by Ben Hewitt
There are times when I wonder if we have it all backward. And I wonder how the world might be if we viewed the very reason for our existence as being not about control and security but about surrender. Not to our fears and insecurities but to our sense of what is possible, to the belief that we all have the ability to shape the world as we imagine it, and that our actions reflect this imagined world until it becomes not imagined, but real. What if we understood—what if we felt we could afford to understand—that whatever harm we do the natural world, we do to ourselves? That whatever harm we do to others, we do to ourselves? What if we did not worry about being taken advantage of by immigrants, by minorities, by corporations, by politicians, by government? What if we no longer worried that others might perceive us as naive? What if the point were not to know as much as possible but to feel as much as possible? What if every day, come sun, rain, snow, heat, or cold, we pledged to find a tree, small or tall, straight or curved, leafed or not, and we sat with our back against its trunk for no less than a dozen minutes? What if we thought we could feel the tree breathing? What if we actually could?
And finally: what if we taught our children accordingly?
Of course, to do so does not require that we unschool or homeschool our children. Nor is it incompatible with much of the rote information that now comprises the majority of institutionalized learning, some of which is enormously helpful, and even essential. Addition, subtraction, writing, reading: all of these and more are necessary for a child—not to mention an adult—to communicate with his family and community. But the truth is that they can be learned with surprisingly little effort, and in a surprisingly scant amount of time, and always in the context of a child’s true interests and passions.
In truth, we have spent almost no time teaching this information to Fin and Rye; indeed, we have found that they learn and retain it best when they are allowed to do so at their own behest. We did not teach Fin how to read, but instead read to him and around him, and one day it happened that our son noticed whenever we skipped a word or passage. Not many days later, he began picking up books and reading to himself. Rye has come to reading more slowly, but in much the same way. “Mama, you missed a word,” he’ll say as Penny reads, because, of course, he’s been reading right along with her.
The math they need is all around us, even in our fields and gardens. “How much garlic do I need to save for next year’s seed?” Fin asks us, and the calculations begin: There are five cloves per bulb, and he needs to plant a bulb every six inches along a forty-five-foot strip of soil. He scrunches his face like any child would, chasing the answer in his head. Fin has been slower to math than his brother; he is in general not as precise a child as Rye and more content with something being “close enough.” But as he matures, he is realizing that precision has its place. Not long ago, after years of steadfast denials that math was even a necessary skill, he said to Penny, “OK, Mama, I have to get better with math.” And he has. Not because we’ve forced him to but because he wants to. Because he recognized that he needed to.
Fin and Rye have learned to write the way all children learn to write: by writing. But rather than demand that they spend hours practicing penmanship, the boys have learned to write as a natural extension of their desire to send letters to family and friends. They have kept on-and-off-again journals of their adventures or in order to track their goats’ breeding schedules. They love to draw cartoons, full of thought bubbles and bawdy conversations.
Having witnessed, time and again, my sons’ ability to quickly learn the essential skills of modern life in the context of their interests, I am struck by just how much of our children’s time we waste on rote learning in isolation from other knowledge and experience. Even as I write these words, I can feel the frustration and even anger I knew as a teen, the sense of my time being stolen from me just so I could meet someone else’s expectations of how and what I should learn. I am struck by how disrespectful this is to children, and how it cannot help but teach them that their lives are not their own. Yes, there is more to a schooled education than reading, writing, and arithmetic, but like most adults I know, I struggle to recall precisely what I learned in school, and I strongly believe this is because it was learned in isolation from anything that mattered to me. It was learned solely because I was told it must be learned and because I passed my days learning what I was told must be learned, I was not free to pursue my own passions. Or even develop them in the first place.
Does our self-directed approach sometimes mean that my boys do not “perform” to the standards set by contemporary educational assumptions? As a matter of fact, it does. For instance, Fin did not learn to read until he was nearly eight, and Rye seems to be tracking nearly a year behind him. Quite clearly, there are things that many of their peers know—some of whom attend school, some of whom don’t—that my boys don’t know. Some of these things they will learn as they need to learn them; some they may not ever learn. Do not think that just because your child is unschooled he will self-direct himself to memorize every capitol city of every state, or the date of every important historical event. But I have seen that if I can let go of my fear and simply trust them, they will learn what they need to learn, and they will do it happily, without anger or the sense that their destiny is not their own. It is not that I wish to protect my sons from all the emotions learning gives rise to. I know they will frequently be frustrated. I know that often they will fail. But frustration and failure are as natural, healthy, and essential to their development as confidence, success, and joy.
Of course there is knowledge and experience contained in the vessels of my young sons that eludes the vast majority of their peers. That eludes the vast majority of adults, even. I see the way they move through the forest, stopping to pluck a handful of wood sorrel or chanterelle mushrooms, or to point out the scratch marks of a wild turkey or, in the winter, the oval of a deer’s bed. Everywhere, I see the evidence of their knowledge and learning. The multitudinous structures they’ve built, some of evident purpose and careful design and some that appear purposeless. Or the pack baskets they use almost every day; they’re only a year old, and already they are ragged at the edges, the thin splints of wood fraying like fabric. Or the wool hats they felted the day after our sheep were shorn.
You might ask, “What is the point of knowing these things?” To which I can only answer, “What is the point of knowing anything?” By extension, we might both ask, “What is the point of an education?” Is it to be socialized to a particular set of expectations? Is it to continue sawing at the few frayed strands still connecting us to the natural world? Is it to learn that learning happens best under the gaze of a specialist? If so, then perhaps you are correct. There is no point to my sons knowing what fox pee smells like, or which of the wild mushrooms in our forest are edible, or how to make fire from sticks. There is no point to the ease and comfort with which they move through the wilderness. There is no point to their desire to help our neighbor get his hay under cover before the rain comes. There is no point to their boundless curiosity regarding the habits of the woodland animals. There is no point to all the little shelters and tools they’ve built.
But what if, as I suggested at the outset of this book, the point of a child’s education simply cannot be found or measured in the context of performance-based assessments, standardized tests, or projected lifetime income? What if the point of an education is to imbue our children with a sense of their connectivity, not merely with other humans but also with the trees and animals and soil and moon and sky? What if the point of life is to feel these connections, and all the emotions they give rise to?
What then?
I am often asked what might happen to our society if every child were educated in the manner of Fin and Rye. What if every child was granted the freedom to learn at his or her own pace, according to his or her specific interests? What of the many highly trained professionals upon which we all rely, the doctors, surgeons, engineers, pilots, and so many more?
Where would they come from? How would they learn the incredibly important and specific knowledge their trades demand? Surely not by knowing how to craft a long bow. Certainly not by spending their days in the forest, or bent over a pot of boiling sap, their cheeks moist with steam, their hair absorbing the acrid smell of wood smoke.
But such questions—while certainly logical—are inherently flawed, because they assume that a childhood of self-directed learning is incompatible with the higher education the aforementioned careers require. Likewise, we seem to be afflicted by a cultural belief that if you don’t compel people to learn, they will choose not to learn. This belief is rooted in the fallacy that people are inherently lazy and disinterested. It is rooted in the misconception that a child can choose to not learn.
Indeed, I have found that the truth is exactly the opposite. When you allow people—both children and adults—the freedom to learn what they want, when they want, they come to their learning with fierce passion and energy. They come to it not because they are motivated to make money but because they are driven by something far more powerful than material gain: love of knowledge and the very process of attaining knowledge. The result is that they end up learning and doing what they should be learning and doing, when they should be learning and doing it, and for this simple reason they become better at whatever occupation they have chosen, whether it is farmer, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, carpenter, artist, logger, and even teacher. And the world becomes better for it.
Of course, not every child—no matter the structure (or lack thereof) of their education—will turn to the land in the manner of my sons. And while I am deeply grateful for my children’s connection to nature and to the place we live, I have seen how other families, under vastly different circumstances, have also benefited from loosening their grip over their children’s education and time. I know of unschooled children in cities who are thriving and finding meaning and purpose in their days, just as I know of unschooled children in the country who do not make bows and maple syrup but are nonetheless blossoming in the context of their own self-directed passions. Unschooling is not about the discovery of any particular body of knowledge. It is about the discovery of self.
Am I really advocating for an end to school? I am not, although at times it must seem as if I am. But in truth it hardly matters. Such a thing as ending institutionalized learning is unrealistic, anyway. It has been less than a century since every state in the union adopted compulsory schooling, but in that time our society has become utterly dependent on school, in no small part because we inhabit an economy that grants few of us the freedom to allow our children to follow a different path. The difficult truth is that even for families that might otherwise choose to educate at home, school performs the crucial function of giving their children somewhere to go while parents work the jobs necessary to make ends meet. It’s not that public education is particularly affordable (in fact, it is precisely the opposite), but few families can afford to consider alternatives.
What’s more, we have become emotionally dependent on school. After so many decades of being socialized to the notion that a child’s learning must be structured, measured, and mandated, we find it nearly impossible to believe otherwise. It is not our fault, because most of us were “taught” in precisely this manner. In the process, our innate love of learning was wounded, and our connections to nature and the community and world beyond the classroom became frayed. They are not severed, because they can never truly be severed—they exist whether we care to acknowledge them or not. But by not acknowledging them, by not reveling in them, we cannot achieve our full potential as human beings.
Penny and I have had to unlearn so much. Indeed, we are still unlearning, and will be until the day we die. In a very real sense, it is not our sons who needed unschooling: it is us. Our sons’ unschooling has become our unschooling, and the freedom we have granted them to embrace learning is a freedom we have granted ourselves. Fin and Rye are teaching us so much, not merely the small specifics of this time and place but also the lessons that no curriculum, no matter how rigorous or comprehensive, can teach. How to find one’s place in a world that can occasionally seem inhospitable. How and where to find beauty and contentment in the minutia of our days. What can be let go of and what should be retained.
There is a place for school in these lessons, but it is not the place most schooling currently occupies. Still, there are models of how a school can become an institution that does not stifle the human desire to learn but instead supports and facilitates it. There are places like the Sudbury Valley School, in Framingham, Massachusetts, where children are allowed to learn at their own pace, and in the manner of their choosing. The Sudbury Valley School follows a model created by Britain’s Summerhill School, in which adults are on hand to facilitate and advise, but never to mandate and, via the accepted norms of grades, recognition, and advancement, demean. In fact, at both Summerhill and Sudbury, founded in 1921 and 1968, respectively, students can even vote whether or not to renew a teacher’s contract.
It was never my intention for this book to be prescriptive in nature, but rather to share my family’s journey and some of the stories we’ve collected along our path toward rooting ourselves into this small piece of land. The constellation of decisions surrounding this rooting—to unschool our children, to pass our days in the quiet, settled manner necessitated by the seasonal rituals inherent in a small farm, to create a life that might be seen by some as needlessly simple or even lacking—has enriched our lives in ways that seem to never stop surprising me. It is as if one discovery leads to another, one lesson heralding the next, and I cannot overstate the extent to which my sons open the door to these lessons. My gratitude to them, and to Penny, who works so hard to facilitate their self-directed learning, is profound.
Like most people I know, I experience moments of uncertainty about choices I have made. There are so many permutations of what it means to live a good life. There are so many ways to be. How can I ever choose between them all? But then summer comes, and I’m riding the hay wagon behind Martha, and I’m dripping sweat and my arms shake as I pass another bale back to Penny and the boys, and I feel the quiet comfort of knowing there is nothing else I want or need.
And I feel like this when I’m moving the cows to a fresh paddock and it’s early and the sun is just coming up and my feet are wet from dew and I’m moving fast because I’m shivering a little. And the cows, they know exactly what I’m doing because we do this dance every damn day and they stand at the fence watching my every move, waiting for the moment I drop the wire. I feel like this when I’m standing in Melvin’s barnyard and we’re talking cows or politics or machinery or weather or he’s telling me about the heifer that was born the day before and she almost didn’t make it but she did and I should really see the mark on her forehead, it looks just like a little bird.
And I feel like this when I catch a glimpse of Fin and Rye moving along the forest’s edge, on their way to some adventure I will never be fully privy to, exploring some world that is not mine to know. In these moments, I see how they are becoming more self-contained, and I feel the passing ache of the knowledge that someday, they will leave this place. It may seem as if this is far in the future, but I know that when it happens, I will look back over the intervening years and realize that it was merely a sliver of time, a window that has closed but which, through recalling, invites my gaze.
EPILOGUE: MOONSTRUCK
After evening chores, the four of us strap on our skis. It is late December and a minor storm has moved through. Three inches, or maybe even less. That morning, I’d told the boys I didn’t think there was enough snow for skiing. “Doesn’t look very good,” I said dismissively. “Bony.”
They’d ignored me and skied anyway, hour after hour up and down the big hill in our pasture, falling and laughing and arguing about where to go next and how to build the jump. I watched them through the warm side of my office window, and not for the first time I realized how much my sons
have to teach me and how quiet those lessons can be. So quiet I could miss them. “Doesn’t look very good,” I’d said. “Bony,” I’d said. Well, it was sure as heck good enough for them.
The boys were right. The skiing is excellent, the snow fast and yielding, the air cold but not too cold. The four of us glide out onto Melvin’s hayfield, its frozen surface shorn by his cows’ autumn grazing. Blood rushes to my cheeks. I can feel it there, puddled and warm.
The idea had been to ski under the nearly full moon; the full moon had risen two nights prior, but two nights prior the ground had been bereft of snow. Tonight, for the first half hour or so, we skied in the inky darkness, and the sky was an unbroken blanket of blue black, as if a curtain had been drawn over the cosmos. “Where’s the moon, Papa?” Rye asked, and I explained that soon it would rise and our way would be lighted as surely as if the sun itself had broken over the horizon. “You wait and see,” I said. “It’s going to be something.”
We skied on. But after another twenty minutes, it was still dark, and the boys were getting antsy, and I began to wonder if I’d somehow gotten confused, if perhaps the idea of a waning moon is a myth and the lunar cycle actually goes from full start to full stop in just one day, a light switch that can be turned on and off.
Finally, with my confidence in my grasp of the lunar rhythms at an all-time low, a soft glow emerged from behind the northeastern horizon, as if a light were shining in the depths of dark water. “Here it comes,” I said, but the boys seemed skeptical. The preceding half hour had dented my credibility. But soon the glow brightened and then, inch by inch, the moon began to rise. We stopped and watched, and even the boys—especially the boys—were transfixed. We could actually see it rising, could track its progress through the sky. It was as if the moon had been catapulted from somewhere deep in the earth’s core, as if it had finally broken free of binding chains, and within minutes, the entire landscape was brushed in a warm, almost intoxicating glow. For a moment I experienced a feeling that was not immediately familiar, but which I soon came to identify as the sensation of being comforted.
