Looking Back Over 20 Years
by Alison McKee

Our family first considered homeschooling as an alternative to traditional school after I had read an interview of John Holt in Mother Earth News. At that time David, my husband, and I were convinced that Holt’s views of children’s learning were “right on.” Holt’s ideas seemed as though they’d be so easy to implement.
Today I look back on such thoughts and I realize that we didn’t even come close to comprehending the complexities of implementing such radical ideals. How could we? Although we knew we wouldn’t use curriculum or aspire to maintain grade level pace for our children we still thought in those terms. Like most parents of preschoolers we were concerned about issues of socialization and how our children would continue to learn. Obviously, even at that early stage of our homeschooling experience, our traditional educational expertise was infiltrating every aspect of our thinking. It has taken us nineteen years to learn otherwise.

When Christian and Georgina were preschoolers I never worried about their socialization. It simply wasn’t an issue. If I did happen think about it at all it was in reference to comments I’d heard from friends who worried that our children might somehow miss out on opportunities for becoming socialized individuals if they failed to go to school. Sometimes I took such worries to heart and found myself wondering just what would become of our “isolated children.” It wasn’t until we were well emersed in our lives that I realized that socialization was a moot issue.

Christian and Georgina participated in classes geared toward their same aged peers often enough that they learned the rudiments of lining up, waiting their turn and being cordial to strangers. They were also having experiences I’d never had as a child sequestered within the confines of school walls. By being actively involved in community life they learned to interact with many adults, some pleasantly mannered some not, from all walks of life. Not until I’d repeatedly heard strangers say that Christian and Georgina were mature and well mannered did I realize that socialization was, as it had been, a non issue.

Likewise I was never worried about the nature of my children’s learning when they were preschoolers. If Christian or Georgina dabbled with learning to read, count and name their colors or simply played on the jungle gym and in the sandbox all day I was happy. Something seemed to happen though, when each child became school age and we had to register them as homeschoolers. Unlike the socialization issue which quite naturally resolved itself my concerns about our children’s need to learn specific subject matter became mired in traditional ways of thinking when they turned five. What about reading, math and writing?

When Christian was five his interests seemed to revolve around building with legos, having us read to him or helping him learn to read and whistling incessantly. Aside from Christian’s interest in reading I saw nothing that resembled the lessons that his school aged peers were learning. Likewise when Georgina was five my concerns for her educational development were great, indeed greater. She showed nothing more than a cursory interest in learning to read or compute and instead spent hours singing, playing imaginative games and thoroughly involved in gross motor activity. Where was the “natural” shift in learning that I had so unconsciously expected to take place at the tender age of five? Certainly something was amiss. With constant reminders from my unschooling support network (GWS, Better Than School, David, my children and a small support group I had started) I cautiously practiced the art of letting go to the learning desires of my children.
Over the course of the next few years I learned to recognize that issues of subject matter, like issues of socialization, were isolated schooled constructs. Certainly there were no work sheets that attested to the fact that either Georgina or Christian had mastered the skill of reading and yet I was discovering that reading was more than I’d been led to believe it was. It was both an art form and a tool.

For Georgina reading was an art form, for Christian it was a tool. While Georgina turned to books to find voice, Christian turned to books to open new avenues of knowledge. Reading was the tool which led him from building with legos (following lego patterns may not require the ability to decode words but it certainly required the ability to read) to paying attention to fine detail which, through various other activities, eventually led him, as a teenager, to taking on an intensive four year study of fly fishing and fly tying. That study entailed reading and following fly patterns, reading rivers and streams, and reading the history of fly fishing. This was nothing like Georgina’s pursuit of reading as a performing art, an art which gives her voice. Like her brother her unique, and truly unschooled, interest in reading has led her down many interesting paths. Along the way she has discovered that reading is an art to be shared with others through singing and acting and once again I learned not to worry myself with traditional schooled constructs.

It has taken me many years to learn to see the world through the eyes of my nineteen-year-old and fifteen-year-old. Eyes which see socialization as something far broader than learning to be quiet, line up and listen and reading as something far broader than a tool. If I can say anything at all about homeschooling then, it is this, it is the means by which we are offered the chance to open ourselves up to the broader implications of learning, implications which know no limits and offer us all, parents and children, the chance to live full and meaningful lives. In 1983 I never suspected that this was what would become of our keeping our son home from school.

About the author:

Alison McKee is the author of From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschooled Experiences into College and Job Portfolios and Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves. Over the years she has written many articles on homeschooling. They have appeared in Growing Without Schooling, Home Education Magazine, Homefires: The Journal of Homeschooling, The Relaxed Homeschooler, F.U.N. News: Family Unschooling Network and other publications. For the past twenty years she has really enjoyed spreading the word about homeschooling but her greatest joy is talking about unschooling. Her web page is therefore dedicated to the exploration of unschooling and what it entails.
Visit Alison at: http://www.alisonmckee.com