Access to Resources

Julian and Oliver examine a femur bone from a giant game of "Operation" at the Grossology exhibit.

            Access to Resources is another fundamental piece of the unschooling puzzle.  Resources can mean internet for research, videos and communication, or easy access to books and materials for projects, or access to outside spaces like mountains and parks.  This also includes the immediate community surrounding the unschooling family, whether it’s an unschooling community or simply the people who live in the neighborhood.  None of these things are essential on their own except perhaps the aspect of community.  For instance, if a family lived in a rural area they might have access to outside spaces, they may have many books or videos in the home, or they may have internet.  Because they have internet, they have access to the wider unschooling community, whether or not they have a community of people living near them.  Of course, if a family did not have internet and also didn’t feel a sense of community in their neighborhood, they may need to find a different way to connect with people in the world.  The need for connection is not singular for unschoolers, it’s a human need.  I won’t pretend that any of these things would be easy for all families to provide, but that doesn’t make them less essential to a healthy unschooling environment. 

Relationship Development

            One of the most important aspects of an unschooling curriculum is the development of the relationships in the child’s life, most notably between parent and child.  This relationship is the how and the why of unschooling.  It is the how in that an enormous amount of trust is needed for this lifestyle to work.  The parent must trust that the child is capable of learning what he or she needs without compulsory schooling.  The child must trust the parent to the extent that they feel secure in their relationship.  This security allows the child to freely explore their interests and passions without fear of ridicule for what those interests are or fear of ridicule for not knowing things along the way.  When there is unconditional trust between parent and child - the child can ask questions without worry that they are too elementary for their age or anything else.  

            As mentioned earlier, this relationship development is also the why of unschooling, it is a huge part of the lifestyle that those who choose to unschool are seeking.  Unschooling allows families to stay together to develop relationships with each other in ways not possible when the children go to school and parents go to work for so many hours out of almost every day.  In attempting to explain I’d like to look to our assumed social contracts and how unschooling can flip these on their heads.  Unschoolers are breaking the social contract that says we send our kids to school to learn academics and to learn to socialize, or how to “fit in” in the world.  Unschoolers live by a different social contract, they are still concerned with learning and socializing, however the view is broader.  The focus isn’t necessarily only on the content to be learned, but on the child learning the content; the focus isn’t on “fitting in,” but on learning how to exist as your best self in the world as it exists.  The child isn’t shamed for not learning how to read at a certain “level” by a certain age, or for not caring about what the adult thinks is important to know.  The child is supported in learning what he or she wants to learn, and the child has modeled to him how to behave in the world – what works and what doesn’t. 

Poverty and Education

 

(This is a picture of my wonderful in-laws, one of my sons and my "partner in crime," Daniel)

(Some of this post is in all caps, and it's not because I'm trying to add emphasis.  I just can't figure out how to change that!!)  
 
One of my best friends is a Kindergarten teacher, she’s been teaching for nine years and she’s on the brink of quitting.  At this point, the only thing keeping her in the classroom is that there’s nothing else she wants to do.  I can relate.  I would be in the same boat if I decided not to have children. 

So we talk about how to make it better, our ideas go around and around in circles as if they were right in front of us, and we try to see them clearly, try to see what connects them all, what would actually have an impact on the lives of the children in her care and on her life spent caring for them.  What we inevitably (and with increasing anger) circle back to is poverty.  There is only so much a teacher can do in the walls of their classroom, and with all the testing mandates and lack of support for teachers within her school she feels trapped, useless in helping her kindergartners grow.  This isn’t an issue of a few children that have passed through her classroom, this is widespread. 

            Some “education” issues that can be attributed mostly to poverty are low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, hard to reach parents and violence within the school.   So far, policy makers have been dealing with these issues as if they were the “meat and bones” in and of themselves, when they are really symptoms of other problems with deep roots.  It is too much to expect school alone to solve these problems at this scale.  It’s a lot like trying to make your fruit tree yield more fruit, but only addressing the part of the tree that you can see above the soil.

When people decide that these issues don’t reflect a deeper problem and are the whole of the problem, they also must take the view that it is entirely the fault of the families allowing low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, being hard to reach and simply being “bad” influences on their children.  So these people become “less than.”  I used to be one of those people who thought it was a poor person’s fault for coming to be that way.  Now that I have children, and we live below the poverty line, I realize how difficult it is.  But we have help, a lot of help from both his parents and mine, who were able to retire comfortably, meaning they have time to babysit our kids when we need it.  We also know, in the back of our minds, if we ever need help financially our parents are able to help.  If we had grown up in poverty we wouldn’t have that help.  We wouldn’t have been able to buy our home, and I might not even consider homeschooling, knowing how important that second income would be for us. 

Minimum wage is not a livable wage, especially because the whole system seems geared to keep the poor where they are.  If the minimum wage was raised to reflect the needs of the people working for that money, then maybe a household could be supported by one earner.  This potentially frees up the other parent or head of household to do things like cook meals at home – almost always cheaper than eating prepared food, and almost always healthier.  The people who think education can be “fixed” by implementing new curriculum and tests, are blind to the effects of poverty.  The disadvantages of growing up in poverty can seem small when looked at individually, but they stack tall and circle around so there seems to be a never ending vortex keeping the poor from being anything else. 

We can only seem to come up with the same impossible seeming solutions to these issues: Raise the minimum wage to something livable, make health care a right afforded to everyone, and hire more teachers to allow for smaller class sizes.  These are just the basics, but they still seem unimaginable right now.  In a perfect world teachers would be seen as professionals on the same level as doctors and lawyers, and it would be just as difficult to become a teacher as it is to become a doctor.  And why not?  Teachers are caring for the future doctors of the world. 

Why should we worry about poverty in general?  Desperate people do desperate things.  I’ve wondered so many times why this doesn’t bother the people who would like to keep minimum wage at a “minimum” and keep health care as a privilege for a select few.  If people can’t take care of themselves legally, a lot of them (especially the more industrious, entrepreneurial, “go getter” types) will disregard the law and take matters into their own hands.