Here are three full chapters from the Teenage Liberation Handbook: an introduction ("About this Book"), Chapter 12 ("The Importance of the Vacation"), and Chapter 16 ("Starting Out: A Sense of the Possibilities") For the Table of Contents, click here.

About This Book

 "Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in." 
                             --Leonardo da Vinci

Did your guidance counselor ever tell you to consider quitting school? That you have other choices, quite beyond lifelong hamburger flipping or inner-city crack dealing? That legally you can find a way out of school, that once you're out you'll learn and grow better, faster, and more naturally than you ever did in school, that there are zillions of alternatives, that you can quit school and still go to A Good College and even have a Real Life in the Suburbs if you so desire? Just in case your counselor never told you these things, I'm going to. That's what this book is for.

                 What it's not

                This is not a book about the kind of "homeschooling" in which you stay home all day and hang a chalkboard in the family room and write essays designed by your father and work geometry problems assigned by your mother.

                There are some good things to say about that kind of homeschooling, especially for young children who haven't yet acquired basic reading, writing, and math computation skills. There are also some bad things to say about it. In this book I will say little about it.

                Most people who do fantastic unschoolish things with their time call themselves homeschoolers, because it keeps them out of trouble and it doesn't freak out the neighbors. Anne Brosnan put it well in a letter to Growing Without Schooling magazine:

When an adult comes up and asks, "Why aren't you in school?" you're supposed to soften it by saying, "My mom (or dad) teaches me at home." If you say, "I don't even go to school. So far, I've taught myself everything I want to know," they think you've run away from school or are a lunatic. Whereas the other way, they think your parent's a teacher and you get private lessons.

The usual adult person in America thinks it's terribly hard to teach yourself something, and if you want to learn something, you've got to find somebody to teach it to you. This leads to the idea that kids are dumb unless taught or unless they go to school.[1]

                If you quit school, you too will probably wish to call yourself a homeschooler, at least when you talk to the school board. But that doesn't require bringing the ugliness of school into your home, or transforming your parents into teachers. Nor, for that matter, does it require that you stay home. The idea is to catch more of the world, not less. To avoid these kinds of connotations, I usually use the term unschooling. But be aware that many people who talk about homeschooling mean the same thing I do when I say unschooling.

                This is not a book specifically about Christian homeschooling, although most Christians will find it as useful as anyone else. I point this out because many people associate homeschooling with fundamentalist Christianity and Fear of Darwin. Many homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians, which has some heavy impact on what they do instead of school school. Many others, however, are agnostics, mellow Christians, Jews, pagans, atheists, and Buddhists. Help yourself to any religious belief you like, but in these pages I won't suggest that you read your Bible instead of a biology book.

                 What it is 

                This book is a wild card, a shot in the dark, a hopeful prayer.

                This book wants you to quit school and do what you love. Yes, I know, that's the weirdest thing you ever heard. Hoping to make this idea feel possible to you, I tell about teenagers who are already living happy lives without school, and I offer lots of ideas and strategies to help you get a real life and convince your adults to cooperate.

                "Excuse me?" you interrupt, "Quit school? Right. And throw away my future and pump gas all my life and get Addicted to Drugs and be totally lost in today's world. Right."

                If you said that, please feel free to march straight to the nearest schoolperson and receive a bushel of gold stars, extra credit points, and proud smiles. You've learned exactly what they taught you. After you get tired of sticking stars to your locker, do please come back and read further.

                This book is built on the belief that life is wonderful and schools are stifling. It is built on an impassioned belief in freedom. And it is built on the belief that schools do the opposite of what they say they do. They prevent learning and they destroy one's love of learning.

                Of course, there are hundreds of other books with similar premises. Some of these books go on to suggest that if certain changes were made, or brighter teachers were hired, schools would be good places. Other books say compulsory schools are fundamentally bad places and society, or at least individual people, should abandon them. This book agrees with that, but it doesn't stop there.

                This is a practical book--a book for individual teenagers, a real-life handbook meant to be used and acted on. I have no hope that the school system will change enough to make schools healthy places, until it makes school blatantly optional. But I have plenty of faith that people--you, your friends--can intelligently take greater control over their own lives. So this book bypasses the rigid, uncreative red tape of that System and instead speaks directly to you.

                If school didn't make people so stupid, this could be a very short handbook. But unfortunately, most of the teenagers I've known and worked with--like the teenager I was, eight years back--are more clueless than preschool children when it comes to knowing how to ask and answer important questions. So, much of this book is about access--how to do this, find that out, what your choices are and how to take advantage of them.

                 Whom it's for

                As the title gently implies, this is a book for teenagers, though their parents and little brothers are welcome too. If you are nine and want to use this book to get free, more power to you. If you are eleven and think of yourself as a teenager, that's fine with me too.

                Is this book for all teenagers? Here are four answers.

                If you are like me, this book is definitely for you. When I was in school, people asked me if I liked it. Sometimes I said yes. Sometimes I said no. I didn't think about it much, because I figured it didn't matter. Whether I liked it or not, I knew (or thought I knew) there were no other options. I believed in school in an abstract sense--education, learning, great writers and poets and thinkers and all that. My grades were good. I hated homework--and rarely did any--but I felt constantly guilty, rather than proud, about this. I wasn't offended by the disrespect my peers and I lived with, because I'd never imagined that it was possible for adults to treat me differently.

                Usually, I thought I'd be fine if only I was a senior instead of an eighth grader, or if only I went to some artsy boarding school instead of boring Capital High School. I liked about half of my teachers, but felt no enthusiasm for their classes. I craved Friday afternoons and June. Except for choir, my life in school was dreary and uninspired, but I had nothing to compare it to. I'd never heard of homeschooling, let alone unschooling, and dropping out was not on my List of Possibilities in Life. I wonder now, sometimes with bitterness, how things might have been different if I had heard then of the possibilities beyond school. The first wave of the unschooling movement caught some people about my age, and I envy them.

                Very definitely, this book is not just for people who are labeled gifted. I make this point because in these pages you will run into a lot of examples of unschooled teenagers who do rather impressive things with their time. I don't want you to be intimidated by them, only inspired. They don't live brilliantly because they are more intelligent than you; they live brilliantly because they have the time and encouragement they need. Many of them did very badly in school before their parents set them free. 

                This book is for you whether you live in the U.S.A., Wales, Peru, South Africa, or anywhere else on Planet Earth. I wrote the first edition with only the U.S. in mind, and most of these pages still reflect my experience as a U.S. citizen. But, as chapter 11 points out, unschooling is a growing trend in many far corners of the globe, and you can be part of it.

                If you have already considered leaving school--as a "dropout" or anything else, of course this book is for you. If you have been feeling guilty or inadequate because of your "failure" in school, perhaps I can knock some optimistic sense into you. Perhaps I can get you to think of yourself as rising out instead of dropping out.[2] The way we think of ourselves makes all the difference.

                If you truly enjoy school and all of its paraphernalia more than anything else you can possibly imagine doing, I suppose I'm not writing for you, because I don't understand you. I'm not sure you exist, but if you do, we live in different universes. I used to think everyone was strong willed and independently inclined. Now I'm not sure. Sometimes I think perhaps school really does completely destroy that fierce, free spirit in some people. Other times my mother half convinces me that some people are naturally docile and passive. Maybe I have something to learn about docility. Or maybe I have a healthy aversion to something dead in people that should be alive.

                However, I invite you to have a look at this book anyway. Even if it doesn't change the way you think about school, or convince you to stop going, it might make you aware of some useful opportunities and resources--things you can do with your life in addition to school. After you finish your homework, naturally.

                Of course, some places we call school are less schoolish than others. I feel pretty strongly that even the most alternative school, as long as it is compulsory, is not a healthy place to be. But I'd be an idiot to say every single school is bad for every single person. If you go to a humane school, and love it, even in May, and have a gut feeling that it's a good and healthy place, stay there. I hope I never tell anyone to ignore their gut feelings. I always listen to mine, and usually act on them. Of course, you have to make sure you're not confusing fear and deeply imbedded guilt with your true feelings.

                 Why I wrote it 

                Just in case you are dying to know.

                When I went to college, I knew from the start that I wanted to be an English teacher. I had always loved to read and write, but I had rarely enjoyed any of the work I had done in my English classes. In my naivete, I blamed this on my teachers. Several of them were obviously very intelligent, interesting, and creative people, but their classes were nevertheless dull, and I thought this was their fault. I knew I would be a different kind of teacher.

                My own classes would be dynamic, entertaining, and always engaging. I would love the stimulation of being around "learning" all my life, and my students would shower me with continual gratitude for rescuing them from the brain-death of their previous existence.

                Student teaching took some of the sparkle out of that arrogance, but I chalked up my victims' lack of complete enthusiasm to my inexperience and lack of adequate time to prepare. (Somehow, I assumed that later I'd have more time to prepare.) Yes, a few of them said I was the best teacher they'd ever had. Most of them just turned in most of their homework on time and looked at me funny when I rhapsodized about writing. I did not find a real teaching position for the autumn after college graduation, and I ended up substitute teaching in the public schools of Oakland and Berkeley, California.

                Subbing put me in the position to see the ugliest aspects of school, and my life-long tendency to rebel against or at least make fun of authority surfaced and grew. In between sending students to the office for calling me a "white bitch" or for pinching me or for loudly interrupting too many times, I'd sit and despairingly ponder the meaninglessness of these huge inner-city schools. I still felt that with determination, I could make a difference. However, I began to realize that working with the kinds of administrators I most often encountered could only be an uphill battle. Furthermore, for many of these students it was probably too late--schools had so crushed their "love of learning" that I could hardly hope to inspire all of them to write or think or discover wonderful things.

                After that school year, I took a break to travel in Peru and then spent three months substituting in the homogeneous, well-behaved schools that I grew up in in Boise, Idaho. I still felt that I wanted to teach kids to read and write but I began to yearn to escape the rigidity and dullness of public schools. I began contemplating starting my own tiny, inexpensive, independent school. I imagined a group of about ten students who spent their time taking field trips and hanging out in someone's basement making movies or writing novels. While I was brainstorming and researching the logistics of setting up something like this, I first stumbled across the writing of John Holt. By that time I'd heard of homeschooling but dismissed it, as most people seem to, as the activity of a bunch of scaredy-cat fanatics afraid their kids would find out about evolution and condoms if they went to school. John Holt's writings threw a bright new light on the subject, and on the whole concepts of school and learning.

                Essentially, he argued that learning is a natural process that happens to anyone who is busy doing something real for its own sake, and that school destroys and confuses this process. Although most of his ideas had never occurred to me, they immediately made so much sense that I felt as though I'd thought of them myself. His books were eloquent yet simple, by far the wisest words I had ever found about education. I realized that although a tiny school like the one I'd envisioned might be a good alternative for students, I wasn't equipped to start it--I didn't have any real expertise, and I didn't know anything worth teaching besides how to embroider, go backpacking, bake bread, dance a little, play the piano, and maybe write. I realized how few skills I had, and that the few skills I did have hadn't come from school. I knew about a lot of things from reading and keeping my ears open, but few of the books that had shaped my mind had been assigned or recommended in school. I felt freshly angry about having given up ballet (instead of school) in junior high, and about having pushed that biggest love of mine, dancing, into a mostly-neglected cupboard. Mainly, I felt flooded by a sense of loss and bitterness--all that time I'd wasted sitting and staring out windows when I could have been out traveling, learning, growing, living.

                I determined to start living my life, then and there. I packed up and migrated to Taos, New Mexico, where I slept on the mesa in a house made of bottles and wind, and feasted every morning on sky and space and sage-scent. (At the same time, I supported my little sister's decision to quit high school.) I spent as much time as I could dancing.

                I continued to read John Holt, but I eventually decided to teach anyway. After all, school was going to exist whether I wanted it to or not, and I figured I might as well jump in and make it the best experience I could. Anyway, I didn't know how to do anything that I wanted to do more. I still felt that public school was a horrendous institution, but I daydreamed about finding a private school that was humane and lively.

                I found a position teaching seventh and eighth grade English at a small independent school in Colorado. I was thrilled. It believed firmly in experiential education--learning by doing--and my colleagues and the administrators were wonderful people: flexible, enthusiastic, imaginative, intelligent, funny, and warm. With only nineteen students, I'd have the chance to know each of them well. It seemed so different from public school that I looked forward to it with great excitement.

                The year did go smoothly in most regards. However, I began to feel that this small school was not essentially healthier than ordinary public schools for most of its students. Naturally, they received more individual attention than they would have in public school, but some of them experienced an uglier flip side of that individual attention: we teachers seemed to see or otherwise find out nearly everything about students' lives, and then to hound students endlessly about things that were none of our business--missing homework assignments, social conflicts, messy notebooks. Even when we were not inclined to pry or push, students had little privacy, no way to escape our eyes.

                Furthermore, this small, "caring,"  "creative" school was fundamentally the same as any ordinary public school, because it controlled students' lives. It continually dictated to them how to use their time. So what if they were role playing the lives of the early colonists instead of just reading the dry words of their American history textbook? These cute "experiential" activities we teachers took pride in had the same effect any schoolwork does. They stole kids' time and energy, so that John-the-math-genius-and-artist had no time to build his geometric sculptures, so that Andy couldn't pursue his fascination with well-made knives and guns, so that Kris and Chris and Rick and Young didn't have enough time to read, so that Shira--a brilliant actress and talented musician--was threatened with having to drop out of her outstanding chorale group if she missed any homework assignments.

                In some ways, in fact, it seemed more harmful than public school. Homework was excessive, leaving students little freedom even at home. Lots of parents expected the school to help turn their offspring into lawyers and Successful Executives, and the school catered to this image enough that it put tremendous pressure on kids.

                But despite all this, I decided to stay with teaching, and I brainstormed ways to make my classroom as healthy as possible. I wanted to give my students as much freedom within the realm of language arts as I could, so I devised an independent study program complete with an innovative "All A's" grading system borrowed from Richard E. Koop of Gulf Middle School in Florida. The assistant headmaster, a courageous, warm woman, gave me her blessing, saying that since I obviously had the kids' needs and growth foremost in my mind, she'd support my experiment.

                I began my second year of teaching with high hopes that soon plummeted. Four or five people who loved to write (enough to do so in their spare time and vacations) thrived in the program. It gave them official time to do what they wanted to do anyway--write novels or collections of short stories or long long essays--rather than drain their energy with arbitrary assignments of arbitrary lengths fit into arbitrary schedules. But most of my students saw it as just another way to make them do something they really didn't want or need to do, at least not every day. So much for freedom.

                After I had felt dismal for a while because my curriculum hadn't dramatically changed the nature of school, we went on a week-long field trip to Washington, D.C. Conflict was inevitable; the teachers who designed the trip naturally wanted to take as much advantage as possible of all the things to see and do in the area, so our schedule was hectic and demanding. At one point, the students were scolded for slouching and whispering during a dull evening lecture after a particularly exhausting day. As students exploded in their own defense, and one of my favorite students said sincerely that he wanted to go home, my mind reeled. It was perfectly fair, I thought, to expect people to behave wonderfully in any situation they chose freely to be part of. If I went to a movie and talked all through it, I'd deserve to get kicked out. If I didn't feel like sitting quietly, I shouldn't go in the first place. But our students hadn't been given any choice as to whether they wanted to sit through a lecture, or even whether they went to Washington, or, for that matter, whether they sat in English and science every day.

                That night I lay in bed agitating till four a.m. Although I hadn't upbraided our students on that particular evening, I had certainly done so countless other times, for similar and sometimes less justifiable reasons.

                I called Holt's writings up in my mind and admitted to myself that he was right--school was a bad place, a controlling place, and I wasn't going to change anything by being there. I could see that some of my students were fed up with school, but I knew they had no clue as to other possibilities. And so the seeds of this book sprouted in my brain. Also, in the back of my head I knew I could not continue to teach, but at first I refused to look this knowledge in the face. The prospect of life without my "career" was frightening and uncertain. However, I started looking at the world with a fresher, more honest perspective. While bustling along the sidewalk and scolding students for dawdling, I thought longingly how I would enjoy spending a leisurely week in D.C. with a  few of my students, talking with the homeless who camped across from the White House, roaming the Smithsonian for days, taking time out for skateboarding and sky staring.

                Back in Colorado, my convictions strengthened daily. I noticed an Emerson quote on the "Civil War" bulletin board, and I shivered: "If you put a chain around the neck of a slave," it said, "the other end fastens itself around your own." The final catalyst came the Friday I read Thoreau with my classes. Nearly everything he said seemed to pertain to the whole school issue, but one fragment in particular of "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" lodged itself in my brain.

                After explaining that he would not pay his taxes as long as they supported such evils as slavery, Thoreau had written:

If any tax gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

                That was that. Forced to face my own responsibility, I resolved first to quit teaching, and then to write this book. John Holt and a few others had written a stack of excellent books on unschooling, but I felt that teenagers needed their own book, one to tell them they weren't wrong to hate school, and to make them aware of alternatives.

                The rest of the teaching year was horribly difficult and odd. In the classroom I vacillated between the easy going, honest human being I wanted to be, and the businesslike teacher I knew I had to be if my class was to function. One day I'd sit laughing with my students, talking about a story one of them had written, ignoring their gum (against school rules) or "off-task" behavior. The next day I'd hand out detentions for "swearing," tardies, and of course any rude, sarcastic, or otherwise "inappropriate" statements. In my confused inconsistency, I imagine I was a more frightening authority figure than a military-style teacher would have been; sometimes it seemed that no sooner had students let down their guard and begun to relate to me as a real person, than I would snap nervously back into teacher mode and bitch at them for "disrupting."

                I could not tell my students about my raging opinions with a clean professional conscience, but I couldn't not tell them with a clean moral conscience. A friend sent me a button that said "Free the Kids," and I wore it. Some days I was afraid that by writing I'd lose all my friends and even the trust of my students themselves. I finally told two students what I was up to, and of course had some guilty professional twangs about doing so. But I desperately hoped that I would finish, and that my book would find its way into my students' hands, in time for them to decide whether they wanted it to make a difference in their lives. June came;  I hugged my students and colleagues goodbye amidst plenty of tears; I moved to Oregon and set up camp with my computer. Then, with a shiver and a grin, I hunkered down to write these pages for you.

                 How to use it

                Notice that it's divided into five parts. The first tells why you should consider leaving school. The second tells how to get ready to do it. The third and fourth suggest ideas for how to do it once you're doing it. The fifth describes people who have already lived without school. I put it in the best order I could, but you can read it diagonally if you like.

                Don't forget to share this book with your friends, or suggest that they find themselves a copy.

                I recommend dozens of books, as well as other resources. Some have gone out of print, but are available in libraries and used bookstores. I have put a great deal of energy and thought into the book recommendations and I often hear from readers that my suggestions are very helpful. On the other hand, please don’t feel that you need a book to start a project (like making a zine, or starting a book group, or studying the ants in your kitchen). If you can’t easily find the books I suggest, you’ll generally do fine with other books on the same subject. And obviously, this book, revised in 1998, can’t tell about anything published afterward, nor do I know about everything that’s already available. (But I do spend a lot of energy searching and skimming, seeking out the best stuff.)

                When I give prices for books or other items, they are 1997 or 1998 prices, in U.S. dollars. Like beanstalks, they will go up. If you order something without first checking with a supplier, ask them to bill you for the extra.

                Most of the organizations mentioned in this book will send you free information if you ask for it. (Their addresses, phone numbers, and web site URL’s are listed in the Appendix.) Keep in mind that it costs them money to send stuff. Especially if it's a do-gooder organization, think about saving trees and money by checking their web sites first. Or, if you've got extra cash, send a dollar along with your information request.

                There is a lot of information in your hands. Don't feel obligated to follow up on all of it, or most of it. Don't let it overwhelm you. Don't feel you should read everything I recommend. Let it guide you to a few important things and let the rest go. The silences and spaces in your "education" are as necessary as your activity.

                On the other hand, this book does not tell everything that's possible. Don't be limited by my suggestions, just use them as beginning points. Someday I may revise this book again or write a different one, so I'd welcome your recommendations for resources, or news of your own activities, or any other responses.

                One more thing. All of us rise or sink to other people's expectations of us. Our society seems not to believe in teenagers enough to expect much of them. This book may shock you, therefore, when it tells how to plan a trip around the world, or when it suggests you start a business or become seriously involved in some academic field you love. But you're no imbecile--I'm certain because at fifteen I wasn't an imbecile. I didn't know much, but if the right information and some freedom had come my way, I could have soared. I hope that this book can provide some of that "right information" for you, and that it also helps you find the freedom you need.

                When I mention ages of particular teenagers, I mean their ages at the time that they wrote to me or to GWS. Some of the sixteen-year-olds are now 26.

                Enjoy your flight....and tell me where you land.

Chapter 12

The Importance of The Vacation

                "Everyday I went to school was a constant attack on my self-worth.  I learned not to believe in myself.  It was bombardment from all directions; the teachers were saying how bad I was doing in their classes, my family was ashamed of my grades, and the students were attacking me about everything under the sun!  I was like a plant trying to grow in darkness -- it doesn't.  It all left me afraid to dream my dreams -- afraid to be my true self! Who wants to show their true and beautiful face if they're just going to get a rock hurled at it?! The real question is: how do we undo the damage done?  We have to take time to dream again. Like the sculptor who removes everything that is not a part of the sculpture, we have to remove everything that is not a part of us. We have to dream our dreams again, not other peoples, but our own precious dreams that mean everything to us. Our dreams are our life maps." –unschooler Jenny Smith

"We start out thinking of what we won't have to do when we stop going to school, and it takes a while for us to think about what we do want to do."--Eva Owens in Growing Without Schooling

                Before you start your new life, you have to let go of the old one.

                There are loud cruel voices you must banish, before you can hear the sweet faint muses. There are harsh schedules you must cancel, before you can coax your natural rhythms back into place. Otherwise, no music.

                Learning in school is swimming upstream against the current of your natural curiosity and rhythm. It takes exhausting effort, but it can be done. Unschooling is swimming downstream, still kicking and paddling and crossing over to investigate the shores, but without fighting. If you don't give yourself time to turn around in the river, unschooling will be a miserable confusion. If you don't give yourself time to adjust, this book will not work for you. Still facing upstream, you'll drift downstream. In other words, you'll be neither here nor there...and maybe you'll end up wanting to be back there, in school, because at least you know it's someplace.

                The vacation I hereby suggest is your time to turn around--and rest--before you make any effort to steer your course. If you don't take a vacation, you may start unschooling with the same frenzied guilty complexes that you've been schooling with. No fun. Jessica Gray, 13, who convinced her mother to let her out of school in fifth grade, writes in GWS #93:

My original hopes for homeschooling were that it would allow me to be free, to grow, to expand my knowledge of what really existed in this world through my own experiences. During that first year, as we traveled the bumpy path of having to keep the school system content and carried with us my old thoughts and beliefs that education consisted of books, pens, papers, early mornings, bad food, and at least six hours of sitting at a desk, I lost the sense of what homeschooling really meant to me and what I had wanted it to be from the beginning. Out of insecurity and fear of being "not enough," I spent a whole year working with a program that was set up exactly like school. The program had many textbooks, tests, a requirement of 6-8 hours of work each day, and an incredible amount of stress. The one year I spent with this program dragged itself out to feel more like five dreadful years. I came out of that program with not much knowledge except for one valuable piece, which was that I would never put myself through that again. ...

             When I received the books and curriculum from the program at the beginning I thought they looked fun, but that's because they looked safe....I felt pretty miserable for a long time, and that robbed me of any remaining energy. Once again I was judged only by tests, not by the hike I took in the mountains or the research I did on a subject that meant something to me.

                After Jessica figured out that she did not want to waste her youth doing school at home, she changed her approach completely. Among many other things, she volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and traveled widely with her mother.

                 Your vacation 

                When you quit school, do nothing academic for at least, at the absolute minimum, a week. If you wish, however, write stories or journal entries about your past and your future. Dream, dream, dream. If you crave TV, watch it. If you crave sleep, indulge. Allow yourself to go through withdrawal. Pass no judgments. If you want to "work" on anything, work on forgiving and forgetting. Forgive yourself for everything. Forgive your teachers for everything. Forgive your parents for everything. Forget the lies school taught--forget that learning is separate from your life, that you can't teach yourself, that you are defined by your grades, and all other such nonsense. Detoxify. Purge.

                Obviously, your parents need to know this vacation is coming. If not, they may anxiously pile textbooks around you and assign essays on The Reign of Queen Elizabeth. I don't know about you, but that sort of well-intentioned concern would certainly drive me back to school. If they don't think they can handle watching you do nothing for a week or so, visit your grandmother.

                   And after the vacation 

                Unfortunately, I can't promise that all your school wounds will heal in one short week. The complete process of unschooling your spirit could take a month or even years—not that you should wait months or years to get on with life. Anthony J. Hermans, 17, reflects, "It's not easy to learn to deal with excessive freedom--especially when you're used to something else." Judy Garvey, homeschooling parent and author of How to Begin Homeschooling, calls the transition process "flushing out." She points out in GWS  #70 that it can involve a period of hating the mention of anything remotely connected to academics, or even a temporary lack of interest in everything.

                A few enemies may lurk in your gut, waiting to make life difficult. Fear, for example, may overwhelm you at first. Most of the structure in your world has suddenly evaporated, and not just for the weekend. Your time is yours, and you may feel dazed by the responsibility of that concept. Expect to be afraid; just don't give in to that fear. Where there's fear, say some wise women I know, there's power. No one feels afraid when they walk into a boring job for the fourteenth year, which is a sorry reason to do a boring job for fourteen years.

                Another enemy is the guilt that blocks your natural curiosity. People who have never gone to school have never developed negative attitudes toward exploring their world. Unfortunately, you probably have. It's not your fault if you don't immediately want to run out and watch ladybugs with a magnifying glass. It might take time before your desire to learn surfaces from beneath the layers of guilt--the voices insisting I should learn this, I have to learn that. Give yourself that time. Don't push. You'll recover. Dan Raymond, Seth's father (chapter 41) told me he thought it would take a year before a new unschooler could do anything "real" and start going forward on his or her own.

                Impatience, too: in chapter 3, I pointed out that schools helped 18th- and 19th- century factory owners by forcing people to shift from a natural, agricultural way of scheduling their lives to an artificial, industrial way. Quitting school, you can ease back into a healthy tempo, but you'll have to be more patient with yourself than factory owners are with their employees. Allow yourself to find a natural pace, even though that means you may slow down, stare into space more often, breathe easier. You won't necessarily accomplish less--many homeschoolers accomplish far more than their schooled peers--but it's O.K. if you do accomplish less. The meaning of life has to do with quality, not quantity. After fourteen-year-old Adrian Deal of North Carolina quit school, she created a wonderful pamphlet entitled, "Isn't there school today?" Part of it goes like this:

What do you do all day?

I hear this from my grandmother who wonders if I just "flop around all day eating chocolates." Well, no I don't. But I also don't do as many things as they do in school: for example, in one day I might do one or two things enjoyably at my own pace instead of cramming in huge amounts of seven different "subjects."

After being out of school for a short while, I realized that a day is not very long--you just can't do that much in a day. Therefore, it is impossible to fully absorb (much less enjoy!) large amounts of algebra, chemistry, history, English, Spanish, biology, and health in one day. My point? School teaches you that you must do, do, do all day. So the first thing you must do when you quit school is relax, don't make yourself do anything, and realize that it's okay if you don't do those seven subjects every day.

Now, on to some of my daily activities: reading a book (fiction or nonfiction), watching a movie, writing to one of my many pen pals, doing office work for my mom, listening to music, working in my scrapbook, making this brochure, cooking something delightful, painting with watercolors, making jewelry, taking art classes, browsing the library, and just having fun.

                The worst thing that can go wrong with your unschooling is lack of trust.

                If your parents don't trust you, they will nag or look like they want to nag. If they see you watching TV they may assume that's all you'll ever do. It will drive you crazy. You'll wish you were back in school, where everyone expects you not to want to learn anything. Tell them how important their trust is. Continue to educate them about homeschooling. Share the stories in this chapter with them. Introduce them to other homeschooling families through your local groups. See chapter 10.

                If the schoolboard doesn't trust you, that's not so bad because you don't have to see them every day. Still, it can force you into more structure and more subjects than you think are healthy. Don't worry too much about the school board. Learn how to be diplomatic. Nod and smile and then go right on doing what you do.

                The worst disaster by far is you refusing to trust yourself. You can suffocate yourself under a stack of guilt trips. If parents and teachers have not trusted you through a lot of your life, it is not your fault that you finally stopped trusting yourself too. It's their fault, but there's no point in revenge. Instead, work through it.

                Help

                If anyone is still on your case with things you "should" be doing, or nasty demonstrations of no trust, or if you find yourself tormented by guilt, school nightmares, or an inability to relax, get some help. Perhaps all you need is contact with other unschoolers. Maybe you need more intensive care, such as work with a counselor. On behalf of wise friends, I recommend co-counseling, although I am not myself a co-counselor.

                I mention co-counseling because it is far less judgmental than some other forms of counseling and therapy; a traditional psychiatrist might start with the unhelpful assumption that your unschooling is the cause of your problems. Also, co-counseling is empowering. Co-counselors work in pairs; each person performs two roles--counselor and client. (A session goes like this: first, one person is the counselor and the other the client. After a designated time period, such as an hour, you switch roles.) Furthermore, after you take a short, inexpensive[1] introductory course, it is free. According to co-counseling literature, it "assumes that everyone is born with tremendous intellectual potential, natural zest, and lovingness, but that these qualities have become blocked and obscured in adults [and teenagers] as the result of accumulated distress experiences (fear, hurt, loss, pain, anger, embarrassment, etc.) which begin early in our lives."

                After you complete the "Fundamentals Class," available in nearly every city in the U.S., you can participate in any group of co-counselors. Co-counseling is open to all ages, and has special youth chapters and newsletters in some places. You can get more information and find out about a group or class near you by contacting The International Re-Evaluation Counseling Communities.

*

                An issue related to this business of guilt and trust is the question of structure--but we'll deal with that in chapter 16. One relatively uncomplicated solution to some of these psychological difficulties is suggested by Judy Garvey and Jim Bergin, who have a thirteen-year-old son, in GWS #76: An apprenticeship or job outside the home, they say, is the best way to make the transition to unschooling. Because it is a structured use of time out in the world, it combats any feeling of "dropping out" or "failure."

*

                Hey, Miss Llewellyn, if it's so complicated and difficult for some people to heal from school, why are you so optimistic? How do you know I can recover?

                Partly because I've heard enough success stories. Partly because like many adults, I have recovered too. It wasn't until I was in college, but my brain did finally boomerang back from the land of grades, SAT scores, harried paper writing, boredom, obedience school, and busywork. The revival, by the way, happened mainly through conversations with friends, and mostly not because of any official college curriculum.

                These stories and comments will help to illustrate the process:

                Katrina Dolezal, 15, writes in GWS #76: "I think the best way to make the transition from public school to homeschool is to be allowed plenty of time to forget some of what was learned in school about how you should learn."

                Sylvia Stralberg describes her vacation in GWS #80:

Things finally got so bad this year in eleventh grade that I said, "That's it--I'm not going back to school anymore," and I didn't. I had a few months of recuperation, which meant doing whatever I felt like doing, be it baking, reading, cutting recipes, or watching a movie. I had a lot of guilt feelings during that time about not being in school, but fortunately I have wonderful parents who reassured me that what I had done was OK.

                Rosemary Risley writes about her daughter in GWS #76:

  Lora only read what she was forced to read when she was in school, and I would sometimes coerce her by reading one chapter out loud to her and then having her read the next to me. All of a sudden, during the summer between school and homeschool, she became an avid reader....I don't know how many books she read that summer, but I was amazed--it was as if now that she didn't have to, and she was free, she wanted to read. She has read over sixty books in each nine months of homeschooling. If we did nothing else these two years, I consider that a major accomplishment.

                Judy Garvey writes in GWS #76:

  Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see in families who have homeschooled their children from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life...

  Most children are very hurt and angry about what has happened to them and to their peers in school. As long as they stay in school that anger must remain under control. When they come home, it all begins to come out. It may show up in extreme highs and lows, negative emotional outbursts, or long periods of apparent depression.

                Kathleen Hatley writes in GWS #45:

A change that pleases me very much this year was to watch our son Steve (12), who spent four years in public school, and who spent his first year of homeschooling asking for "assignments," become a more self-motivated learner. He became interested in mechanical drawing when I gave him a beginning drafting set and he spends a lot of time designing cars and space ships. He has discovered science fiction and reads Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and others with great enjoyment (he has always read a lot, but despises the school-type reading programs where one must answer questions to prove comprehension). We both enrolled in the IBM Systems computer course at the state Vo-Tech school and he thoroughly enjoyed that--the perfect classroom situation, in my opinion, no tests, no grades, just people voluntarily coming to learn about something which they were interested in, from a helpful expert in the field. Since Steve's career goals tend toward the technical at this point, he works real hard at mathematics, and at his request we added the Key Curriculum algebra and geometry series to his regular sixth grade math. He surprised me this year by informing me that he didn't want to take a summer break from his schoolwork!

                Darlene Graham, a mother, started to feel like homeschooling was working after three years. In GWS #37, she advised, "Don't feel discouraged if your school program doesn't work like magic from day one. We have found that the longer our children were in public school, the harder it was for them to re-develop their own natural curiosity and creativity."

                In GWS #64, editor Susannah Sheffer relates a conversation with Emily Keyes, 16. When she was in school, says Emily, she hated it and always got in trouble for not doing her homework. After eighth grade, her parents heard of homeschooling and decided to try it with both Emily and her younger brothers. After her mom took a class in homeschooling, she decided to try "natural learning," with no curriculum. Emily was lost at first:

  I still didn't know what to expect, or what I would want to do with the time, because back then I wasn't interested in much of anything. We decided to start homeschooling on the day that school started, and it should have been like any other day, except we didn't know what to expect of one another. We didn't know what mom was going to do, if mom was going to assign lots of stuff. My attitude was still so rebellious. I was so fed up with school that I felt I didn't want to learn anything. There was so much tension that first week.

  The change was very gradual. Your whole thinking changes. In school, everything's programmed for you, this is how you have to think, and then all of a sudden you're on your own, and you don't know what you want to do. It was so hard at the beginning, but I knew there was no way I would go back to school, and I think we all knew it would get better if we stuck it out. 

                  Emily goes on to explain how eventually she discovered that she thinks mechanically and logically, and how she learned to fix machinery, to work with sound equipment, and to enjoy, among other things, early American history.

                Arlean Haight writes in GWS #28:

  When we took the children out of school nearly two years ago, we had advice from several people, among them Dr. Pat Montgomery of Ann Arbor, Michigan [director of Clonlara--see chapter 11]. She told us if we would let the children follow their own interests, and just help them when they needed help, they would learn more than if we put them on a pre-planned curriculum.

  I respected Dr. Montgomery, and was grateful for her help. But I just couldn't see any glimmer of hope in Becky [14]. It seemed that seven years of public school had successfully stamped out any inclination she might have had to learn. By her own admission, she had learned to cram for tests, make A's and B's on her report cards, and promptly forget almost everything she had "learned." Whenever I allowed her free rein on "school," her one interest was mindless fiction--nothing of any value that I could see. Pat tried to encourage me, but I had the misgivings and insecurities that I see in so many other parents new to home-schooling. I was afraid Becky would learn nothing at all. So--we embarked on a "curriculum." It turned out to be just a duplication of the old public school pattern. So I went pretty easy with it, still allowing her freedom, and limiting her fiction reading to what I felt was least objectionable.

  But, Pat was right. It finally happened. This year Becky progressed from Louis L'Amour Western fiction to an interest in Western history, then to the history of the United States, and is now in the process of memorizing the Constitution word for word.

How not to get stuck in la-la land

                After I published the first edition of this book, I began to feel that there was something incomplete and overly simplistic about this chapter on vacations. Jennifer Louden's The Woman's Comfort Book  helped me understand what was bothering me. In a chapter called "The Shadow Side of Comfort," Louden says,

It is possible to use comfort and being comfortable as excuses to limit or negate ourselves....For instance, when I started paying attention to how I comforted myself, I realized that staying home weekend nights and ordering Thai food and watching videos was comforting and safe, but it also could be limiting and boring. It made me uncomfortable at first, but I found when I made unusual plans for the weekend, I almost always came away stimulated and enriched.

Indeed, it may not be enough for a new unschooler to simply take a vacation from academia in which absolutely anything is permissible--any amount of TV, any number of potato chips. I'm still certain that most people need a relaxed time in which to heal from the pressures of school, and to reclaim their own internal motivation. But some ways of vacationing are healing and rejuvenating, while others may be more likely to worsen the feeling of being out of control of one’s life. With that thought in mind, I think the unschooling process requires not just two essential steps (vacation and then do something), but three.

I still think an "anything goes" vacation in which you indulge some of your petty cravings is crucial. But it's just as crucial to recognize when you've had enough of this--and then move on to phase two which is still a vacation, but a much more rejuvenating one, and will probably need to last anywhere from a week to a year. During this time, do not strive to meet any academic goals, but do begin to actively experiment and play--no more excessive TV, eating, sleeping, video games, or hanging out with unexcited people.  During this time you might experiment with transition rituals such as those described below, or find ways to engage with the world such as making new friends, changing your wardrobe to reflect your true personality, or visiting a variety of churches or other religious services. The general point is that activities like these can take you beyond both 1) the pressure, chaos, and stress of being schooled, and 2) the boredom and self-loathing that can result from too much lounging around, from a lack of creative release.

Unschooling Transition Rituals

These suggestions are based mostly on my own experiments. Just as Louden's book sparks me to come up with my own rituals, I hope my ideas will spark you to make up activities that meet your particular unschooling needs.

Try these rituals when

1. Make a scrapbook

Supplies:

         Back issues of National Geographics or other magazines (buy at thrift shops, garage sales, library sales, etc.)

         any other postcards, photos, or other flat paraphernalia 

         a ready made scrapbook or any looseleaf binder, construction paper, and a three-ring hole punch.

The point here is to play with a topic that intrigues you, by collecting and arranging pictures, postcards, poems, quotes, maps, whatever. National Geographic alone is a great source for a lot of different subjects--I have one scrapbook showing traditional costumes of a variety of different cultures, and another one in the works showing traditional architecture worldwide, and a few years ago I also started keeping a file of clipped pictures of markets around the world and of different farming methods.

2. Purge school

Throw darts at photos of your school or administrators, or have a bonfire with useless worksheets or homework assignments, or take a report card and rip it to shreds. Write down all the ways school has harmed you and limited you. Burn the paper....and then write down the ways you want to no longer be limited by your past schooling. Post your list by your bed or computer.

3. Reclaim your past

Get out your favorite childhood toys, hobbies, collections, books, and photos of your childhood--whatever physical evidence remains of your early life. Arrange these things around you and take some time looking at or playing with all of it. Does anything still entice you? How might you invite your earliest interests into your present life? How could you pick up where you left off?

4. Comfort with children's books:

5. Report Cards

Get out an old school report card. If you quit school recently, get your latest report card or progress report. Read it carefully and notice the feelings you have. Does it make you feel proud? Depressed? Competitive? Angry? Nervous? Ashamed? Confused? As the feelings subside, think about what your report card is: a subjective evaluation of your tests, papers, and “class participation” in classes which you didn't freely choose to take, given by people who don't know you very well, are overworked, have too many students, don't have nearly enough information to judge you accurately, and are themselves probably not great examples of joyful, purposeful learning.

                Ask yourself these questions: which of these subjects are important to you? Why? How successful was each course in helping you learn about its subject? (Grades deflect the pressure off of the school, onto the student. In my dance classes, if a student doesn't get something it's up to me to teach it in a different way--and of course up to her to go home and practice. At school, it seems all the emphasis is on evaluating you, but sometimes it would make more sense for students to grade their teachers.) How much do you really know and understand about the subjects you got good grades in? What things are you good at that aren't even listed on the report card? What things would you like to be good at that aren't "taught" in school?

                Write your own report card based on your knowledge, skills, and personal qualities. Include not just grades, but explanations. Then project yourself into the future and write a report card for where you'd like to be a year from now.

6. Inspiration Cards

Cut out magazine images you like or that inspire or intrigue you. Use rubber cement or a glue stick to attach them to heavy paper or cardstock. Then, on the backs, list questions and possible activities that they suggest. Play with them, sort and arrange them in different ways, make patterns or mosaics with them. Put them in a bag and draw one out whenever you feel sluggish.

7. Keep an unschooling journal. Some possible starters:

                The time I got an F.

                I am curious about...

                Why I cheated:…

                A list of questions:

                I hate math because....

                I love math because....

Chapter 16

Starting Out: 
a sense of  the possibilities

"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be." --Albert Einstein

                A Different Kind of Time

                Don't be a factory. Do a few things well instead of everything poorly. Big undertakings--like starting a town orchestra or trying to find the ultimate physics theory--do take time. If you love your big undertakings, that time is never wasted. 

                A Different Kind of Structure

                The homeschooling community talks a lot about structured education versus unstructured education. Although there is no such thing as a completely structured or a completely unstructured education, these terms are convenient and can make it easier for you to think about how you want to organize your unschooled life.

                In a mostly "unstructured" education, you let life happen to you, keeping your eyes open and learning from whatever you happen to do. In a mostly "structured" education, you make life happen, setting goals and making plans. Which is best? That's a philosophical and religious question, and there are plenty of respectable votes on both sides.

                An unstructured education frees you from unnecessary boundaries between life and learning. It allows you to calm your mind and to live on a healthy schedule, reading only when you are hungry. It invites you to soak up the universe by swimming in the river without telling yourself, "I should be thinking about the natures of the currents, and the names of the potential fish near my feet, and the dead poets who wrote about water." It meshes with the teaching of Zen masters, Indian gurus, and ancient Chinese philosophies, which ask their followers not to strive, not to battle life, but to let themselves be shaped and carried by its flow.

                A structured education, on the other hand, is what you want if you are goal-oriented or if you enjoy being methodical. After all these years of living with other people's curriculums, you can get a big thrill designing your own personalized education. Obviously, it can be as formal, rigorous and organized as you want, far more so than school. You can set big or small goals for yourself such as finishing a math textbook by a certain date, writing a letter to your newspaper every week, writing and illustrating a children's book during October and November, completing an inventory of local tree species before Earth Day, phoning three people each day until you find an apprenticeship you like. If you take this approach, you will get things done. Barbara Sher's book Wishcraft can help you set epicurean goals and reach them, although she writes about life, not just education, which may confuse you if you don't yet realize they're the same.

                One more point about structure versus unstructure: don't assume that structure has to be school-style structure. Personally, I despise the idea of school-at-home, and the kind of schoolish schedule that would entail. But you can build your own structure centered around whatever you like. For some homeschoolers, structure consists of five or more hours of daily music practice. For others, it consists of a full-fledged computer programming business, or nonstop reading, or tinkering all day long with electronics.

                One valuable kind of structure is goal-setting, which is explained in profound detail in the aforementioned Wishcraft. This is the sort of structure which serves your desires (I want to build a windmill so I will do this, that, and the other thing) instead of your sense of guilt (I should study chemistry every day for forty-five minutes). Obviously, you are going to learn plenty by setting out to achieve your goals; in the windmill department that's going to include physics, carpentry, geography, and probably history--for a start. If your goal is writing a book on unschooling, you're going to learn about the homeschooling movement, about the publishing industry, about word processing, about library research, about efficient versus inefficient original research, about law libraries, about words, and about fear--for a start. If your goal is to restore the neighborhood swamp to health, you'll learn about chemistry, biology, politics, economics, your own muscles, and organizing people--for a start. Fifteen-year-old Reanna Alder, of British Columbia, says, "Most of my learning is done in the name of life or challenging myself rather than education. For example, I think I would be happier and would feel more capable and presentable as a writer if I knew I could spell better, so I work on it."

                If you are completely confused as to how to start structuring your life, here's one way: do "academics" for two hours each day--not necessarily lots of subjects, or the same ones every day. You are not going to dry up if you don't do 45 minutes every day of "social studies." Do some kind of "work" or project for four hours. In your leftover time, read, see friends, talk with your parents, make tabouli. Take Saturdays and Sundays off. Sound arbitrary? It is. I made it up, although it is based on a loose sort of "average" of the lives of a hundred unschoolers, most college-bound. Once you try this schedule for a month, you will know how you want to change it.

                If you like participating in programs and doing academic work in groups with adult leaders, consider thinking of your summers as hardcore "education" time. During the summer, there are lots of interesting "enrichment" academic opportunities which are more fun and productive than school. See Free and Almost Free Adventures for Teenagers and Student Science Opportunities, both by Gail L. Grand, and Peterson's Summer Opportunities for Kids and Teenagers. Then, spend the winter making holiday feasts, hibernating with a stack of epic novels, visiting favorite uncles, painting murals on your ceiling.

                Quite possibly, you may need a structured plan because your state laws require that you submit one. If this is the case, read chapters 17 through 30 for ideas and then try two brainstorming techniques:

                1. Make a list of the subjects you have to cover. For each, write down all the ways you can think of to "study" them, and a list of related books you think you might like to read. Also ask your family and friends for suggestions.

                2. Make a list of your most important interests. Then look at each one and consider how academic subjects could be related to it. For instance, if you love horses, your horse list might look like this:

Language Arts/English: Read National Velvet. Write a profile of a local horse breeder. Write poetry or stories from a horse's point of view.

Social sciences: Conduct a study of various careers related to horses. Look into why so many young girls are intensely interested in horses, by conducting a survey or another type of study. Read about the profound influence horses have had on cultures around the world, such as the culture of Plains Indian tribes. Stay on a working cattle ranch for a week.

Science: Learn about horse anatomy, diseases, and biology. Find out about the evolutionary history of horses. Learn to use a microscope to diagnose horse diseases.

Art: Draw horses. Make a saddle or other tack. Produce a documentary video on horse care or horse races. 

  You get the idea. Here are some comments and morsels of advice from unschoolers on their experiences with school-style structure and other kinds of structured and unstructured learning. In GWS  #22:

  This past year, we got away from correspondence schools altogether, ordered our own texts (for math only), and really got unschooled....My daughter (13) now studies totally independently, with only occasional help in algebra, or help with a Spanish conversation. Her progress is really astounding, too. She reads more than ever, and does about three times the work that she did in regular school--by choice. I guess that once we eliminated all the busywork, she discovered how much fun learning can really be. She is once again eager, sets her own schedule, and still manages to get so much done that it is truly astonishing. The changes in her have also been very beneficial, because, as she controls and uses her own time, it has matured her and made her very responsible and sensible.

  In GWS #35 a brave mother writes about her teenagers:

  "What do they do all day?" Why is it that I don't know? Why is it that I don't care? We don't keep journals or go on field trips or categorize the day's activities into subject areas. I can't stand the dead smell of all those fakey thought-up things.

Also in GWS #35, Borgny Parker wrote about unschooling her teenaged daughter Abigail:

We started off thinking that we would be following the public school day at home. That did not work well at all. Both David and I saw the need to keep our distance because we were putting Abi under the same pressures she was seeking to avoid. What evolved was our own blend of non-schooling, I guess. We saw Abigail take off in different directions by herself...

Eleven-year-old Halee Shepler, of Venezuela, writes:

The way I do my schooling is by answering three questions each year:

1.  What skill do I want to learn?

2.  What question do I want to answer?

3.  What big problem do I want to solve?

Usually one thing leads to another. For example, one year I wanted to learn how to train my horse.  This led to the big question: "How do individuals and cultures change?"  One day when my instructor and I were working with my horse,  she asked another rider to jump him without my permission.  When my horse refused the jump, the rider beat my horse.  So I wanted to solve the problem of animal abuse.  I started to search for resources.  In Horse Illustrated I found an article about Tellington Touch Equine Awareness Method.  I wrote and I got information. 

          This led to a new problem that I want to solve.  Linda Tellington-Jones wrote about the work at the Paralympic Games.  I told my friend who is blind and does jumping about the Paralympics and she was interested in entering the next competition, but there is no committee in Venezuela.  I am helping her in this. So you see how one thing leads to another.   I hope to be a TTEAM practitioner some day, after completing the two-year program for horses and companion animals, and work in therapeutic riding.   

  After Eva Owens left "one of the so-called top public high schools in the country"  after ninth grade, she wrote in GWS Magazine #105,

  I am by nature very unorganized. I decided that with homeschooling, I wanted to be somewhat organized to learn what I wanted to learn. Also, when I wrote up my homeschooling plan, the school wanted me to set objectives that they could follow up on. So way back in September I set goals for myself for the year. By December I decided that I needed a little more guidance than that. So I sat down with Leslie [an adult friend], and with her assistance I set my goals for the coming month. Ah, but that was not enough for Eva, the procrastinator. Now in April I've become quite content with the routine of, after eating breakfast, writing down what I want to accomplish that day, with thought to my monthly goals. This has turned out to be best for me. At the end of the day I can see the results of my work and can see what I have not done. It's very clear cut that way.

Christian McKee, of Wisconsin, writes:

                At the age of eighteen and as one who has never gone to school, I realize that somewhere during the past five to six years I've come to think of myself not as a homeschooler or as an unschooler, but simply as who I am, Christian McKee, citizen and community member.  My life, except for the few times my parents doubted their own belief in unschooling, has essentially been mine to structure and live as I have chosen.  In the past eighteen years I’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything: radio engineering, juggling, skate boarding, cross country skiing, foreign language, singing, make-up design, fly fishing, all sort of unusual things. While it seems that unusual things interest me, I think it could be said that I am pretty intellectual by nature.  When I'm interested in something I study it in detail.  For the past four years I've focused my life around my interests in choral music, fly fishing, radio engineering, and the study of foreign language.  While each of these endeavors has taken on a significant role in my life, I'm not sure that any one of them will become the way I make a living for myself.  My fishing has offered me opportunities--my own small business, travel and work in Montana, instructing beginning fly tiers, being a demonstration fly tier at regional conclaves, served as a board member for a regional chapter of the National Federation of Fly Fishers--but I'm not sure that I will continue to center my life around chasing the elusive trout with a stone fly nymph.  Fishing has expanded my outlook on life and offered me opportunities to experience what a less traditional life style might offer, but my experiences with singing and foreign language have also opened unimagined doors.  Through my work with singing, German and French, I've been able to travel (locally and internationally), teach young students German and study at the university.  My small taste of university life (I've taken German courses, a literature and a writing class) has whetted my appetite for more concentrated academic studies.  As a result, I've applied to and been accepted at Kalamazoo College.  My plans for the immediate future are to continue, for one more year, as a special student at the university of Wisconsin, possibly live in my own apartment and then move to Michigan for college.  What can I say, this is just how my life fits together.  As I said earlier, it has little to do with unschooling, homeschooling or schooling of any kind and more to do with being myself and how I choose to live my life at the present time.

Gwen Meehan, mother of Patrick (who is quoted in several places in this book), writes:

Last year was licking wounds and healing time. We both put much more emphasis on structured learning. We "did History, English, Algebra" and other "school" things. It was fine and necessary for that time.

Over the summer, however, I read all my back issues of GWS which high-lighted homeschool information for older students. By the time I had finished, I realized the overwhelming consensus was: get off the formal education road entirely. Every parent and every child backed up the idea of simply letting the student direct his/her own education. My role would be "facilitator." I did not have to worry about "teaching a curriculum," no matter how loose.

This has been the proper direction for us. Patrick is developing wonderfully