The Adventures of an Unschooler on the Virtual High Seas

One of the best features of the educational path that is becoming known as “unschooling” is the opportunity for “deep learning”, that is, delving into something of great interest with all your mind, heart and soul, to whatever extent your inspiration and/or need takes you, instead of being told it is now time to learn something else. Even more so than her pursuit of learning the French language (see my post “The Unschool Pursuit of French”), our daughter found the opportunity to deep learn when she got involved in an Internet-based role-playing game community over the course of several years.

Starting in the fall of 2003 at age 14, in the midst of ninth grade (what would turn out to be her last year of school), her older brother Eric turned our daughter Emma on to a “massively multi-player online role-playing game” (or MMORPG) called “Never Winter Nights” which was his favorite among several such games that he had played. This is one of those games where you create a character and the avatar (representation) of that character which you then navigate through the various environs of a fantasy world, along with or encountering other avatars controlled by other people logged into and playing the game. You communicate with other players by typing, and little dialog bubbles appear above your avatar’s head.

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Engaging High School Youth in their Own Education

So when you are bored and not really engaged with what is going on around you, is that a good learning environment for you? It apparently isn’t for most of America’s high school students.

As reported in a June 15 article in Education Week, “Study: Teens Are Bored”…

Most high school students feel bored and disconnected from school, according to a new survey of students from 103 high schools in 27 states. Begun in 2004, the annual High School Survey of Student Engagement aims to take a pulse on teenagers’ attitudes toward school and learning. But the latest results, released last week, show that students were just as bored in 2009 as they have been every year since 2006.

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Does Compulsion Still Work?

I am convinced that we are in an historic transition in our society and our entire world from patriarchy to partnership. From a model of organizing society’s institutions around hierarchy, top-down control and “power-over” towards a very different model where the “world is flat” and decisions are made collectively in a “power-with” arrangement. Like all profound transformations, besides the visible changes in how our institutions are organized, how we lead our lives and interact with each other, there are internal realignments in what we value and how we frame the world and our participation in it.

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Abby Sunderland & Conventional Wisdom on the Capabilities & Quests of Youth

Abby Sunderland
So should Abby Sunderland have attempted to sail around the world? Should her parents have let her? I’m sure plenty of people will argue endlessly, many on camera for news shows seeking high viewership ratings, of the particulars of this case of Abby’s age, her judgment, her family’s judgment, and her parents’ responsibility in their role as stewards.

I am more concerned about the “spin”, and the reinforcement of the prevailing conventional wisdom about the limits of the agency of youth and the responsibility of parents and other stewards of those youth to restrain and constrain the more prodigious among them from pursuing their dreams and strutting their stuff.

I guess the facts of this particular anecdote and the decisions that were made by Sunderland and her family are arguable. Maybe getting delayed and having to do the treacherous Cape navigation in the southern hemisphere winter was bad judgment. Maybe being driven by the notoriety of a place in the record books is not the best reason for launching an adventure. Maybe older youths should have significant limits imposed on them beyond what they would choose to impose on themselves.

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Spare the Rod… & other Inappropriate Conventional Wisdom Dealing with Youth

Kids are obviously stakeholders in their own lives, and like most other stakeholders they generally want and deserve to have input into decisions made about the course of their lives, if not having the final say on those decisions. There seem to be a lot of adults, who play a stewardship role in kids’ lives as parents, teachers, etc. that don’t seem to get this. Or maybe relying on inappropriate myths or conventional cultural wisdom, they think their responsibility as stewards to these kids somehow trumps kids’ own right to self-direction.

We adults mostly understand this when dealing with other adults, and our society and most of its institutions basically “get it” that adult stakeholders should have input or even the final say in key decisions in their lives, unless they are say convicted criminals or judged mentally incompetent. This is a key element of the whole evolving concept of individualism over the past five centuries of human history and thought in the transition from feudal monarchies to citizen republics and free enterprise.

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Margaret Fuller: America’s First Public Intellectual

On the 200th anniversary of her birth, Unitarian-Universalists are rediscovering and celebrating one of the giants of their movement, Margaret Fuller. She is acknowledged in the recent UU World article as one of the trio of key thinkers that defined the philosophy of Transcendentalism that emerged in the mid 19th Century as a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal “command and control” paradigm of the emerging capitalism, industrialism, and the related social engineering that was popular in mainstream progressive Protestant denominations, including mainstream Unitarianism.

Obscured in history, perhaps because of her gender, Fuller may in fact have played the critical role (as what some call America’s first public intellectual) in putting forward the Transcendentalist ideas of a more humanistic self-directed vision of human progress. Maybe more so than her colleagues Emerson and Thoreau, she championed those ideas in American popular cultural to counter the prevailing top-down model of social development.

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The Unschool Pursuit of French

The Old Montreal neighborhood where Emma & Riva attended the language immersion school
I believe there is something profoundly different about an internally motivated and self-driven pursuit of a body of knowledge, as compared to an externally imposed requirement to learn something, and in an educational venue not necessarily of ones choosing. I think this fact is lost on an education establishment that continues to provide essentially just one educational environment, which is an OSFA (one size fits all) set of conventional instructional schools.

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Living an Intentional Life on a Random Day

I like each day I live to have a little bit of adventure in it, and today was a perfect example of making that so. In fact I am writing this piece on a bus headed down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, doing exactly what I would want to be doing at this moment, but not what I expected or planned to be doing at this time.

We had an offsite gathering for my work down in Irvine today, about 50 miles south of my work site in Burbank. They scheduled a bus from our office to the site and back, but the return would get us back to the office at around 4:30pm, way too late for me to hop my 222 bus to Hollywood and then the 2 bus to the Palisades. Initially I had resigned myself to forgoing my normal Thursday ritual of having dinner with Sally and her folks at their house in the Palisades.

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Lefty Parent Classic: Jane & Eric Go To Ann Arbor

Jane Roberts as a young adult
Jane Roberts as a young adult
This is a reprint of the initial post in my chronology. Thought those who had not seen it before might enjoy it while I am busy with my work week and not putting out new stuff…

As I get older, I am more and more amazed about the story of how my mother, Jane Roberts, decided to go to Ann Arbor. An unlikely odyssey in 1946 for a single young woman of 23, but one that started a chain of events that led to my birth. Thirty-two years later in 1978, I would embark on my own odyssey to Los Angeles, coincidentally at age 23 as well.

Based on her telling, Jane had had a childhood mixing idyllic joys and adventures with some difficult family relationships, particularly with her mother Caroline. Jane was the first of three children, her brother John just two years younger and her sister Pat born to an entirely different generation 14 years later.

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Moving Beyond “Adultism” & Disrespect of Youth

It is stunning to me the “adultism” demonstrated by the disrespectful ways many adults still treat children and youth, particularly their own kids. I think it is one of the last vestiges in our society of pure patriarchal “power-over” protocol that is still considered acceptable by many adults in dealing with their children and youth. That protocol involves the assumption that the “superior” adult/parent has the absolute command and control over the “inferior” young person/child, such that any inappropriate behavior by the “inferior” reflects on and is highly disrespectful to the reputation of their “superior” and must be forcibly modified to save face.

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