipulate adults to counteract the rampant international consumerist corporatism that now controls the world.

Public schools were created as a tool to produce a docile and undemanding citizenry. This has led to amazing paradoxes in America, such as our expectation that fire departments should be a public service, but that somehow medical care should be considered a private luxury. The way things are, here, is not a result of a strong sense of our culture or philosophy as Americans. It’s a result of our collective inability and unwillingness to take responsibility for our own thoughts. Radical unschooling is part of a radical corrective for that.

(That there was the rant portion of this post, if you’re scoring at home.)

The Daily Beast has published an excerpt of my book.

However, they embellished my record, and I need to set it straight.

First, they called me a genius. If I were a genius it would undermine my message. You do not need to be a genius to do what I did. I’m an intelligent guy, sure, but so are you. Unintelligent people don’t read blogs. I prefer to say that I’m “guaranteed not stupid” (most days), but the word “genius” is used to separate people. It’s what you call those special magical people who think in ways you can’t imagine.

Second, they said I have an eighth grade education. What I have is an eighth grade diploma. It’s the only diploma-like thing I have. They didn’t give out diplomas for 9th and 10th grade, but I did sort of finish 10th grade (not sure if I passed it, because I don’t know how to interpret my transcript, but I tried NOT to pass 10th grade). So, I have a 10th grade formal education.