by Ben Hewitt
There was just one problem: Fin wasn’t the least bit on board. He’d never so much as heard of Rudolph Steiner; he didn’t know he was supposed to love sitting and expressing himself artistically.
In short, Fin hated it. He’d never been a particularly docile child, and the expectation that he would sit at that table quietly expressing himself through his art unleashed something close to fury in him. He fought every second of it. He bucked and keened and wailed. He fidgeted and fussed. He didn’t want to sit at that table for even a minute; indeed, he didn’t really want to sit anywhere at all. “What the hell would a Waldorf school do with this kid?” Penny remarked after one particularly exasperating session that had ended in tears for all involved.
Penny’s question was rhetorical, because even if we could have afforded the tuition, we had no intention of sending our son to a Waldorf school, and this was particularly true once we came to understand and accept that Fin’s temperament simply wasn’t suited to sit-down learning. He’d always been a child-in-motion, one of those kids for whom silence and stillness are anathema. For all his childhood, there was precisely one time he napped of his own accord; every other midday snooze was a hard-fought affair, coming only after being in the car, or a walk through the woods, with him folded into a sling, his eyes covered simply so he’d stop looking around. So he’d stop engaging for long enough to provide him (and us) some much-needed rest.
I have no doubt that if Fin had been sent to a public school, he would have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and summarily prescribed behavior-modifying drugs. Indeed, were we not inclined to allow our children to learn at home, anyway, the simple fact of Fin’s temperament and the threat of such a diagnosis would have compelled us to keep him out of school. The sad fact is that drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, which so profoundly alter the neural pathways in the brain as to be addictive, have become a de rigueur part of our nation’s public education system. In 2010, sales of these drugs surpassed the seven-billion-dollar mark, an increase of 83 percent over just four years,1 and by 2013, 11 percent of school-aged children would be diagnosed with some form of attention deficiency.
The acceptance of who our son was rather than who we thought he should be marked a crucial turning point in Penny’s and my journey of unlearning the expectations and assumptions we’d been socialized to. I now view our son’s high-octane temperament as being one of the great blessings of our lives, for if he had been an easygoing child, willing to apply himself to whatever lessons we placed before him, we might never have allowed ourselves to grant our children the freedom that has been so essential to their growth and development. We might never have granted ourselves the freedom that has been so essential to our growth and development.
Once we abandoned the notion that Fin should learn in any particular style, it was as if a blindfold had been torn from our eyes. No longer were we mired in concept; now, we could observe. And what we observed was that the son we worried would never be able to quiet his body and mind enough to concentrate on a particular task was actually capable of tremendous focus. Liberated from paint, paper, and all assumptions about how he should learn, Fin immersed himself in projects that seemed to blossom from some primal place deep inside him. At first, these projects had no discernible end: He spent hours hammering nails into a single piece of wood, or whittling a stick until it was so thin it splintered in his hand. But gradually, his pursuits became tangible. He built bows, spending hours carving and sanding. He became an expert at making cordage from gossamer threads of cedar bark. He fished for hours at a time, seemingly unconcerned by the dearth of fish he brought home. He learned to kindle fire from flint and steel, to identify the trees and plants in our forest. So determined was he to make a pack basket that he spent an entire day weaving splints into shape, and by seven the next morning he was back at it.
Of course, he did not teach himself all of these skills; liberating our son from our preconceived notions regarding what his education should look like did not uncap a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience that had been lying in wait for the very moment of our enlightenment. Nor were the majority of these skills handed down from Penny and me, who could no sooner have taught him to make cordage than to construct a nuclear reactor. Instead, we sought ways to connect Fin with other adults experienced in working with children in the natural world. We visited a nature program for kids, but quickly realized that the overstimulation of so many peers was not a good match for Fin’s temperament, so we hired one of the instructors to work with our son one-on-one.
The instructor’s name was Erik, and every week he came to our home, whereupon he and Fin would disappear into the woods for hours. Later, when Fin turned eight and it was clear he was ready for the stimulation of a group, we signed him up for a one-day-per-week wilderness-skills program. He flourished there, returning each Thursday afternoon glowing from the day’s excitement and, I suspect, the sense of having found a place where he felt as if he belonged. Today, Fin is still part of this group, and Erik still comes to our house every week. But now, it is Rye he accompanies into the woods.
Rye’s temperament is so different from Fin’s that had he come first, we might have gone farther down the path of a more structured homeschooling regimen. Rye shares Penny’s organizational tendencies, and is in general a quieter, more introspective child. I do not think he would thrive under the onus of a structured curriculum, be it at home or in school, but I do think he would at least survive. Fortunately for us all, Fin showed us a different path.
A question I ask myself with some frequency, and particularly as I struggle with one or another of our parenting choices is this: “What is an education?” And, not inconsequently, “What is a childhood? Should it be one thing, and not another?” It’s a silly question, really, a bit like asking, “What is a person? Should she be one thing and not another?” But even if it is silly, it grounds me. It reminds me that the assumptions we have arrived at regarding education are just that: assumptions. They are stories born of a culture, and like all stories, we can choose to believe them or not. We can choose to listen or not. We can choose, even, to write our own stories.
Part of the story I am attempting to write with my children is the story of trust. Of letting go and trusting my instincts as a parent, which is a luxury I can allow myself only if I can learn to have trust in my boys. Simple trust, the confidence in our children and in ourselves to allow them to unfold at their own pace. The confidence that they will unfold, even when it seems as if they are falling behind the manufactured expectations set by institutionalized schooling.
Not so long ago, when Rye was seven, I mentioned to someone that he did not yet read. She was shocked, and not only because my son couldn’t read but, I believe, because I was so unconcerned. “Really?” she kept asking. “Really?” As if this were some unconquerable failing that would haunt him all his life. I was not offended. I know what the expectations are, what they have become. I know that by age seven, my children are expected to be reading, to be multiplying endless rows of numbers across a page, to be sitting for hours on end, bent over pencil and paper or, as is increasingly likely, a laptop or iPad. I know what they’re expected to know, and often, in this regard, I recognize how my children fall short.
Yet it is what Fin and Rye are not expected to know that is so fascinating to me. To identify every tree in our woodlot. To butcher a hog. To wield a splitting maul and use a chop saw. To make a fire. To know when a windrow of hay is dry enough for baling. To build a cabin. To sew and knit and carve. To disappear into the woods below our home and return an hour later with a bag full of chanterelle and hedgehog mushrooms. To operate Melvin’s bale wrapper, so they can help him during the crush of summer. These skills feel important to me because they are the skills of a particular place, having arisen from their connection to this land and community. And they feel important because they are true life skills. They are instilling in my boys a degree of hands-on resourcefulness that i
s rapidly being lost in a society where many people do not even know how to change a tire, or hold an ax. Finally, I see how the skills and the knowledge they embody are the direct result of my sons’ innate curiosities and love of learning. To be sure, their exposure to the particulars of this place has played a role in defining the subjects their love of learning has landed upon. Such a thing is unavoidable.
But none of it has been forced. None of it has come attached to reward or acclaim beyond the quiet satisfaction inherent in the process of learning and the completion of a task. Penny and I believe in presence, not praise. We are here to support and facilitate, but not to cajole and manipulate, through either threat or incentive. The boys’ unhampered curiosity is incentive enough. The learning is its own reward.
Can the same be said of schooled learning? Of course it can. Loving to learn and being compelled to learn from a prescribed curriculum are not mutually exclusive. But there is little question that the overwhelming majority of institutionalized learning occurs in isolation from the tangible realities of place and form, of how the world feels and looks, tastes and smells and sounds. I believe it is crucial for children to learn in ways that are not held in isolation, that involve the body as well as the mind, and that result in something real and tangible. Even better, something of service: a shelter where once there was none; food in a freezer that was previously empty; or even just a piece of clothing mended by their own hands. Interestingly, this is precisely the sort of learning that is rapidly disappearing from public education in the wake of diminishing budgets and immersion in the abstraction of technology.
I have seen how even a child’s whim or want of a frivolity can provide an opportunity for them to create something real. When Fin was five, he desired nothing in this world so much as a popgun. For weeks, we put him off, his pleas growing more ardent by the day. It wasn’t that we didn’t want him to have a popgun, but rather that we didn’t want to buy him a plastic bauble that would in short order be reduced to landfill. So Penny set about researching how to make a popgun, slowly gathering the materials in anticipation of a teachable mother-son project. “He’s going to love this,” she told me once she’d finally settled on a design.
The next morning, before Penny could astound our son with her ingenuity and resourcefulness, something curious happened: Fin careened into the house with a contraption in his hands. “Look what I made!” he hollered, waving in our faces the popgun he’d designed and summarily constructed. Penny and I were mute with surprise. Without so much as consulting us or even watching a YouTube video on the subject, our five-year-old son had designed and built a popgun. What’s more, the darn thing actually worked. Sure, it was simple, little more than a length of copper pipe fitted with a dowel of appropriate diameter that slammed into the cork he’d shaved until it could be squeezed into the pipe’s end. But simple or not, it worked. The cork flew.
How many times, I wondered, have we profoundly underestimated our children’s abilities? How many times have we simply given them what they’ve asked for, in the process short-circuiting their sense of discovery, their ability to imagine and create, to fail and succeed? It happens less often now than it once did, but still I suspect it has been an awful lot, and I am reminded of a friend’s comment that her young children’s “art” class in school consisted primarily of coloring inside prescribed outlines. “They don’t leave much room for imagination,” she said, and I flinched at the comment, because of course imagination is what we should be leaving the most room for.
The danger in “color between the lines” learning is the degree to which it conditions children to need direction. As adults, few of us even recognize this because of course we too have been conditioned to the need for direction. Witnessing Fin and Rye construct innumerable implements of their devising has revealed to Penny and me the glaring lack of our own resourcefulness. Like most people in our society, we were taught to need instruction.
One could argue that the knowledge we hope to imbue in our sons is not mutually exclusive to a conventional schooling experience. This is true. But another truth is that any child, like any adult, has only so many waking hours in a day, and if those hours are passed inside the four walls of a classroom, or gazing into a pixilated screen, they are by default not spent otherwise. If a child is spending seven or eight hours in a classroom each day, plus another two or three (or more) hours completing homework assignments, plus whatever other extracurricular activities are on his or her plate, plus however much time he or she spends commuting to school, plus whatever time is devoted to television and other passive entertainment mediums, there simply isn’t any time remaining to develop relationships outside the context of these institutions.
Every so often, I fall victim to the manufactured educational expectations of our culture, and I worry that my boys will remain forever out of step with twenty-first-century America. Could Penny and I be condemning them to a life of toil and meager wages, bereft of the information they need to land the sort of job parents are supposed to want for their children? Is it possible that by not introducing them to Facebook, or by not equipping them with smart phones and iPads, or by not compelling them to sit for hours on end memorizing multiplication tables and textbook history lessons, we are disadvantaging them? In these moments, I fret over the many things they don’t know, and think, “My God, am I failing them?” Or I consider my own unlikely education, and my still-bloated ignorance and all the times it feels as if I know nothing or, if not nothing, then not enough.
Of course, I cannot know with any real certainty that I am not failing my children. This is the cross all parents must bear: We cannot know. We cannot know what their future will be, if they will end up as bankers or boatbuilders, lawyers or linesmen, doctors or ditchdiggers. We cannot know if they will be happy and contented, or bitter and maladjusted. We cannot know the state of the world they will inhabit. If everything goes according to plan, we will die before their journey is anywhere near to being over and we will know even less. One of the most important jobs I have as a parent—and perhaps simply as a human—is to learn how to peacefully coexist with this uncertainty.
One might accurately note that completing high school and even college does not preclude happiness and contentment. But that’s not what I’m suggesting. Rather, I’m suggesting, based on personal experience, that living a good and meaningful life is not dependent on walking our culture’s prescribed educational path. That may sound painfully, if not insultingly, obvious. Yet our society seems to have attached itself to the notion that institutional, standardized education is precisely the path our children must walk if they are to thrive in this world. Perhaps this is correct, although it’s interesting to note that homeschoolers graduate college at a higher rate than their peers—66.7 percent compared to 57.5 percent. Not only that, but they earn higher grade-point averages than their schooled classmates along the way.2
It seems to me as if most educational institutions view it as their duty to prepare children for the economy as it exists, with all its inherent assumptions regarding happiness and prosperity. And really, who can blame them? After all, this is precisely what we demand of them: give our children the skills necessary to succeed in the context of the socioeconomic arrangements upon which we have all come to depend. The problem is, we demand this without seriously considering whether or not these arrangements create a world we all want to inhabit. So long as these institutions groom our children to compete and excel on a global stage, in an economy that reveres growth and defines success and security in terms of money and force, a world of true peace and equality will remain achingly out of reach. In short, the feedback loops built into our contemporary economy will not be overcome so long as we continue to educate our youth in a manner that upholds them.
In my own life, and with the benefit of a quarter century of hindsight, I now see that leaving high school was actually an enabling factor. Not so much for the doors it opened and the so-called opportunities it presented, but for havin
g played a role in changing my view of what mattered. For having freed me to make my own way in this world, before I had so much invested—materially, emotionally, physically—in a more traditional path that I might never have dared deviate from. Our society carries strong assumptions about what constitutes a successful life and about the sort of person that becomes a high school dropout. Or the sort a person a high school dropout becomes.
In fairness, statistics do play a role in developing these assumptions. After all, among dropouts between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, incarceration rates were sixty-three times higher than those of college graduates.3 But of course correlation is not causation, and it seems reasonable to wonder if this correlation is less the result of some inherent “badness” associated with dropping out of school and more the result of the stigma we attach to leaving school, and the lack of support provided to those who do not follow through with a formal education. It seems fair to wonder: if more children were allowed to pursue their own paths outside of school, free of judgment and supported by their communities, might they find ways to bring meaningful and positive contributions to this world?
It is so easy to explain and demonstrate success in the context of our culture’s common vernacular regarding achievement. Home ownership, a good-paying job, a generous 401(k), a nice car, recognition, personal ambition to achieve these things: These are some of the metrics by which our culture has come to define success, and because they are commonly understood to be so, they have become a sort of shorthand for a life well lived. Or perhaps it is simply a life of comfort, which itself seems to serve as an emblem of a life well lived.
It is not that there’s anything particularly wrong with any of these metrics in isolation. These are not inherently bad things, and indeed, I have some of them myself. The danger is that the pursuit of them threatens to hijack our lives in ways that make it difficult for us to cultivate meaningful relationships with place and nature. The problem is that we pursue them—both for ourselves and on behalf of our children—without considering the ramifications of our pursuit, how it can pull us away from one another, how it can fragment family and community, how the attempt to ensure our economic success can sacrifice our freedom. And how this pursuit can do the same thing to our children.