A Year of Wonders
Hundreds of millions of school students and millions of college students have become homeschoolers as their countries struggle to flatten the curve, or slow down the spread of the new corona virus. Newspapers are filled with quotes by parents who seem more horrified by this sudden disruption in their routine than the pandemic itself. If you are such a parent (or such a college student, many of whom sound equally perplexed by the prospect of studying from home), let me tell you a secret.
You may be feeling completely lost, not knowing where to start. Crushed by the responsibility to provide for your child’s (or your own) education. All of this is understandable. The change has been too abrupt, it’s not like you have had the time to embrace homeschooling as your life’s choice. But here comes my first secret: neither have we.
We, the weird families, whose kids don’t attend school even when there’s no virus haunting us. We, who choose to drop out of college or take a year off, even when no colleges closed. Most of us didn’t expect to homeschool or to unschool, we just had to at some point. Because our kids were desperate to learn and didn’t learn anything at school, because school made them feel demotivated, bored, bullied, anxious, burned out or even suicidal.
Just like you, most of us used to think school was the only way to get an education. The only way to have a future. It wasn’t until our children’s distress with the conventional school system forced us to get unplugged from the matrix that we discovered that intelligence and learning lie far beyond the narrow construct of school. That schooling and education are two completely different things, the former applying positive reinforcement to model its subjects to join the workforce, like cogs in a machine, and the latter being a spiritual journey aimed at getting to know yourself and your true calling. And here comes one more secret: no one has a clue what “the workforce” will look like in twenty years from now, or even if there will be such a thing.
It’s those who will be able to face the constant change that will have a future in the new fluid world (including the flu, but also the floods and the fires caused by climate change, fluid gender, fluid identity with algorithms trying to make decisions for you and just flukes that any chaotic system is bound to exhibit as it gets exponentially more complex). School is an Industrial Age construct (originally designed to model a factory, including the bell) that no longer prepares one for this constant game change.
You’re probably thinking: “Thanks, now I feel even more confused”. You and your parents, and possibly even your grandparents were raised to believe school was an inherent part of growing up. In fact, we observe today that some countries hold on so tight to this stereotype that they have postponed closing schools even in the face of the worst pandemic that has hit the world in a hundred years, risking lives.
Yet, no matter how hard-wired it has become in our brains over the past couple of generations, school hasn’t always been seen as the way to learn. Many great visionaries of the past never went to school or considered their years out of school the most prolific (in an ironic twist, there’re schools now that are named after those unschoolers): George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of radio, a Nobel Prize laureate), C.S. Lewis, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Mozart, just to name a few. Also, the inventor of telephone Alexander Graham Bell and one of the most phenomenal mathematicians ever known Paul Erdős were homeschooled until they became teens.
Albert Einstein wrote that he resented school and that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote memorisation. He gained profound understanding of Euclidean geometry and later integral and differential calculus (as well as philosophy and many branches of physics) through self-study and conversations with his family tutor and even dropped out of school entirely for several months as a 15-year-old.
Among our contemporaries there are many creators who never went to or dropped out of school and have made remarkable contributions to their fields. Think of all the ingenious laureates of The Thiel Fellowship that “gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom” (one of the conditions is that one drops out of school upon getting the fellowship).
Or think of singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, the youngest person and second person ever to win the four main Grammy categories. Together with her brother and producer Finneas O’Connel, she wrote and recorded her music in a small bedroom at their parents’ house in California and recalls that most of it arose from freely messing around. Their parents have allowed for a lot of freedom and also accompanied Billie and Finneas on tour. In other words, they engaged in their children’s interests without micromanaging them. "Being homeschooled is all about self-discovery. It's something that I've really enjoyed and thrived under,” Finneas said in a 2014 interview with Your Teen Media about the movie Life Inside Out (written by their mother, Maggie Baird) which was partly inspired by his childhood and in which he appears. “I'm not at a high school where I have to base my self-worth off what other people think of me. I have to think, "What would I like to be doing? How would I like to be as a person?" I think that's an enormously positive thing".
Even younger is painter Iris Grace from England, whose mother Arabella Carter-Johnson trusted her enough to get her a painting brush and a cat friend instead of a place in a special ed school where the teachers said they “trained kids” (Iris didn’t speak until she was 8 years old). “I stopped focusing on what was hard, I stopped pushing those things that frustrated you, aggravated or even blocked your learning,” Iris’s mom writes in her blog. “Together with the help from our animals, you are learning to use your voice. We have learned how to be with each other without needing these words and I feel that has helped you, the pressure was lifted”.
Acclaimed Computer Science Professor at MIT Eric Demaine, a McArthur fellow, never attended school and spent his childhood traveling across North America with his dad, sculptor Martin Demaine. Later his dad followed Demaine everywhere his university studies took him. The mathematical art he created together with his dad is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian. “Demaine chooses projects based purely on his curiosity, regardless of where they may lead”, - Popular Science magazine wrote about him. I think this sentence grasps the essence of what freedom to learn really is. One of the many things Demaine is known for is programmable materials that one day may allow to morph your smartphone into a teapot or any other design you can download on the web.
In fact, there’re many reasons to believe that school as we know it is doomed to go extinct as the Industrial Age fully surrenders to the new Digital Age.
Today, a growing number of educational psychologists and neuroscientists come to realise that the propensity to be curious about one’s environment and developing one’s knowledge is inherent in human nature, and that in the process of learning, autonomy is key. Not autonomy in the sense of self-sufficiency at an early age, but in the sense of self-paced, self-directed learning, following the child’s intrinsic interests instead of using external motivation to force the child into a predefined educational path with compulsory benchmarks. This is why the main lesson a homeschooling parent learns is to let go.
Many new homeschooling parents don’t dare to trust their children to steer themselves on their educational journeys and attempt to organise school at home. In most cases, this approach doesn’t work. It puts a strain on the parent-child relationship and doesn’t tap into the powerful resources that home education has to offer (intensity, freedom of creative flow, space for in-depth scrutiny, trust and mutual respect among family members, mindfulness).
This is why I don’t particularly fancy the word “homeschooling”. Much of the learning happens outside of the actual home, out in the nature, traveling, attending clubs and events (this part is unfortunately temporarily unavailable under the current crisis). Home means ‘safe place’ or anywhere you feel free to be yourself. And there is no schooling, but a lot of natural learning.
Parents often distrust their children and think children wouldn’t spend their time in a productive way if they weren’t set any goals. It’s true that many children who have been subject to continuous intervention on behalf of the school system need time to regain their autonomous learning mechanisms and “deschool”. Deschooling can take months. The trick is to really back off in terms of forcing any academic work and facilitating enough tools to be available for the child to discover. This is where the digital age comes in.
Did you know that YouTube is booming with free educational content and that YouTube algorithms generate new suggestions specifically suited for your child’s personal interests, exploring state-of-the-art interdisciplinary concepts, many of which neither she nor you could possibly imagine even existed? That your child can master a foreign language by simple exposure to videos in that language that cover the child’s area of interest? That your child can become part of community of like-minded people from all over the world by joining interactive live sessions? That there are beautifully animated learning environments built by game-designers where your child can acquire great skills (like typing) through play? Contrary to schools teaching to the test, the best learning platforms don’t penalise for failure, because it’s only when we fail that we recalibrate our worldview and hence learn. One of our favourite platforms, brilliant.org, has even included failing in its main principles for learning.
This personal fit instead of standard curriculum, on-demand instead of force-fed, truly inclusive (all ages, all geographic locations) nature of digital environment is what makes self-discovery, self-directed learning accessible to many, not only the privileged families, and allows for a shift in our view of learning and of ourselves in the new world.
The world no longer resembles a factory where all that matters is growth at any cost. The new world is a world of pandemics, environmental cataclysms (fires, floods, storms) and abrupt political change defined by social media algorithms. But the new world is also an opportunity to reconnect with our loved ones and with other species, to recover diversity and appreciation of the little but meaningful things, even if those things don’t signify monetary profit, credits or competitive edge. In this new world, the best gift you can give your child is flexibility. Model flexibility, be spontaneous, be playful. Forget the race. Forget the worksheets. Forget the rigid schedule.
The last time Cambridge university closed was in 1665, because of the Bubonic plague epidemic. Isaak Newton was just a college student then, instructed to leave the campus and practice some social distancing, so off he went to his mother’s estate in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in Lincolnshire. Once there, he had no obligations and spent most of his time experimenting in his bedroom (he even bore a hole in the shutters of his window to create a very narrow beam of light) and musing in the garden. It was during this year of unstructured play that he achieved revolutionary insights into his method of fluxions (that later became early calculus), optics and, of course (yes, that apple tree), gravity. Newton later referred to this period as the most prolific in his life, his annus mirabilis, the “year of wonders.”
Let your (inner) child have her year of wonders, her year of self-discovery. Let her have it, even if she will have to return to the matrix afterwards. Her year of wonders will be like a red pill making her immune to many viral agents she may yet encounter.