The unschooling of Caiman D
Thankful Friday
“There must be a way to educate young children so that the great human qualities that we know are in them may be developed. But we’ll never do it as long as we are obsessed with tests. At faculty meetings we talk about how to reward the thinkers in our classes. Who is kidding whom? No amount of rewards and satisfactions obtained in the small group thinking sessions will make up to Monica for what she felt today, faced by a final test that she knew she couldn't do and was going to fail.
"Pleasant experiences don’t make up for painful ones. No child, once painfully burned, would agree to be burned again, however enticing the reward. For all our talk and good intentions, there is much more stick than carrot in school, and while this remains so, children are going to adopt a strategy aimed above all else at staying out of trouble. How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of getting 'right answers'?”
~John Holt~ How Children Fail
Most people call it dropping out. But Grace Llewelyn calls it rising up.
I’m going with Grace.
I’m so tired of Caiman’s six hours a day in school, six hours a day that are a complete waste of his time. School is merely a holding pen for him: nothing about it inspires or motivates him, and he’s labeled a failure for that. If I’m tired of it, he must be just sick to death of it.

We recently got a letter from BUSD saying “your son is being referred to Berkeley Technology Academy,” and at first I was actually excited. Berkeley Tech, formerly known as Berkeley Alternative High School. Maybe he’d learn some skills, and become an electrician or a plumber or a carpenter. Maybe it would be radically different, a learn-by-doing sort of place. In fact, the school’s website made it sound just fine.
But it didn't take much poking around on the internet to have my hopes dashed. An API ranking of 1 out of 10, for starters, and a description somewhere of the place as a "pre-prison," had me just about ready to cry. No way would this be a better place for him.
I set about looking for alternatives: charter schools, private schools, vocational schools, but my search was half-hearted. It's not that Berkeley High isn't the right school for him, it's that school isn't the right place for him at all!
I'd thought about homeschooling in the past, and I'd read a little bit of John Holt. But a lightbulb went off when I found this Grace Llewellyn book online. The title alone was enough to make me dance -- The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.
It reminded me of something a teacher of Caiman's said to me at an open house once, something that made me cry with joy and relief. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something along these lines:
Caiman is great just the way he is. He makes me laugh more than any kid I've ever had in class. Yes, he's smarter than his grades show, and that's something you need to figure out if grades are important to you. But if that's not what's important, don't worry about it. He's going to be fine.I ordered the Grace Llewellyn book that same night. Caiman started reading it the night it arrived, and the next the morning he said, "WTF have I been in school for? I remember when I used to want to learn things, and now I'm mad."
~ Ms. Searle, King Middle School teacher extraordinaire
Is Quitting School Really the Plan?
So... yes! The plan is that Caiman is going to take and pass the CHSPE in the fall so he can legally quit high school and take his education into his own hands.
So many obvious questions, right, about what he'll do all day and whether he'll really be motivated to learn anything and how he'll ever find a job without a normal high school diploma?
But I'm only an eensy bit nervous about these things. Caiman wasn't on track to head straight to college after high school; he wasn't even on track to graduate. He's not going to suddenly become a different kid (the kind of kid I was in high school who felt inexplicably motivated to Get Good Grades), make up all his failed classes and catch up with the other kids. It's just not going to happen.
Let me reiterate: high school has been a waste of his time.
If we stick with the plan, then obviously the unschooling of Caiman will be a frequent subject of this blog. So I won't try cramming every thought about it into this post. But I do want to provide at least partial answers to the questions I raised above. I'll answer one, and then give the floor to Grace Llewellyn and (posthumously) John Holt.
How will he ever find a decent job without a high school diploma?
Um, I don't think my high school diploma from Bonita Vista High School -- or my BA in film studies from UC Berkeley, for that matter -- had much if anything to do with the temp job I got that led to my job in marketing communications that led me to where I am now.
Not as far as learning the skills I need to do my job anyway. They did, I suppose, send me down the path of "knowledge worker" -- which neatly landed me in my soul-crushing cubicle. Maybe I should’ve risen up at 15 and taken the time to think outside the box about what I really wanted to do with my life. What I really wanted to learn and be and how I could change the world.
(For more on knowledge workers vs real workers, read Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Or at least read his most excellent article, The Case for Working with Your Hands.)
Sure, "no high school diploma" could make things more difficult. But no way is it going to stop an amazing, intelligent, charming, all around awesome boy-man from finding work. There are alternative paths to most other careers -- even President of the United States (Andrew Jackson did not finish high school).
Here are a few other people you may have heard of -- artists, businessmen, billionaires -- who did not finish high school:
Quentin Tarantino
Johnny Depp
Dave Thomas (the Wendy’s guy)
Jack London
Sydney Poitier
Peter Jennings
Richard Branson (Virgin Air/Virgin Records)
Ansel Adams
George Carlin
Oh. And Albert freakin' Einsten.
What will he do all day? Will he have the opportunity to overcome or do things he thinks he doesn't want to do? (question adapted from here)
Answer from John Holt, in Teach Your Own: I'm not sure what this question means. If it means, will unschooled children know what it is to have to do difficult and demanding things in order to reach goals they have set for themselves, I would say, yes, life is full of such requirements. But this is not at all the same thing as doing something, and in the case of school usually something stupid and boring, simply because someone else tells you you'll be punished if you don't. Whether children resist such demands or yield to them, it is bad for them. Struggling with inherent difficulties of a chosen or inescapable task builds character; merely submitting to superior force destroys it.
Will he be motivated?
Grace Llewellyn includes a section in The Teenage Liberation Handbook that addresses the reservations of kids who are considering unschooling. She writes:
But I'm lazy! If no one makes me learn, I won't.
How do you know you're lazy when you've never had the chance to choose what to work at?
If you call yourself lazy, your biggest job in unschooling will be remembering, glimmer by glimmer, how much you loved to learn before school took that love away. Frogs, wheels, words, blocks, dogs -- when you were a little kid, the world dazzled you. Also, you will need to allow yourself to admire ("learn") the things that still sparkle in your kaleidoscope, whatever they
are.
And laziness shouldn't be confused with zen-like tranquility--"lazy" travelers who hang out in a little Peruvian village for a week will soak up the life and ambience of Peru far more than the typical tourist who in one week sucks in Macchu Piccu, three market towns, four museums, two ancient ruins, and one horseback ride along the Urubamba river. People who find ways to get out of the 'rat race' or the obscene commercialism attending Christmas improve the quality of their lives by deliberately avoiding frantic, mindless activity. The same goes for learning: watching the sky for two hours will do mre for anyone's cortex than a harried afternoon of longitude worksheets.
But it's easy to go to school -- I don't have to think for myself!
To you, I have nothing to say. Stay right there at your graffiti-adorned desk. When you turn eighteen, proceed directly into the army. Be all that you can be, according to somebody else.

