learning free

In further pursuit of freedom, I have ended up deep in literature about homeschooling/unschooling. Men such as John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich have been my "enlighten-ers" in this. But my journey to educational freedom didn't start with them.

I encountered homeschooling several years ago when I discovered one of my college professors from the States, who was in Kenya for a year, didn't send his kids to school. That seemed odd for a prof who made his living from pedagogy. His kids seemed pretty smart and happy regardless. They also had lots of time to go walkabout on campus and socialise and that to me wasn't such a bad thing. Hmm.

Later, after campus...

My interest piqued when I was introduced to a Kenyan family that homeschooled. I met the daughter in that family and was completely blown away by her demeanor. She acted like a tiny grown up; such fluent and unabashed speech! (she was four at the time, btw.) If more of us had been brought up that way, who knows what we'd have achieved by now.

Needless to say, I am obsessed by natural, non-institutional methods of learning. One of the reasons being that my own formal education was miserable from somewhere in mid-primary all the way to Uni. A part of my high school I enjoyed because it was a slightly more liberal place than what I had encountered prior.

Right now I am reading excerpts from a book by John Holt, an education reformer from the sixties and seventies who decided that reforming schools wasn't the answer to creating better learning environments. Abolishing formal schools ALTOGETHER is the only remedy since they weren't in the first place created to be places where children could achieve their full potential in whatever they desired. Schools were invented to teach people their place, to grade and pigeon-hole them so as to make them easier to control. Encouraging the spread of school is the worst thing that we could do. Read the chilling quote below from "Instead of Education:Ways to Help People Do Things Better" by John Holt:

"A global schoolhouse would be a world, which we seem to be moving toward, in which one group of people would have the right through our entire lives to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require us to submit to various kinds of treatment, i.e. education, therapy, etc., until we did. A worse nightmare is hard to imagine."

Shiver me timbers.

My children (if I ever have any) shall be homeschooled, no contest.