Faith, Confidence and Integrity

[Sandra Dodd]

When I go for philosophical discussons, I like to go all the way. :-)

One of the rarely-discussed issues with unschooling as it is shared and learned is where to go for information and how to weigh who knows what.

"There are no experts," I always heard, but what I took that to mean is there's no such thing as a degree in unschooling. No one has a master's or PhD in it.

Years and years into it, though, I hear variations on that assertion that go more like "No one knows more about unschooling than anyone else," and someone assured a group of people that the only experts on unschooling were John Holt (an always childless long-dead guy) and Pat Farenga (NICE guy, plays piano, I like him; but he has three kids all of whom have gone to school at least for a while, for reasons unknown and untold and not really any of my business, unless I want to decide for myself or advise others whether I consider him "an expert").

What I myself like when deciding whose advice to take is how thoughtful and open and honest the people giving the advice are. I like to know what their background and experience is, and whether their families are happy. I like people whose writing is entertaining and I like people who are willing to answer questions.

I like people who have spent a lot of their own volunteer time helping other unschoolers. And I know LOTS of such people, many of them in person, and it's wonderful. I've really enjoyed seeing their kids grow up, some up close and some at a distance. I LOVE that the internet lets us share photos, and that I can see other people's kids and their writing and their artwork. I like seeing photos of other unschoolers' houses and yards and all.

Sometimes a new unschooler has clarity and the ability to communicate things in clear ways to others. Sometimes someone who's been doing it for years is lacking credibility for some reason or combination of reasons, or maybe they just can't clearly verbalize what they know (and words are our main tool here, even when people can get together in person or trade photo sites).

Somehow each person decides which music to like, which movies, books, friends, and advisors. I made waffles this morning with two different recipes laid out on the counter. As with any real inquiry or research, I think people need more than one source!

Maybe it goes right back to "make the better choice," which can only be done when you have considered two or more options.

[Joni Zander]

Ah - this is something that has boggled my mind for a very long time - the fact that some people take more time researching what car to buy than they do researching parenting!

I admit that I over research everything and I get really, really into the things that I get into, but to have a child and know nothing about development, nutrition, health, education, etc. is just irresponsible. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be "an expert" in parenting, but put a little time in, 'kay? It is one of my (many) rants! grin

And yes, unschooling and parenting are inseparable. In fact, I may argue that unschooling IS parenting. Of course, I think it is high-quality, mindful parenting!

[laura bowman]

thanks joni. i am not alone!!! i sometimes get this look from my family that says 'we don't care' when i talk about my quest to be a better parent and sharing what works for us (that it can work for them too), what i've learned, etc. (again, when asked! which boggles my mind too because...ummm...they asked!!!) i think it goes back to that not really wanting to work at something. just wanting some tricks to use. something easy. and i think...if you wanted easy, you should never have become a parent!!!

[Sandra Dodd]

Laura, if they ask but they don't want the answer, the answer is probably supposed to be a big smile and "great!" or "Fine!"

The answer to "How's it going?" or "How are you?" isn't really supposed to include the details of surgery or car repair. They were very rarely really asking. :-)

[Katherine]

---i'm a mom, i'm a wife, i'm an artist. i have lots of titles i guess. none of which have expert in front of them. but i've got a lot of good ideas =).---

This is so funny now that My Page title says "Mommy's the title, Katherine's the name."

It used to be that Karl called me by name a lot. These days he uses my title (I think because some people --not me-- told him he should do that). Every once in a while he will call me Katherine. I answer to both.

When I first started out on the mommy "job" I definitely felt unqualified. *Not* an expert by a long stretch. I still don't feel like an expert but if Karl wants to call me "mommy," it's great payment even when the work I've done doesn't match my title so very well. Sometimes I feel like a fraud (if I've yelled or freaked out that day...eek!). I want to avoid overstating my qualifications. A lot of times I don't know what I'm doing. I know what it's supposed to look like but not how to create that from the abilities I have at the moment. I know I'm a human being on my *best* days. I have some experience living life a certain way (but not others so those I can't say much about).

The great thing about all this unschooling stuff is that there is a lot of information and support for how to do it.

Making happiness a goal in your family. That's a big one. A major outcome I can bring about by finding ways to be more peaceful and ways to encourage peacefulness in others. Like feeding them when they're hungry for one. It's real easy for me to forget to eat! That spells disaster around here. ;)

I could go on and on but I like the unschooling lists as well as this wonderful RUN network, and have gotten so much from them. I have a lot of confidence because others are passing on what has worked well for them in their unschooling adventure. Yay for the example of others. There are so many unschoolers who have teenagers and adult children all grown up! That didn't used to be so. I consider many of the parents of those folks to be my experts in the field of unschooling.
____

[Katherine]

I do that too, Meredith. It might be my philosophical bent and my roots. I have a lot of practice from very young at the art of philosophy, the kind where I took an idea, put it out there .. phrased how I would .. and, learned from the responses I got about, for one thing, what kind of interpretation was being put on how I said things. It wasn't formal schooling. It was the way my family interacted when I was growing up. It brought to the fore alot of differences of opinion among my folks. So for a while I thought it was a bad process. But later on in life, the skills of learning from my audiences stuck with me. It was what I knew. My vernacular.

Questions aren't my bag but I can use them and get a lot from the replies. I still do plenty of lurking. As well as deleting and not even reading when life is too hectic for me be online (that has happened the last few weeks.... lota deleting). I've read enough and learned enough from living it that occasional deleting doesn't mean that I'm not striving for unschooling knowledge. There was a time when I needed a constant continual line of info at *all* times. I just didn't know enough. I still want to know lots more. At this point though I can start letting go of the handle bars and ride pretty smoothly (until I hit a bump in the "road" ... then I'm right back online).
____

[Sandra Dodd]

Woohoo! A clue. Three clues. I had an English professor who used to say "three trees make a row." He meant that if we found (in Shakespeare or Ben Jonson or some such) three pieces of evidence, that it was enough to make a general point. Certainly he wasn't a math professor, because two trees would've made a row, and three most likely a triangle.

I digress. Usually.

These three quotes are from recent posts to the Always Learning list:

1) I hope someone out there in the homeschool community has walked in my shoes and I'm hoping can give me some incredible words of wisdom to help me deal with my inner conflict. I have a 9 year-old dyslexic son who is really having an obvious difficult time in reading. I have a 12 year-old austic son...

2) I am wondering if those of you with teenagers and adult children could
share your thoughts on the following...

3) I'm asking this here because I'm thinking some of the members on this list have girls who like princess-y types of things. And in supporting that, you might be able to suggest some fun games.

Each time I cringed, and in thinking about why I cringed, I learned something about expertise in unschooling. Pam and Joyce (mothers of daughters) can answer questions about teenaged boys better than some of the people with teenaged boys. There are moms without Barbie-loving girls or without girls at all who could well answer a question about girly video games. Teenaged boys who've worked in gaming shops or who get games magazines or know how to use google could answer those questions.

So when a person limits their input artificially in hopes of getting experience, they might crowd out expertise.

And as to "disabilities," someone whose child is being treated as "dyslexic" or "aspie" rather than as Bob or Sue won't give as good unschooling advice as someone who knows her children would have been labelled if they were in school, but they weren't, and they're not.

The expertise of those I'm so confident about--Pam Sorooshian, Joyce Fetteroll, Deb Lewis, Schuyler Waynforth and some others--comes in part from many years of reading and helping and following up on the problems and questions of unschoolers with all manner of situations and outcomes. They KNOW some things they didn't learn at home with their own children. There are other people at home with their own children who are burying direct experience in labels and rules and philosophies other than unschooling itself. They don't become experts that way. They might not even become experienced unschoolers that way.

So I propose that expertise is knowledge beyond personal experience. And not just "I read it in a book," but "I have worked on one of these engines before" or "We've nursed several patient with these symptoms before, and here's how some of them acted in ways that led to the demise of their families' happiness."

[Katherine]

How did I miss this reply? Ok... and also there is a university in the Midwest closely linked or related to Maharishi ... that offers a sustainability degree(s) as well.

TN is a heck of a lot closer to me! Gotta look that up on google.
____

[Katherine]

Here's one other thing (at least): In the field of ideas (dreams, whatever), everybody could strive for expertise by experimentation, listening, talking, doing, and so on.

The person who isn't striving for unschooling expertise isn't using the ideas very much. (And I'm not saying to "be" an expert, or an "ex" or a "done" anything).

There are tons of ideas and dreams that I don't call mine or use to any great extent. So far... I haven't striven for expertise in rocket or rock science or rock 'n' roll. Though I may dabble in any of those.

But unschooling is something I want to do really well, and using the ideas has the potential to raise my level of expertise, though I never need to think of myself as an unschooling expert.
_____

[Sandra Dodd]

-=-That idea to separate our baggage from our children's immediate experience of life in the moment they are living it goes directly to the heart of making "the better choice." Leaving our baggage alone for the moment gets a lot of bad stuff out of the way while we do the work of relating to our children.-=-

For me, it was important to be aware of my own history while making the choices, when the kids were little. It was the way I healed my own self. And maybe it was the first-rejected choice in my choice-making process! :-)

When Kirby needed something, or wanted to do something, when he was a baby and a toddler, I would consider what my mom would have done, and then I would decide to do what my mom would have (which was a acknowledgement and healing) or I would do something better (also healing--good for Kirby AND for me).

In those moments when I did a gentle, generous thing, I was giving it to my own baby self and Kirby both, and I was able to think "If my mom's life hadn't been so harsh, maybe she could have done this too." So there was also an element of forgiving my mom.

By the time Holly came along, I didn't need to think so hard, but having La Leche League on one side showing me lots of examples of nurturance, and al-Anon's Adult Children of Alcoholics on the other side encouraging me to be nice to myself and not to continue to treat myself (or others) in the bad ways I had been treated by an alcoholic parent made lots of those good childcare choices glaringly obvious.

I talk about those days here, if that sounds like something that would help someone else: http://sandradodd.com/parentingpeacefully

Reading a little online about adult children of alcoholics might be useful for anyone who had a parent or two whose own parents had been harsh or arbitrary or dismissive, too. The behaviors and attitudes can survive in the absence of alcohol, when the children of alcoholics (or druggies, or sometimes addicts to other things) perpetuate their parents' actions through just not thinking about it, or being so wounded themselves they couldn't rise out of the mire. Dysfunction. Another thing to look up: dysfunctional family.

My dad's parents weren't alcoholics and he was way different from my mom about parenting things.

[Robin B.]

I think of the people in the unschooling world much as I did leaders in La Leche League. Most of them have the same basics of knowledge about the subject, but it's the personal implementation of it that always made the difference for me.

My first leader (with whom I worked to become a leader myself) was the essence of gentle and respectful attachment parenting. She didn't homeschool her first child, but did her second. On both subjects, she wouldn't so much question mothers' motives or ideas, nor argue with them, but she would drop pearls of wisdom with quiet authority. You just needed to watch her with children, others and her own son, to learn what those paths were all about. It was about doing it, not just telling it. Walking the walk, as it were.

Other leaders who professed unschooling confused me, while I was sorting out how attachment parenting worked in conjunction with unschooling. Some things they did seemed anti-unschooling to me at the time (control, manipulation, rules). Sometimes, their kids seemed too perfect, and that made me wonder if what I was doing was somehow misguided. They also didn't talk about their own difficulties or their learning to "do better."

I appreciated that my first leader would talk about what she had done "wrong" and how she learned to do things differently. I could see her progression. She also used others as examples and directed folks to more resources than just hers or La Leche League's. She was a mothering/unschooling mentor I will never forget.

I had trouble being a leader myself, as I felt at times that though I had knowledge, I hadn't had experiences other mums had had. I considered myself "unqualified" to give advice. And with LLL, people wanted help *right now.* Finally, the two sets of meetings I led and the phone help I did (I was in a new group with 2 other leaders, but somehow I was doing it all) burned me out and I quit. Though the integrity and even the faith were there, my confidence was not.

The quiet confidence combined with the open-to-learning attitude of my first leader is what I appreciate in a mentor. She never thought of herself as an "expert" either, and I liked that.

[Sandra Dodd]

Because of a discussion on the AlwaysLearning list, I found and linked a page I hadn't seen lately, and it seemed a good thing to add here.

One day... Joyce Fetteroll responded to someone who had come to the AlwaysLearning list explaining patiently to us that there were other equally valid ways to unschool and all that.

Joyce:

There is probably not an idea about how to be with kids that you
have that we haven't seen and turned over. (Sounds a bit snooty!) What I mean is, that 1000's of people have wandered by us with the ideas they have. We've held them up for examination to see "Is this respectful? How does this help a child? How does this hurt a child? Is there a better way that will nurture him *and* help him?"

Even though I thought it was perfect, I was inspired to expand on it.

One of the charges about unschoolers in general (and me in particular) is "arrogance." "Unschoolers are arrogant," say those who are flitting from one curriculum to another (or maybe worse, sticking with the first one they ever heard of, because they want to teach their children to finish what they start).

I spend VERY little time and energy listening patiently while people tell me that the public schools are really pretty good. I attended public school (zipped through more quickly and happily than some, and kindergarten hadn't become required, so I was there for "only" 11 years). I taught in public school for six years (7th and 9th grade English). I've had custody of three kids who attended public schools (when I was younger, not in the past 20 years). School apologists won't say anything I haven't heard (or experienced, or done, or said myself).

I've sought out writings about all kinds of homeschooling. I read some of the most conservative Christian homeschooling magazines for a while: Home School Digest (scary) and The Old Schoolhouse (where I read that Pat Farenga's three daughters have all gone to school; he doesn't say that when he speaks at unschooling conferences I don't think).

Some people just want to learn as little as is necessary for them to go and do what they think they need to do to homeschool or unschool. I think it's a "Will this be on the test?" mentality—a souvenir of school.

I've researched methods I KNEW I wouldn't pursue in a million years, because I didn't want to be ignorant when the subject came up, and in the early days of online unschooling discussions there was no such thing as unschooling being discussed off in a corner by itself. It was always in and among the others, many of whom believed that there was no reason to homeschool other than God had called Christians to set their children apart, and that secular homeschoolers were riding the coattails of Christian homeschoolers.

I knew that wasn't true, but THEY didn't know it wasn't true. When I
defended my stance I really wanted to know what I was talking about.

It wasn't too many years before we had our own corner on the AOL boards, and online chats (and the edited files of those available for download). People were paying $3 an hour for online access. There is more available to new unschoolers now, online sitting and waiting to be read for free, than existed in the whole world twenty years ago.

I'm confident. I'm not guessing unschooling can work, I know. I've also seen how it can fail, through my correspondence and discussions with so many other homeschooling families. I'm not hoping that kids can still get a job without fifteen years of practice bedtimes; I know they can. (And they would've been "practicing" for the wrong shift anyway.) I don't conjecture that kids can learn to read without being taught, I know. It's happened at my house, in three people's lives.

There have been people come by over the years who said "We should all learn from each other," meaning I should compromise with them, "meet them half way," admit that their ways were just as valid and useful as what I was doing. But none of them have brought any ideas or practice I had never seen and that seemed better than what was
happening at my house, or that could do anything to improve the flow we already had going.

On the other hand, the years of discussions of how to put principles into practice have expanded lots of peoples understanding of this subset of unschooling. Mine, definitely! I learned from others here, about how well it can work to make housework fun and peaceful and kids would eventually volunteer to do things, in surprisingly cool ways. That has happened at my house, but I wouldn't have thought it up on my own. I learned that the idea of "a bad day" is much inferior to "a bad moment," from which one can recover immediately. From me sharing my experiences, some families have loosened up about bedtimes and wake-up times. From Robyn's and other people's success with being patient and kind with explosive kids, many fewer children are
punished or shamed for having sudden outbursts of pure neediness. And interestingly, both Pam Sorooshian and I have been accused of not knowing anything about having such children, because our two explosive kids learned ways to deal YEARS ago with what some families punish or ignore or exacerbate. Those who know our kids probably wouldn't be able to guess which in each set of three was the scary-go-nuts kid when they were younger, because we figured out loving ways to help them recognize and deal with the emotions. And it's a physical thing with some people, that their emotional biochemicals come on QUICKLY, and hard. But they can learn to deal with it cognitively and physically, for the good of their own health and relationships, and for the good of others around them.

I'm not thinking that's true, I KNOW that's true.

This is confidence and experience.

Sandra

SandraDodd.com/confidence.

[Alane]

Joyce's quote hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter to me how educated, or experienced someone is if they haven't EXAMINED their ideas.

"... 1000's of people have wandered by us with the ideas they have. We've held them up for examination to see "Is this respectful? How does this help a child? How does this hurt a child? Is there a better way that will nurture him *and* help him?"

If someone isn't willing to hold up their ideas to this type of questioning, then those ideas aren't much better than doing things things because, "It's always been done this way."