My talk at the Maine Home Education Alliance conference surprisingly meshed with comments from a major funder of the event, General Dynamics/Bath Iron Works.
I too appreciate your work, Pat, and along with The Intuitive Learner below, consider all who are free of the schooling prison should also get free of the larger Statist penitentiary and understand why they should identify with Voluntaryism, here https://voluntaryist.com/ and understand the truth of Voluntaryist scholar Robert Higgs’ warning:
“The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. We shall never have real, lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state.”
I appreciate your work, Pat. However, what’s the point of unschooling if it still results in participating in an economy that centers the military industrial complex? For me, unschooling is not just about better education in the sense that they will get better jobs in the old system. It is about living into a new system that centers sovereignty and heart.
Thanks for your comments, Intuitive Learner and Everything Voluntary. I harbor many misgivings about the military–industrial complex and its scams and misuses of power, but I also see a need for national defense. I want to see unschoolers find work worth doing and lives worth living, not just something called a better education (to paraphrase Holt). Towards that end, I see the outreach by a major employer in Maine to the homeschooling community as a positive step, especially in these precarious financial times. Prospective employees can make their own decision about whether they can work for a business that builds weapons of mass destruction.
I agree that unschooling is not just about getting better jobs in the old system, but the new system is not something we can just wish into existence. Unschooling is not a politically organized movement but a diverse group of interests united by their desire to live and learn in their homes and communities in their own ways. The history of school reform doesn’t bode well for making change within the system, and there are ever more political forces that prevent significant change in modern societies from percolating up from the citizenry. Rather than give up hope, I try to follow John Holt’s “nickel and dime” approach to lasting social change, announced in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling.
In starting this newsletter, we are putting into practice a nickel and dime theory about social change, which is, that important and lasting social change always comes slowly, and only when people change their lives, not just their political beliefs or parties. It is a process, that takes place over a period of time. At one moment in history, with respect to a certain matter, 99% of a society think and act one way; 1% think and act very differently. Some time later, that 1% minority becomes 2%, then 5%, then 10, 20, 30, until someday it becomes the dominant majority, and the social change has taken place. Some may ask, “When did this social change take place?” or “When did it begin?” There is no answer to these questions, except perhaps to say that any given social change begins the first time one person thinks of it.
I have come to understand, finally, and even to accept, that in almost everything I believe and care about I am a member of a minority in my own country, in most cases a very small minority. This is certainly true of all my ideas about children and education. We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it, without much adult coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that. And we are not likely to become the effective majority for many years, probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of any readers of GWS.
This doesn’t trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing. My work is to help them grow. If we can describe the effective majority of our society, with respect to children or schools or any other question, as moving in direction X, and ourselves, the small minority, as moving in direction Y, what I want to do is to find ways to help people, who want to move in direction Y, to move in that direction, rather than run after the great X-bound army shouting at them, “Hey you guys, stop, turn around, you ought to be heading in direction Y!” In areas they feel are important, people don’t change their ideas, much less their lives, because someone comes along with a bunch of arguments to show that they are mistaken, and even wicked, to think or do as they do. Once in a while, we may have to argue with the X-bound majority, to try to stop them from doing a great and immediate wrong. But most of the time, as a way of making real and deep changes in society, this kind of shouting and arguing seems to me a waste of time.
I work to change how children are being educated by speaking directly to those who are doing or are considering homeschooling, as well as the occasional public or private school. Many of them have totally different points of view about politics, economics, and religion from me. But if we don’t talk and listen to people who are not like us how can we learn what else is possible in our lives? This is hard to do, and I’ve declined invitations from groups who I feel are just using homeschooling to further a larger political , business, or social agenda that I can’t support in good conscience. I don’t know how else to grow the movement without meeting people where they are and talking openly about schooling and getting off the education treadmill.
It is very common for military recruiters to attend school and college events in the US, so I’ve never been surprised to see them at conferences. Christian Nationalist homeschoolers, in particular, put their connection to the military front and center by inviting retired military officers to keynote their events. I have not been invited to many of these events, but when I’ve done them I’m often thanked by those in my sessions for speaking about how to work with children, not on them; using kindness and patience, not force, to help them grow to be knowledgeable people. They are in the minority in these groups and seek support, which I’m able to provide.
I asked John Holt what powered him to continue speaking about his ideas about learning and children when he was criticized in public or in print. He replied (this is not an exact quote, but how I remember it), “I see my work as putting a pebble in people’s shoe. Some day they will have had enough discomfort that they’ll take the shoe off and think about that pebble and how it got there.”
I too appreciate your work, Pat, and along with The Intuitive Learner below, consider all who are free of the schooling prison should also get free of the larger Statist penitentiary and understand why they should identify with Voluntaryism, here https://voluntaryist.com/ and understand the truth of Voluntaryist scholar Robert Higgs’ warning:
“The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. We shall never have real, lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state.”
I appreciate your work, Pat. However, what’s the point of unschooling if it still results in participating in an economy that centers the military industrial complex? For me, unschooling is not just about better education in the sense that they will get better jobs in the old system. It is about living into a new system that centers sovereignty and heart.
Thanks for your comments, Intuitive Learner and Everything Voluntary. I harbor many misgivings about the military–industrial complex and its scams and misuses of power, but I also see a need for national defense. I want to see unschoolers find work worth doing and lives worth living, not just something called a better education (to paraphrase Holt). Towards that end, I see the outreach by a major employer in Maine to the homeschooling community as a positive step, especially in these precarious financial times. Prospective employees can make their own decision about whether they can work for a business that builds weapons of mass destruction.
I agree that unschooling is not just about getting better jobs in the old system, but the new system is not something we can just wish into existence. Unschooling is not a politically organized movement but a diverse group of interests united by their desire to live and learn in their homes and communities in their own ways. The history of school reform doesn’t bode well for making change within the system, and there are ever more political forces that prevent significant change in modern societies from percolating up from the citizenry. Rather than give up hope, I try to follow John Holt’s “nickel and dime” approach to lasting social change, announced in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling.
In starting this newsletter, we are putting into practice a nickel and dime theory about social change, which is, that important and lasting social change always comes slowly, and only when people change their lives, not just their political beliefs or parties. It is a process, that takes place over a period of time. At one moment in history, with respect to a certain matter, 99% of a society think and act one way; 1% think and act very differently. Some time later, that 1% minority becomes 2%, then 5%, then 10, 20, 30, until someday it becomes the dominant majority, and the social change has taken place. Some may ask, “When did this social change take place?” or “When did it begin?” There is no answer to these questions, except perhaps to say that any given social change begins the first time one person thinks of it.
I have come to understand, finally, and even to accept, that in almost everything I believe and care about I am a member of a minority in my own country, in most cases a very small minority. This is certainly true of all my ideas about children and education. We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it, without much adult coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that. And we are not likely to become the effective majority for many years, probably not in my lifetime, perhaps not in the lifetime of any readers of GWS.
This doesn’t trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing. My work is to help them grow. If we can describe the effective majority of our society, with respect to children or schools or any other question, as moving in direction X, and ourselves, the small minority, as moving in direction Y, what I want to do is to find ways to help people, who want to move in direction Y, to move in that direction, rather than run after the great X-bound army shouting at them, “Hey you guys, stop, turn around, you ought to be heading in direction Y!” In areas they feel are important, people don’t change their ideas, much less their lives, because someone comes along with a bunch of arguments to show that they are mistaken, and even wicked, to think or do as they do. Once in a while, we may have to argue with the X-bound majority, to try to stop them from doing a great and immediate wrong. But most of the time, as a way of making real and deep changes in society, this kind of shouting and arguing seems to me a waste of time.
I work to change how children are being educated by speaking directly to those who are doing or are considering homeschooling, as well as the occasional public or private school. Many of them have totally different points of view about politics, economics, and religion from me. But if we don’t talk and listen to people who are not like us how can we learn what else is possible in our lives? This is hard to do, and I’ve declined invitations from groups who I feel are just using homeschooling to further a larger political , business, or social agenda that I can’t support in good conscience. I don’t know how else to grow the movement without meeting people where they are and talking openly about schooling and getting off the education treadmill.
It is very common for military recruiters to attend school and college events in the US, so I’ve never been surprised to see them at conferences. Christian Nationalist homeschoolers, in particular, put their connection to the military front and center by inviting retired military officers to keynote their events. I have not been invited to many of these events, but when I’ve done them I’m often thanked by those in my sessions for speaking about how to work with children, not on them; using kindness and patience, not force, to help them grow to be knowledgeable people. They are in the minority in these groups and seek support, which I’m able to provide.
I asked John Holt what powered him to continue speaking about his ideas about learning and children when he was criticized in public or in print. He replied (this is not an exact quote, but how I remember it), “I see my work as putting a pebble in people’s shoe. Some day they will have had enough discomfort that they’ll take the shoe off and think about that pebble and how it got there.”