What Really Matters? David Albert and Joyce Reed tell us what!

What Really Matters? I love the title of this book because it has you questioning your priorities right off the bat.

In this collection of essays- conversations between veteran homeschooling advocates Joyce Reed and David Albert, we get to the heart of the matter:what is learning really all about?

I read the book cover to cover and found within its pages useful tips and encouraging words of wisdom as well as liberating ways to think about how people actually learn.

Most of all, I felt energized and inspired by Reed and Albert's living examples of the wonderful world that can unfold when we trust our kids; that they are learning what they need to and want to.

How do we do this? And what does it look like? These two 'elders' share their beautiful stories with us, and it makes everything seem so much more lighter.

As we read through the pages of these essays, we can look at our own children's learning paths in new light-and be heartened that they are capable of forging just as an extraordinary a path as the children of these advocates have done.

We can do our best to help them along the way-but not too much. Like Albert and Reed did (and continue to do, I'm sure), we need to offer; expose and then step back so that they can explore and discover what they are passionate about.

In keeping with my 'learning in community' theme of the past couple blog posts, there is one chapter in the book where Albert writes in a thought provoking essay called "The Curriculum of Beauty' about there being moral and ethical beauty- and how to find these in 'beautiful relationships' stepping outside our security zone to seek out these people.

"Seek out not only opportunities for service in your community or your world, but contact for your children with those who work, in their own ways, big or small for peace, l justice and equity, often at risk to themselves or in sacrifice of their own creature comfort.

He suggests having tea parties, "lots and lots of tea parties," as an easy way to get the ball rolling.

This is a book that I would give to anyone who wants an indepth depiction of what joyful learning and living, authentic education looks like.
It's published by Natural Life Books.

Peter Kowalke:Grown homeschoolers-What are they doing now?

What is grown homeschooler, writer, former
Life Learning Magazine columnist and producer of the film 'Grown without Schooling,' Peter Kowalke up to these days?

What about the grown homeschoolers he knows? Are they different? Peter provides insight into the varied paths of people who choose alternatives to schools in a phone interview with Radio Free School.

Listen to the interview here



Or read an excerpt from the interview below.

Is there going to be a 'Grown without schooling 2'?

There continues to be a need both among grown homeschoolers to share experiences to share what makes grown homeschoolers. There is a need to tap in to that community and for parents who are interested in growing homeschoolers. But we are all so busy so we don't have time to put out something polishes so where does that leave us? Quick and dirty blogs. So hopefully you'll see something from me soon.
If there is a gws 2 it will be done with this quick and dirty blog style- so a mish-mash of various formats not necessarily a traditional documentary

What about the second generation of grown homeschoolers? Are you in touch with these that are married, that have kids?

I am in touch with a great number of grown homeschoolers. I just talked to one in Florida- Lynda Young.
In some regards I look for what is different because that is where the story is. As I've been talking to these home schoolers, I've been trying to sleuth out well are you doing anything different? "Are you doing anything wildly and crazy?"
In some regards I'm disappointed because there is not a lot of wild and crazy going on. It's not dramatically different that what their parents did and what people who aren't growing homeschoolers are doing.

One difference that I am noticing so far is that a lot of the homeschoolers I've talked to are calmer. They are not as stressed about the process. They are okay with their children reading late. They're okay with their children not knowing geography- you know, or following their interests and that looking a little scary at points.

And getting back to Lynda Young and what I was about to say about her- you know she did point out that sometimes there is a little alienation in the sense that she is around these parents who are sending their kids to school.
And lot of the things she is doing like like the family bed, and one of her kids nursing somewhat later than most kids- non schooling- there is just this litany of somewhat unusual alternative parent which when you look at the children and you look at the family it seems all great but the priorities and values are a little different.

What is interesting is that you are seeing there what you see elsewhere with grown homeschoolers which is that they are charting their own course; they are doing things a little differently and not just in a uniform different way-not just they all do it the same way. There is a lot more thinking about it individually. Sometimes the solutions they come to are a little bit different than the mainstream dominant culture. That is something they are facing and sometimes it is to a competitive advantage.
You kinda wanna stand out especially in this economy. So being different has its advantages but if you just want to blend in with then maybe homeschooling is not so good for being average and normal and doing things like everybody else does.

There have been a few magazine where I'm noticing talk about the 'drop out economy,' 'reasons why you shouldn't send your kids to college.' Because the world that we are heading into is not going to be a world that university prepares us.
I am not the biggest fan of the college system and the way that we institutionalize education. It always seemed a little strange that you don't go to school; you homeschool and then and when you get to college level, you go back into institutionalized education. The reasons that I homeschooled were really a critic of the institutionalized process. I don't see them us preparing us particularly well.

I definitely went to college - it was a long and drawn out process but I knew that I needed that degree.
One of the things that the education system does that is so pernicious is that it ties certification to education. There is a certain logic for the need for certification-but the sad part is that it should be an ideal world scenario that you can 'learn it anyway you want it. Just show us that you know it and we will certify you.'
But sensing a business opportunity the education apparatus really restricted the way we can learn. You pretty much have to do college! Even the alternative colleges are really variants on the various models of the traditional college models so it really forces you to do it one way- that is a real shame.


I have been talking to people who are saying no -not going and they are finding ways to just being more self sufficient more entrepreneurial.

Oh yes! There are grown who have that critic and some of them one to go to college and try and some of that group challenge and try not to go. My read on the outcome most of the time- it does vary wildly but it is certainty not easy to skip college- and a lot of the homeschoolers will do it because as much as we dislike it we don't want to fight that battle.
We are tired of fighting but there are a number that have gone without college and I am always excited to hear that. But then you do see later on at some point struggling or questioning it. They don't say, "Well I should have gone to college"- but a lot of times between the line they say, "This is hard.
It's not as easy as it sounded at first. This is tough."

It's so much part of our culture!

Yes. That is the problem. We are not set up as a society to recognize that. so It is an uphill battle to make a large amount of money. The most successful of homeschoolings I have seen who skip college are those who live lightly they are much closer to back to the land, I don't need much because it is hard to avoid.
I'd like to think that we can get past that but I don't know I am somewhat pessimist of changing the whole direction of society. I'd be content just to carve out a little corner for myself.

How do you define success?

You know its tricky. Some days I feel successful and other days I don't and the days that I don't feel successful are the days when I am making direct comparisons with my peers using their metrics. It really does comes down to
the fact that I am in a society and every society has its values and what they consider success and as much as you wanna define it the way that you think it makes sense its the dominant view of success is put upon you.

How I define success? I define success in how many loving relationships I have- how many good strong connections I have with people I define success in what I accomplish and if I do it in a moral way? I define success in "Am I healthy?"
I was just out to dinner with a friend who is not a grown homeschooler and she works herself to the bone. She gets four hours of sleep, she's unhealthy and her hair is falling out. She is quote on quote 'successful' but it's not just how much $$ you make. l am still opposed to materialism like a lot of grown homeschoolers where they find success beyond how much material I can acquire.

But at the same time it is tough to always live inside your definition of success. There is no easy answer. If you walk a somewhat individual path, that's kind of the price you have to pay.

In the previous interview we did- what you noticed about home educated kids is that they questioned a lot - i noticed that with you. You are not afraid to question if self directed learning is is the way to go. You are brave enough to question that.

I definitely still believe in it and I am glad I was homeschooled. I still plan to do that with my kids when I have the opportunity but yeah- I do think that homeschoolers especially unschoolers do have more time to think about things and to challenge.

And i think that the challenging comes from the fact that grow up not in school and that is is a pretty big challenge to a system that until relatively recently went unchallenged. And to do that it is hared not to internalize that at some level to question what some people think is so fundamental you come out and say, "Yes. I questioned it and I am glad what else can I question?"

That is why I like hanging out with homeschoolers because they are doing a lot of fun interesting things. Not all of it- there is some kooky behavior sometimes some failures along the line, but pound for pound there is a lot of trying things experimentation open mindedness and that is a beautiful thing.

Indeed and if we can have some influence on people who were not raised that way- we are ourselves a walking challenge so it is a good thing to impart on society there-that to give little challenge.

One of the things I have noticed in my own life in relationship to that being a challenge as a grown homeschooling i have been a challenge my whole life- and I am not alone in feeling that people have to feel challenged.And I am tired of it.
And so I have noticed it is a "be the change you want to see in the world" as Gandhi said. I think that at this point, and a lot of my grown homeschoolers are approaching it this way too. A quite example; less about converting the world. if you want to do it that is great- we think we are doing something good here. As I get older it is not that I am losing sparks - just that I fought it for so long. Let someone else do it!

But again you are thinking of doing a blog so you do have that interest right?

Basically there are 2 parts to it - the real reason to connect to other homeschooler because they are doing cool things and also because there is the societal pressure to do it. And that can wear you down-so to hang out with people who think the same way similar ways. And the other half is just to give back. There are a lot of questions that parents have asked over the years. That would be the more static part.

Silver Donald Cameron; Beyond the Teapot Theory of Educating and Gross National Happiness

Silver Donald Cameron is one of Canada's most versatile and experienced professional authors. His work includes plays, films, radio and TV scripts, an extensive body of corporate and governmental writing, hundreds of magazine articles and 16 books, including two novels. His non-fiction subjects include history, travel, literature, politics, nature and the environment, community development, ships and the sea, as well as education and public affairs. He produces and hosts a project called The Green Interview.

I interviewed him a few weeks ago for Radio Free School about new ways of educating, with examples from Bhutan where the focus is on Gross National Happiness!

Listen to the show here.

Also, included in this post is a text excerpt from the interview (below). Enjoy!

Your article Beyond The Teapot Theory-pouring out knowledge into empty vessels- do you think there is a significant movement happening now against this way of educating? In magazines like The Times, more and more you are seeing articles talking about the 'dropout economy,' don't bother going to college-because it will not be useful in the new world.


I think that the rising cost of university and the uploading of the cost on to the student has had a really deleterious affect on that whole dimension of the system. But I think most of us do need some form of education but how you get it is kind of the question.

What i am sensing is a lot of disquiet about what i call 'the tea pot theory' in that article in the sense that that is not the way people learn. I think that educational needs have become so diverse and the range of things people do with their lives has become so striving that it is not easy anymore to have a single education system that prepares people for the labour force.

The labor force is not like that anymore - it is very very fragmented the skill sets are quiet sophisticated and very different from one another so this sort of factory system where you push them all through and they get more or less the same education it doesn't fit very well and i think a lot of people are seeing that.

And I think it doesn't fit not only from the point of view of a vocational system but it doesn't fit in terms of the way that people learn, and i think we have learned something about that too; that there is a relatively small part of the population that learns best by sitting inside of a classroom having the information preached to them, or conveyed to them. That is not a very efficient way of learning, and the more effective way of learning always seems to involve hands on activity, community activity engagement with the world out there observation, reflection and then maybe be ready to hear something from an instructor or mentor...


You underlined in your essay Beyond The Teapot Theory "the need for art and mystery in learning" which is something we don't often hear about.


That comes from an actual apprenticeship document in the 19th century Cape Breton Island that the young fellow is "bound to the blacksmith to learn his art and mystery" and the sense that there is art and mystery and that it is something you have to absorb over a long period of time more or less through your pores. Not something we think about very much anymore. We tend to think of it as being a very cut and dry proposition. But learning in a profound sense is not like that.

What I love about that phrase is that it's not just some sort of mechanical skill or technique but a sense of the actively as a holistic kind of thing and the sense of it being a body of knowledge that can only be understood if you know that at heart there is mystery to it. I think that is true with anything that you have set out to learn.


"The liberation of learning"- that is what we need to do. liberate learning from these strict A to B- no deviation.


That's right. One of the things in another mood I would say is that I am not sure there is such as thing as teaching. I am very sure that there is such a thing as learning and that teaching really occurs at the instance of the learner For example if I want to learn how to lay carpets or weaving and you know about it than I may come to you and say, "Please show me how to do this."
This is what we do in every aspect of our lives; the way we do it, you say, "Well, I will sign up for this course because I want to learn about it."

So the emphasis is with you and the primary activity is you learning and the other person is not so much teaching as providing resources intellectual resources and other resources. And I suspect that that is how most learning takes place and this doesn't resemble the paradigm we have.


Gross National Happiness vs gross national product?


I got involved with that because we have had here a wonderful research organization in NS GPI Atlantic -which was working on a genuine progress index for Nova Scotia and is in fact completed. And the kind of core understanding of GPI is the foundation upon which the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness measurements are based.

The basic issue that GNH has dealt with is the sense that important things don't get counted and unimportant things do get counted in our economics process. So for example traditional GNP measures all economic activity and if all economic is increasing then people tend to think we are becoming more prosperous and that is a good thing.

But it doesn't tend to distinguish between economic activity that is positive and economic activity that is negative......We don't have any way of measuring the value of the standing forest. We measure the forest as potential as lumber. We don't value it's absorption of co2. We don't value its control of erosion its impact on the human spirit. It is just strictly lumber that hasn't been cut yet. Well this is obviously nonsense. This is obviously a foolish way to do things.

And underneath all of this is the assumption that somehow multiplying money makes us better of and in fact there is lots of research that that is not true. Simply multiplying money beyond a certain point-I mean there is a point a fairly low level where you have enough to food to eat, good place to stay, clothes etc. Once you have that, more money doesn't add proportionately more happiness. In fact the more prosperous we become in the Western world the more the indicators of unhappiness have tended to arise-like in family breakdown and divorce, suicide and drug use- these are diseases of prosperity.

And so understanding all that the king of Bhutan said years and years ago the Gross National Product (GNP) is not as important as Gross National Happiness (GNH).

They didn't really pursue that in a scientific and systematic way until fairly recently and then they said, "What are the elements of GNH and how can we measure them?" They started to look at the factors and talking about the things that normally don't get measure and they developed a whole set of metrics based on the GNH there.

Then the next thing they said was, "Okay. If we now understand that if there are things that make us happy and other things that don't make us happy and they are not the way that things are conventionally supposed to go in the Western world, how do we organize the school system so that young people are trained to think of their role in the world from a GNH point of view not the GNP point of view?"

So they had a whole conference last December and they brought together educators holistic educators alternative educators, spiritual leaders from 16 countries and it was an astonishing experience because these educators took a day and a half and basically asked what would the product of a GNH system look like?

What kind of a person would that be? And they said, "Okay- so there is the objective we would need to pursue."

That night the government adopted that. "The government has accepted our recommendations that these should be the objectives. Would you now please tell us how to get there?"

And the conference players considered that question-how you would have to train teachers, principals.. the government has convened a meeting of all the senior educators in the country to start the process of training in GNH education. and plans to train every teacher in the country.


How is that reflected in the people that come out of this process?


What you wind up with is young people that have a great respect for the environment and who think of the environment as an integral part of their decision making in their personal life they have a great regard of the traditional wisdom of the tradition of the country very conscious of the fact that they are people in society. That their role in society is to function with people- not in competition; they understand themselves to be in society and also understand that they can progress as individuals only if people around them are also progressing.

And it will be very different from the kind of graduates we will produce who tend to think in terms of personal success, high degrees of consumption not too much attention to the environmental impact of what you do. If we flip a lot of the attitudes that we have in the west on their heads and you wind up with the Bhutanese attitude.

More Learning in Community

Work groups. Study groups. Learning in coops and communities. These are the topics of my recent blog entries as I continue to make plans on starting a space in my home and invite families to join us in studying and in doing things together.
One of my daughter's friends wants to learn life skills with us- sewing, cooking, tying knots, making preserves etc. Since she goes to school we are planning to do this on a week day evening.

I'm looking into have 'table time' where she and her unschooled friends can sit down together at a table and focus on their work-either on something they are working on together, or something they are doing individually. The idea is that learning together is a social opportunity; a community-nurturing occasion.

Scott Peck said somewhere about community that "unless you do it, it will vanish."
A good way to do do that,is working together.
How about you? What does your 'community' look like?

Learning in Community

Many people like to learn together in groups. Small groups.
Here is an excerpt from an interview I did a few years back on radio free school show with Katharine Houk, author of Creating a Cooperative Learning Center:An idea book for homeschooling Families, where she talks about learning as "a relational experience." You can listen to the show here if you prefer.


Why did you start a learning center?

Originally in 1983 when I was homeschooling, there were no groups or anything and i was feeling the need to at least talk to people in my area about homeschooling. That was a a support group.
After a while we invited people in the community to share things with us and it evolved into workshops and it happened in my home which my children where pre teens and people would come and do workshops.
And then i got a call from a women who was thinking of starting a school an alternative in the community and i wasn't particularly interested in starting a school but i agreed to meet with her and it evolved quickly into the idea of a learning centre and I thought "Aha! This is would be the perfect place to have these workshops in my home that could happen here instead of in my home.

Learning is everywhere. But yet sometimes, there seems to be a need to be in community -to learn things together under a roof.

Learning is a relational experience really. My kids learned so much by doing things and we tried to hook them up with people in the community who could do things that they were interested in doing things and it just added another wonderful dimension when other children could be involved too.

It also meant that we could come into contact with people who knew things that we didn't even know about that other parents did that might not have occurred to us ourselves that we could discover by being in this organization. It opened up a whole realm of opportunities.

How does it operate? Expectations?

That has evolved over time. We structured the coop and by-laws so that it very open ended. It's run by a council- anyone who wants to can be on the council. There are.regular council meetings at which decisions are made- like how we going to let people know about what we are going to do.
We moved from a community centre into a church right next door to a gym that belonged to a village. We have more outdoor space to be used by the families.

Families offer whatever they are interested in offering. Sometimes children offer workshops. Sometimes a lot happens outside it through going to museums, field trips so there is a wide variety of things outside the community.
Everyone is expected to offer something except for new people who get a few ride for the first semester but after that each person offers something.

How about money-to start the center?

We started out without any money. Really if you aren't not paying much rent and not buying into insurance it's can be done very inexpensively. It has gone up because insurance has become an issue. It started out very simply. Now it is up to $65 a semester. There has been scholarship types arrangements for people for whom that was prohibitive.

There has been more of a tendency to have workshops that build on previous ones which is wonderful for families who have been involved in the Centre for a long time, For example language classes debate clubs. Debate clubs, making things, drama, choir, display day at the end of the semester. Projects that people have worked on in their homes.
A year book has developed which is wonderful memento to have.

Would you say that it serves youth -the teenage years. Keeping kids out of school?

There are those that do end up going to school for the school year but there are definitely teens and they seem to be doing just fine.

In order to do a coop it seems that someone has to have the vision.

It does take perseverance and at least 2 people to get into it. None of us where in a big rush so we could send out surveys to everyone w could think of instead of rushing into it with the idea of two people and how far they would like to travel. Really it was Alica and i but ever since enthusiastic parents have joined.

Homeschooling people have different ideas of how thing can be done.
We are more fluid, unschooling and structured it so it could absorb changes without bickering involved.

I know that people have put together learning groups based on Sudbury school but really it doesn't need a particular space. A lot of groups that organize and post things on the Internet - which wasn't an option then.
There are benefits to having a space and to have a chance to meet in a space regularly. Having a consistent group of people is great.
Ours is very much like an extended family-with shared values, which is lovely to have- a place where children can look forward to going to.

I would like to stress how doable and how rewarding this is. For me it was vision of what education could become. If you feel passionate about it just go for it!

Passion-based learning, Joint collective agencies and Communities of Practice

Get ready for upcoming posts that will focus on learning in communities, work groups and collaborations.
Here's one to kick off the series.
http://www.nmc.org/2010-summer-conference/jsb-keynote-video
A must watch about John Seely Brown's ideas on learning in collaboration and the wisdom of study groups.

If you think of the way technology is changing our lives daily what with the internet and other social media- how can we hope to continue to educate kids using a 19th century, factory style, 'one-size fits-all' model? Get real!

Community whether online or in neighbourhoods is the new learning spaces and places representative of a new culture of learning. This is the message from John Seely Brown who sees the humble 'work group' with kids getting together to pursue their passion in a collaborative effort-joint collective agency - as the revolutionary wave in education.

Such social groups-communities of practice- evolve naturally when the kids are allowed to pursue their interests and seek to gain mastery of an area.
Online access is helping kids do this and Seely Brown gives us an extreme example of performance when he shares his story about surfer kids in and how they got to be the best in the world.

This bring to mind my daughter's work with her-virtual community. An online group under the name of deviantArt, it's a place where she has found a 'study group' that she is in the same mindset with.

Following her passion for poetry and visual art, she has found a strong group of youth and young adults that are doing the same.Participating, picking up ideas, reciprocating, the amount of learning she is doing through social media is astounding.

This is where she goes to dialogue, critic, share with like minded writers, poets and writers. This virtual community supports the work she does; and she in turn supports their work. I never realized how powerful this tool for learning is until i saw the comments and feedback she gets from fellow writers-spurring her own to greater work.

Learning in community, engaging one another, practicing 'deep tinkering' 'marinating in the experience' are some of the ideas for a new culture of learning Seely -Brown presents in his videos and essays-ideas that to unschooling folks are not new, but are superbly reaffirming however.

Gold Digger

Author Ursula Le Guin wrote, 'Artist-writers are miners, digging deeper and deeper to get to the true gold-to find out what it is they really know about themselves, about their life, about other people, about life.
But their shovel, their pick, the tool they use is their writing. Writing itself, ..is a learning device-a means of knowledge, self knowledge, knowledge of life."

That 'pick,' that 'shovel,' is what we are after when we talk about unschooling or self directed learning, or authentic learning. The learner needs to be free to discover what that pick looks like.

But finding your own pick is very hard to do if you are trying to follow another person's curriculum and expectations. Here is the beauty of an education that evolves from inside out-from the depths of the self.

To find our own picks that we can use to uncover the gold within ourselves. It doesn't matter what that pick will look like- that's the fun of learning-because they are only a means to an end- digging our own gold.

Shouldn't every human being have the right to dig into the depths of our mysterious selves? To uncover the gems that lie within?

no surrender...

"To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity  to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do its chances for the future."

Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

Plain Rude

I get the impression that to expect a child to act considerately, whether or not they are schooled or unschooled is becoming a thing of the past. Quite a few kids that are friends of my children are often impolite in that they don't acknowledge adults. They don't smile or show courtesy. I or my kids have to remind them to pick up after themselves.

And now I sound like a cranky old lady because maybe it is awkwardness on their part that drives this behavior; but I am really tired of badly behaved kids.

As to those unschoolers who think that since they are practicing 'radical unschooling,' their children should not have to be 'called on' if they are behaving rudely because that would mean conforming to society's expectations-my response is,"Why is conforming to good manners so bad?"

Not everything about conforming to society's expectations is wrong. There are many good things about conventional society-being respectful to and acknowledging the person who just fed you dinner, being one. Really, is that too much to ask?

The idea that you, as a the parent,  model good behavior and that is enough for the child to eventually learn good manners is a good one.

Children do learn from watching how people treat one another but I have also observed parents being extra polite- making up for their kids sucky behavior instead of calling them on it.
On the other hand, we parents don't have to go overboard to ensure politeness (the "what do you say? Say thank you," over and over).
So in my opinion, what is needed is a sensitivity to the situation. If you kid is developing her singing talent and practicing in a public library, then the thing to do is ask her to stop; explaining that she is disturbing people. If she doesn't stop- you can be sure she and you-will be thrown out. And rightly so. Common courtesy.

A Sense of Self-Susannah Sheffer

Susannah Sheffer worked for a number of years with Holt Associates. Holt Associates is the organization that John Holt founded in 1977. John Holt is the education critic and writer who probably is best known for his books How Children Learn and How Children Fail. He also founded a magazine called “Growing Without Schooling” (GWS). Quite a number of years after his death Susannah Sheffer joined the folks who ran the magazine and eventually became the editor. She got to keep close touch with his philosophy and ways of looking at children learning and with people who were practicing growing without schooling all over the country and other countries all over the world. At some point along the way, she wrote a book about homeschooled adolescent girls in particular. That book is called A Sense Of Self.

In A Sense Of Self, you reveal that homeschooled teenage girls are more confident, and assertive than their peers in school. Let’s talk about that.


I was interested in looking at the experience of girls in particular at a time when the experience of girls in school was getting a great deal of attention. In the early and mid nineties there were a lot of studies and reports coming out looking at the experience of schooling for girls and specifically asserting that girls were suffering in school in some very specific and particular ways.

There was a study called “How schools short change girls” which was produced by the American Association of University Women and such studies. That was being looked at. Everything from specific school discrimination issues like studies that showed that teachers called on boys when students raised their hands- that teachers called on boys much more frequently than they called on girls that teachers were often not consciously aware of their behavior. They might say when being interviewed that they had no discrimination based on gender whatsoever but when they’d let’s say, be videotaped and when they’d watch the video of their own classroom behavior teachers would realize to their shock that in fact they were favoring the boys! That’s just one example of the kind of research that was being done.

Also, there was some important research that was looking not specifically at girls in school but simply at adolescent girls psychological growth and development and their inner experience. And there was a lot of discussion about girls “losing their voice.”- the phrase that came out of the Harvard project on the development of girls- the sense that adolescent girls really were losing trust in themselves, doubting their own voices, doubting the validity of their own goals, and perceptions and experience.

Adolescence is a hard time for many young people. Again there was some attention to the particular way it was hard on girls, the messages that the culture send to girls, the ways in which school sometimes reinforces those messages, and that the way that let’s say, and this very general but I think it will resonate with many people, that if a boy is struggling in school or struggling as an adolescent, its often very visible.
Classically and more typically a boy might be”acting out”- that a boy for whom school was not working might be the disruptive one. The one that was making trouble in class, interrupting the teacher. The girl in school on the other hand might look fine on the outside; she’s the one sitting quietly in the corner not making any outward trouble!
So that’s the type of discrepancies in the way this plays out-what with all those studies and reports and getting a lot of popular attention. getting picked up by the popular press, these were university studies- and what I noticed , as I was following these things closely, was the assumptions that girls go to school was a given. One of the studies even said in passing that all girls go to school.

The point was therefore we need to look at the way schools treat girls- extremely valid point. But meanwhile I knew of course through my work and my interactions in knew and dealt with and in some cases worked closely with girls who didn’t go to school; in some cases girls who had never gone to school a day in their lives. Who had grown completely outside of that very typical experience.

And I was working with girls only through the magazine “growing without schooling” as well as discussion groups for teenagers and through mentoring young writers and so forth. So I had a lot of contact with teenagers of both gender, but I was also aware of the girls that i knew well and they didn’t fit the descriptions that i was reading so much about.

I would read about girls who were losing their voices, getting less confident, distrusting themselves, feeling alienated from their own goals, and that just kept not fitting the girls that i knew well. They were having a very different experience. So I thought that it would be interesting and worth while as a contribution to this whole discussion to study girls who were learning outside of school and ask them many of the same interview questions actually that girls in these other studies had been asked and see how that all came out.

And that’s what a sense of self was ultimately about. It was the result of 55 interviews with homeschooled girls age 11 to 16 across the united states and they were in depth interviews- this was not a statistical study - this was qualitative interviews research where its all about the answers that the girls gave give in talking and reflecting in conversation. I did indeed find that the girls experience was in many ways quite different from their peers in school.

Can you underline some of those difference again?

Yes-first of all the summary was that they were not experiencing the same kind of decline over time that was demonstrated in some of the other studies and what I’m going to say about the other studies is something that I think does resonant with a lot of adult women. That people talk about age 10 or so, as being the high point of their girl hood- it’s when a girl often feels very confident and on top of the world and then as the girl begins to absorb the cultural messages of what’s expected of females in this culture that things begin to get much harder and she as Carol Gilger and her colleagues, “goes underground.”

She doesn’t feel comfortable saying what she really thinks, focuses on what others want (this is all very much shorthanded) And the girls I was talking to were reporting the opposite. A 15 year old girl might report that she felt more sure of herself, more trusting of her own experience than she had 3 years before, for example. You saw a different kind of progression.

Another really classic distinction was the other studies had found that girls became increasingly uncomfortable with disagreement among friends. For example,you think of the classic sense we have of social life of girls in school-like it’s very,very important to conform, to fit it, to go along with what the norms are, what the leader of your clique demands and so the one of the interview questions is about how do you speak up when you disagree with a friend and that sort of thing- and that was a place where the homeschool girls were almost unanimous one of 2 exceptions in the 55 girls I interviewed.

They expressed comfort with disagreement; they sort of expected to disagree with friends a about one thing or the other and didn’t assume that that precluded friendship. After all these are girls that are doing something so different with so much of their lives and so often having to explain themselves so that if they needed to agree about everything with a friend they would have a very limited pool- so they become much more comfortable with that sort of thing- with being different and yet having relationships with people. They don’t think you have to be the same in order to have a close relationship.

There is something important to understand. Ultimately, although these interview questions on both sides look at something pretty internal, and subjective and kind of subjective in a way, ultimately it’s very much connected to the outer experience

Psychologists ask how can we help them-to identify with their own goals, To feel more connected? And my point, was well conventional schooling is not really based on that. Schooling is not about helping to identify their own goals and helping them with that. Schools tell you this is what you need to learn this is how you are going to go about it. We will test to see if you’ve learned it - that sort of thing.
In a setting where you are learning outside of school, you are being asked to reflect on your own goals. You are learning to ask the question what do I want out of life? Not just education. What do I care about, what seems important to pursue? Those are the questions that a typical teenager of any gender are being invited to ask. So it those students eventually then feel more comfortable and identify with their goals, it’s not actually surprising.