by Ben Hewitt
So I describe and use the term unschooling with a slight sense of unease, simply because I do not believe it is an accurate description of what we are actually doing. Likewise, I’m pretty sure it’s not an accurate description of what most unschooling families are doing, although I suppose I should leave that up to them to decide. But as many misgivings as I have about its use, there are three things the term unschooling does very well. First, it is concise. To describe our educational path with full accuracy would require a lot more than a single word (in fact, it appears that it requires an entire book!). Second, it is evocative. Almost everyone has associations—some pleasant, some not so much—with school. Simply because the term includes the word school, it is almost guaranteed to trigger an emotional response. And third, it demands attention, particularly in a culture that places so much emphasis on education. “Unschooling? What’s that?” At which point, I am always happy to provide a greatly expanded definition of my sons’ learning.
For all these reasons, and because I have yet to settle on a better term, I will continue to use the word unschooling to describe how my sons learn.
When I explain my children’s unconventional educational path, I am often confronted with skepticism. “What if they want to be doctors?” people say. “How do they learn?” I am asked. “What if they want to go to college? Don’t you worry about socialization?” I have heard these questions so often that it is almost as if I can see the thought as it migrates from brain to tongue. I can hear the question before the question has been asked.
The answers to these questions are at once simple (respectively: “If they want to be doctors, they will.” “They learn because learning cannot be helped.” “If they want to go to college, no one will be able to stop them.” And “No, we are not worried about their socialization. Don’t you worry about what schoolchildren are socialized to?”) and complex. They are complex because so much of what we want for Fin and Rye and so much of what we want for ourselves cannot rightly be measured by the contemporary metrics of achievement. Every so often I think of the fact that Penny and I have chosen to exchange the security of moneyed wealth for the freedom to pass our days with as much autonomy as possible. Or the fact that our days are full of labor, of muscles made sore by long hours gathering firewood or stacking hay bales, sweat accumulating on our brows before the sun has even cleared the eastern horizon. Every so often, most often in the midst of some chore turned tedious by repetition and fatigue, I find myself thinking, “I don’t have to do this.” And then: “Is there something wrong with me that I want to?”
There is not, of course, and whatever fleeting moments of doubt I might experience are the result of allowing those voices and the well-meaning logic they convey—that we should worry that somehow our sons will not find their way into whatever career they desire, or that we’d be better served by taking steady jobs that could afford us the luxury of hiring out whatever unpleasant tasks need doing—to ring louder than the beliefs and experiences that guide us and bring so much beauty and balance to our days.
In both my family and in others, I have seen that parental expectations for childhood education are often corrosive to living with that sense of balance, as we allow ourselves to become swept into the river of extracurricular activities and expanded “opportunities.” We do this with only the best of intentions, believing that such things will advantage our children, without considering the toll these activities and opportunities extract, the hours and days spent scurrying and hurrying, too pressed for time to simply sit and enjoy the spectacle of a setting sun or the warm wetness of a July rain shower.
All of this does not mean you must be a parent to appreciate these ideas, in part because this book is not solely about children, but also because children need the support and love of many more people than just their parents. The role of mentors in a child’s community is rarely spoken of and, in fact, has all but disappeared. True, some communities offer mentoring programs, but they tend to be reserved for children whose home life defines them as being “in need.” The reality is that all of our children are in need of meaningful, mutually respectful relationships with adults and elders to facilitate learning and help children understand their role in their communities and, by extension, the world.
As I will discuss in more detail later, we have gone to great lengths to seek out mentors for Fin and Rye, and the critical importance of their role in our sons’ lives cannot be overstated. In fact, the critical importance of their role in Penny’s and my lives cannot be overstated, in no small part because the mentors we have found are drawn to the relationship through a passionate embrace of the specific knowledge and experience they embody, but also a sense of their responsibility to pass this knowledge along. After Rye recently decided to take a break from banjo lessons, his music teacher, Sarah, reminded him that she would always be available to help. “Even if it’s twenty years from now, you can call me with any questions, whether it has to do with music or not,” she said. And with that offering, she demonstrated the generosity this passing on requires, the hours spent in the company of our sons, the slow transference of skill and wisdom and, as important as the taught skill itself, an ethos of sharing.
Having chosen such an unconventional path in both the manner we educate our sons and the way we pass our days, growing most of our food and remaining close to our home, there are times it feels to me as if my family’s voice is lost in the crowd, and it can occasionally feel as if we occupy a lonely space. I do not mean “lonely” in the sense of lacking meaningful personal relationships, but in a broader cultural sense of living out-of-step with so many common goals and expectations. We drive decades-old cars with curmudgeonly contentment, and our thrift-store shirts bear patches on their patches, small scabs of cloth to cover the wounds inflicted by our labors. We tend to measure our wealth in terms of trees planted, time spent wandering the woods, and meals taken as a family. We do not earn very much money, and we do not care to, in large part because we believe that whatever time we might devote to earning money is generally worth more than anyone can pay us. There is a certain sociocultural isolation inherent in these choices, although I have noticed that the more fervently we embrace them, the more frequently we seem to connect with others who are making similar choices.
For their part, Fin and Rye seem generally unconcerned that they might be perceived as different. Recently, we attended an outdoor concert in a small city. The boys wore frayed camouflage pants, rubber barn boots, dangling belt knives, and—the pièce de résistance—a pair of felted wool caps they’d made of fleeces shorn from our sheep.
“Everyone is staring at us,” said Fin after half an hour or so.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“No, I think it’s hilarious.” Then he ran off to be stared at some more.
This sense of being out of step is one of the challenges I face in my life and in the principles I apply to raising my children: to not lose sight of my truth in a world that in so many ways tells me it is false. There is little support for our choices in the mainstream economy and in the omnipresent messaging that supports this economy, and I believe there is little support for our choices precisely because there is little profit to be realized from them. The decision to revere our time more than money, or the things money can buy, is not profitable for anyone but us. The decision to remain largely at home, or in our immediate community, finding our inspiration and entertainment in the people and natural world surrounding us, is not profitable for anyone but us. The decision to invest in our relationships—not merely with other people but with the plants and animals surrounding us—is not profitable for anyone but us. The decision to simply be discerning—about what we buy, how we pass our time, what influences we allow to shape our lives—does not line anyone’s pocket.
In this regard, this book performs one more function, albeit a decidedly self-serving one: It is a reminder to myself that just because the path we are following frequently deviates from the norm, we ar
e not crazy. It is a reminder to act from the place of clarity that tells us that the world we imagine is not impossible, impractical, or illogical, as individuals or as a collective. In fact, it is precisely the opposite: it is reasonable. Beauty, kindness, generosity, abundance, and connection are products of profound reason. They are the only rational response to a world that so freely offers these qualities. They are all around us, embodied by both humans and nature, and I owe my children the opportunity to recognize this fundamental truth.
Over the years, I have observed something astounding. The more Penny and I provide our boys the opportunity to view the world in these terms, the more they reciprocate by offering the same opportunity to us. I remember a morning last summer, when Rye called to me through the open kitchen window, to where I stood, washing egg yolk off the breakfast dishes. “Come outside, Papa,” he said. “Come look at this!” My boy was bent over the lifeless body of a star-nosed mole, a victim of our cats’ predatory instincts. He showed me the moles’ front paws, with their talon-like toes. He showed me the small appendages that ringed its snout, twenty-two in total. Later, we learned that the mole uses the 25,000 sensory receptors on these appendages to find and identify food. “That’s amazing,” said Rye, and we joked about what I’d look like with twenty-two tentacles protruding from my face. “Not much different,” said my son, and I feigned offense.
Or I consider all the times Fin has returned from one of his woods rambles with a hatful of wild edibles. He brings fiddlehead ferns, blackberries, spruce gum, and honey mushrooms. He brings goatsbeard and toothwort. Since he rarely travels without a length of fishing line and a hook tucked into a pocket, maybe a pair of brookies, their skin wet and glistening. He builds a fire and cooks the fish on a hot rock until the flesh is white and flakey and falls away from the bone.
Without my sons, I would not have known of such a creature as the star-nosed mole, and those twenty-two tentacles. I might have known of fiddleheads and blackberries, but not of spruce gum. Certainly not of goatsbeard and toothwort. I would not have known how to cook a fresh-caught trout on a hot rock, or that the world even held such possibilities. Ever since that morning Rye showed me the mole, I occasionally think of those 25,000 sensory receptors and I wonder how many of my own receptors have gone dormant from lack of use. I marvel at how many of them my sons have helped me coax back to life. How many more are just waiting for the right combination of factors to awaken, to whisper stories about how the world is and how I might find my place within it?
And I realize that my failure to hear these whispered stories is the direct result of perceiving myself as standing apart from others and from the natural world. But of course I do not stand apart; none of us do. We are all interconnected and interdependent, and because of this, we are all only as rich as we enrich those around us. I did not learn this in school. I learned it from my children.
OVERSEERS
In middle March I walk the upper pasture, stumbling under the weight of a pair of five-gallon buckets sloshing sap. The ground is nearly bare; the winter past was a feeble, fleeting thing, almost dreamlike in its rapid passing. Did it really happen? Was I really there? Why, I got the plow truck stuck only once, and two full rows of firewood remain in the shed. I’ll be glad for them come fall.
A gallon of sap weighs eight pounds, and I carry ten gallons (or maybe nine; I’ve lost some over the bucket rims). Seventy, eighty pounds. Not so much, but the far taps are a quarter mile down the field, hung from the old maples that define the border between our land and our neighbor Melvin’s dairy farm. They are big and graceful trees, overseers of decades and generations, and I cannot help thinking of all the cows that have loafed in their shade. I cannot stop myself thinking of all the storms they’ve survived, all the haying seasons they’ve known. The horse-drawn mowers, then the old Fords and Masseys, and now Melvin’s big New Holland that can lay down the entire field in an afternoon. And every year, they give their sap. Am I honoring or exploiting them by accepting this gift? Strange how it can sometimes seem as if there’s not much difference between the two.
Still, it humbles me to consider all they have seen and all they have given, as if these somehow juxtapose each other in a way that makes me unworthy of their gift. I am glad for the toil: the trudging through the late-February snowpack to drill and tap and hang, and now the daily shoulder-burning haul up the field to the small evaporator, fed with lengths of slabwood pulled off the sawmill as we boil down to the sweet essence of it all.
Halfway home. I stop at another tree, but of course the buckets are too full. I’ll have to come back. Down in the valley, I hear the distant whine of a two-stroke engine, either an end-of-season snowmobile run along some shaded ribbon of snow or an early-season dirt bike. The noise fades into the distance and I can hear the high-pitched bleating of the lambs in the barn and I know they are running to and fro, energized by the warmth and sun and perhaps some instinctual knowledge that soon they will be turned out to the season’s first tender shoots.
I set the buckets on the ground and for a minute, maybe two, I allow my mind to return to the previous morning. It was a cold one, barely a dozen degrees above zero and not yet full light when Rye slipped outside. The boy has caught the “fever,” which is the preferred colloquialism for the affliction that strikes a certain subset of the population that will spend the latter half of March bloodletting the sugar maple trees. The fever is common as mud around here; we have neighbors whose livelihood is utterly dependent on the annual sap run, who for three or four weeks every year don’t sleep more than a few hours per night, having spent the previous eleven months preparing for these hazy, exhausted days. We see them in town, at the post office or the hardware store, and the circles under their eyes tell us everything we need to know about what sort of season it’s been. The bigger the circles, the better the sap’s running, because of course no sugar maker worth his salt will rest when there’s syrup to be made.
For the past month, Rye has been amassing his own pile of slabwood scraps, and yesterday he arranged a small stone fire pit, over which he’ll boil away the thirty-nine parts of water necessary to glean one part of syrup. Concerned that Fin might beat him to the more productive trees before he got a chance to have at them, Rye marked his territory with strands of red yarn days ago. It looked as if the trees wore necklaces around their trunks. “Those are my trees,” he told Fin, as serious as if his livelihood depended on it, and Fin said OK, fine, whatever, he’d find his own.
One morning after chores, with Rye already stoking his fire and tendrils of steam just beginning to rise off the pot he’d appropriated for the task, I followed my son’s tracks through the waning snowpack, just to see which trees he’d tapped. (“That way,” was all he’d told me when I’d asked, pointing a gloved hand. Rye takes after Penny in that he rarely uses more words than necessary. Someday he might understand what a gift this is.) Down past the pond, over the hill at the pond’s western shore, up the hill after that, and finally, down into the woods, the pitch so steep I had to slide down it on my ass. There, he’d drilled holes into nearly a dozen trees, a small copse of maples so tucked away I hadn’t even known it existed. It was more than a quarter mile from his fire pit, and the haul—on some days, dozens of gallons—would be mostly uphill.
Down in the woods, I remembered a story Penny had told me a few days prior, how when she was driving Rye home from his weekly banjo lesson, she mentioned that there were times she still wished to travel. Penny’s always been like that; when we met, she’d just returned from a year of backpacking and ranch work in Australia and New Zealand, and she can’t quite pluck out the last few strands of wanderlust woven into her DNA. Someday, after the boys are grown, I’ll probably wake up to a note on the kitchen counter: “Pack your bags. We’re going to Africa.” Anyway, Rye said sure, he’d be fine with some travel, no problem. “But we have to be home for sugarin’ and haying,” he implored. “I can’t miss those.”
Late that afternoon, I visited my
son again. I kissed his head, his hair damp from steam, tasting of smoke and maple. He’d sat by the hungry fire all day, feeding it whenever it began to wane. Now his pile of wood was nearly gone and the buckets of sap were nearly empty, those thirty-nine parts of water having evaporated as if they were nothing at all.
“How much do you think I’ll get?” he asked, and I peered into his finishing pot, where perhaps a pint of almost-syrup roiled.
“I don’t know,” I replied, unsure of exactly how to break the news that his hours of labor and attention had been reduced to so little. I looked at my boy. His face was smudged with soot. I couldn’t lie. “Maybe a pint?”
“Really? You mean a whole pint?” He tipped his face to me, beaming as surely as if I’d told him his haul would be measured in gallons rather than cups.
“Yeah,” I said, grinning back at him. “A pint. A whole pint.”
2
Coming to the Land
IN ANY GIVEN AUTUMN in northern Vermont, there comes a day when the full intention of the approaching season becomes clear. On this day, a biting wind might blow, or a heavy rain might fall, or the air might carry the soft, uncommitted flakes of first snow meandering their way earthward. On this day, the sun may even shine, but there will be a certain slant to the light that speaks of transition. You may not recognize this day when it arrives; you may think it just another in a string of autumn days, its character and intent no more defined than those that came before and those that will follow. But in hindsight you will know differently. In hindsight, you will recognize it as the day the soft meat of summer was cleaved from the hard bone of winter.
It was on just such a day in the fall of 1996 that Penny and I first walked the land we would eventually purchase. It was a day of mottled browns and grays, the colors tempered by the season and a low ceiling of impassive clouds. A few stubborn leaves clung to the trees, unwilling to relinquish their thinning grip on life, but even they’d gone dull. Every day, a few more of them fell. Only the birches, slender and white as bones, seemed to harbor any color.