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March 18, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:12
2348 Two Dads: Talking Unschooling with Rocco Stanzione

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses unschooling with Rocco Stanzione.

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Time Text
Hey, how's it going?
Alright, how are you?
Good.
Stanzione?
Yeah, Stanzione.
Not too bad, not too bad.
Alright, good for me.
Alright, so, thanks of course for taking the time.
It's a pleasure to chat with you, of course.
And we are on the topic of unschooling, right?
Yeah.
Alright, so, I mean, I know a little bit about it, I guess, but if you could...
Give me the lowdown on how you ended up in this situation.
It sounds like quite a story.
Yeah, we didn't do it from the beginning.
You know, our daughter was in public school and I suppose I can tell a story that a lot of people are familiar with about why that wasn't working out.
Finally, there was a last straw and we pulled her out of public school and thought we would try private school, thinking that would solve some of the problems.
I was surprised that it didn't you know it was worse in some ways maybe better in some ways but in the ways that we really cared about it really wasn't much different at all so after just a couple of weeks we we pulled out of that too and decided to try homeschooling and we went and got a curriculum and lesson plans and all that and we spent probably about a month trying to do that and it just didn't feel like that was working either so we just decided to take a break and try to Figure out what we would do next.
So my wife and I talked a lot about what we would try to do.
We figured if we just spent a little time trying to figure out what to do, maybe she'd fall behind or something, but it wouldn't be that big a deal.
So we just decided to take the time to figure that out.
I remember the moment because looking back on my own education, I've always thought that it was mostly a waste of time because I was kind of nerdy.
So if I wasn't in school, I was probably busy learning something.
And so, you know, I had developed this idea about education that it wouldn't be great if you just learned by living life and going and doing stuff.
And so I shared that idea with my wife and she said, yeah, that's called unschooling.
I just found out about that.
And I thought she was making fun of me at first, but she told me a little bit more about it and she had just...
Come across it as well.
Didn't know anything about what it was.
So we started looking into that.
And there was a big unschooling conference in town going on at the very moment that that happened.
And it was just a little bit too late for us to make it to it.
So we didn't get to go to that one, but we started doing some reading and started trying to head down that route without really knowing what it was.
And then we were very eager to go that next year, our first year at that conference.
And learn quite a bit, you know, there's a lot of, it's a conference, so there's a lot of speeches going on and things like that, and a lot of community.
But what really did it for me was the kids.
You know, there's all these five and six and seven-year-olds running around like they're in the place on the elevator, but being very, very respectful and treating me as a peer, not as, you know, an authority figure or somebody to be afraid of.
I might as well have been one of his, you know, five or six-year-olds and, you know, Just encountering them everywhere all over the hotel and seeing how they interacted with each other and with adults kind of blew my mind a little bit.
So I was quite sure at that point that I was on the right path.
That eliminated most of my doubts.
And so I think that's kind of the story of how we got started.
Right.
And was it...
There was some bullying that was happening with your daughter when she was around 10 or 11 in the public school system.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was...
And it wasn't...
It was at the beginning just from the students, or at least especially from the students.
And then on a different, not physical bullying from the teachers, but some of that as well.
And she would come home with these new stories day after day.
These kids would find just new ways to bully her.
And I finally gave her my explicit, I don't want to say consent, but I told her that you need to Stand up for yourself.
If nobody's going to stand up for you, defend yourself.
Don't just take it on the chin and walk away.
Maybe these are bullies.
They're supposed to go away when you stand up to them.
And so she got pushed the next day, the very next day, and told the little girl, don't push me.
And so the girl pushed her again.
And so my daughter grabbed her by her ponytail and threw her on the floor.
I suspect might have been the end of it, except that after that, of course, it's my daughter that gets in trouble and gets suspended.
Nothing happens to the other girl.
That was the last straw that I mentioned before.
We just decided we were going to pull her out.
Was there bullying before that?
Was there something that changed?
Was there any particular reason that you think why...
I mean, was it everyone bullying everyone?
Was your daughter picked on a little bit more?
The origin of that is always curious to me.
I mean, you know, I sort of left Canada, came to...
Sorry, left England, came to Canada when I was about 11, so I was kind of different from the other kids, and I wasn't hugely bullied or anything like that, but I certainly did get that sense of being different.
Was there anything that changed in your daughter's life or social circle or anything like that?
No.
It was a new school, but other than that, it's hard to say what it was.
I mean, the impression I had always had at school, going to drop her off and pick her up and do the occasional visits, was that it was just kind of full of thugs anyway.
And so I kind of doubt she was unique and that she was being picked on.
She was just the place she emerged in that social order, I guess.
Yeah, and there is this idea that You fight back, right?
That's sort of the idea.
You fight back and the bullies will back down if you stand up to them and so on.
And do you still think that was the way to approach it?
I mean, I've heard a bunch of different ways of trying to deal with it.
I do still like to think that it could have worked if the whole system hadn't been on the bullies' side.
If they had been left to their own devices to see how that was going to end up Maybe.
But when she finally, after months of bullying, finally stands up for herself and she's the one who gets in trouble for it, you know, that's not going to end well.
Right.
And was it...
So in the process, was there any curiosity about what caused the conflict or any idea of trying to figure out what happened?
Or was it just, well...
Your daughter was aggressive, so she's done.
Well, we met with, I think it was the vice principal, and, you know, we told the story, and the position of the school was that, well, we should have taken it up with the school's authorities, and, of course, our response to that was that we had.
We'd been complaining about this bullying for a long time, but, you know, there's no evidence.
There's only her story about what, you know, what happened on the bus and at school, and, you So there was obviously going to be no resolution from there, and so that was when we pulled her out after meeting with the people at the school.
And what was your daughter's thoughts or opinions about this?
She was obviously very frustrated.
She would come home sometimes crying, especially if it had just happened on the bus on the way home, which happened frequently.
And it might have been just verbal sometimes, and sometimes it was physical, throwing things at her.
And then otherwise just calling her names, but she didn't like it one bit.
I mean, she has always been a really happy girl and made friends easily and got along well with people.
And I don't actually have any theories about why she was singled out, if she was singled out, you know, if she wasn't one of a great many not to be picked on like this.
But she, you know, at the time, I mean, she's 11 years old.
She knew she didn't want to be picked on.
She knew she didn't want to be Embarrassed in school and things like that and she definitely didn't put up any resistance to the idea of being pulled out of school.
She thought she might miss her friends but we talked about that and she still does hang out with her friends and always has.
So that wasn't much of an obstacle.
So she didn't resist it at all and when we tried private school she didn't resist that so much at first until she got there and found that it really wasn't much different.
Some people think it's the refuge, right?
What happened when she went to private school?
It was the first or second day at private school.
She was called upon to answer some question that she didn't know the answer to.
This was the middle of the school year.
She didn't know the answer to it and she was reluctant to talk and a little shy.
The teacher just drilled her and drilled her and drilled her until she started to cry out of embarrassment.
And then the teacher started basically bawling her out for crying.
And then the other kids started doing it.
And the teacher didn't do or say anything about that.
And when we heard that story, we were like, this is not going to work out either.
And we tried because we'd already spent so much money at that point on getting her into the school.
I think it was a week and a half or so we ended up pulling her out.
Right.
I mean, if you're the new kid and that is the way that you're treated by the teacher, I mean, they're setting the whole thing up, right?
That's how you were defined then for the next X number of years, right?
So that's pretty rough.
And this was, I assume, obviously you did research, they were good school and all that, but these sadistic teachers and not to mention students, they can pop up just about anywhere.
Yeah, and I spent some time in a private school myself, and I didn't have an experience in anything like this.
And I think, for all I know, it was this one teacher, because of the information I got later.
She'd been a teacher for 30-something years, and we ended up talking to the principal about her.
My impression was that she'd just been doing it a long time, and was working toward retirement, and had maybe lost whatever passion she had once had for teaching kids, and Just didn't have it anymore and probably shouldn't be a teacher.
So, I mean, it could have gone a lot differently, I think.
I think there are some good teachers out there in the system, and she did not get one of them.
And I don't regret that she got the teacher she did, because we may not have started down this path that I'm so grateful we did.
Yeah, that's pretty charitable.
I would certainly say that If you lose your passion for something to the point where you're becoming abusive to children, it's kind of your job to take yourself out of the equation.
Absolutely.
You have to know that, right?
And also, it's the administrator's job.
It tells you everything you need to know about the school administration and the principals and all that as a whole if they're willing to allow this kind of mess and abuse to go on with.
With children.
I mean, the new kid, it's the middle of a school year.
And of course, with the new kids, you know that there's going to be a transition because not everyone teaches everything at the same time.
So good heavens.
I mean, that's just nutty.
I mean, it's crazy.
But I mean, I went to a private school as well.
And it's, I mean, it was pretty old school and pretty mean towards the children for sure.
So it's not to say all of them.
But yeah, I had a friend who was interested in a private school and went there and was told about how Oh, you know, we have, you know, we try to teach children all about different belief systems.
You know, we have, you know, Muslim week, we have Sikh week, we have Hindu week, Christian week, and so on.
And it's like, oh, when's your atheist week?
We don't really do that so much.
Okay, so you're going to teach all belief systems, just those that are inoffensive to the most parents.
Anyway, but, so, yeah, that's a bit of a shame.
Now, when you...
So, okay, then the next step, of course, was, you said, to go to the homeschooling thing.
And as you say, you tried it for about a month.
And how did that go down?
Well, it just never quite felt right.
Like, you know, it wasn't a big struggle, you know, between us and her.
You know, it was a structure.
It was a school-at-home kind of thing, like a lot of homeschooling is.
And we thought that that was basically the only alternative left to us at the time.
And...
It's hard to say what just wasn't working out, but it began to feel like it just wasn't working.
She wasn't enjoying it, and we weren't enjoying it, and if she was learning anything, it was hard to even see the value in it.
She was learning things that might enable her to pass a test, and so eventually we tried just kind of moving it to a much less structured thing without so much of a A daily schedule, just maybe daily goals.
And so it became less and less structured until we just decided to take a break to figure out what we would end up doing because it just kind of vaguely wasn't working out for us.
Right.
And so it was a pretty quick transition, I guess, all things considered.
And then how did the unschooling bit take?
Like I said, we had that conversation where Unschooling, where I became aware of it, of its existence, and started to learn about what it was and what were the ideas behind it.
And so we really weren't doing anything.
And in retrospect, maybe at that point we were already Unschooling, just without having a name for it or having any idea what we were supposed to be doing, apart from what we were not supposed to be doing.
And then after that first conference when we met a lot of people that we could reach out to for help, especially Dana Martin.
I know you've talked to her and she's guest hosted your show.
After that it felt like we had a lot more direction and like we were doing this purposefully and not just not doing the other things.
Now, do you think there was something in...
Because, I mean, this is an unusual thing.
A lot of parents would sort of just grit their teeth and tell their kids to somehow find a way to manage the problem or deal with the situation.
Do you think there was anything in your or your wife's background that may have led you to be more open to this kind of situation?
I think in my personal background, there was my...
You know, my own attitude toward my own education.
I graduated high school and everything.
But my wife didn't.
She failed a couple of years in a row and then just dropped out.
And then, you know, obviously turned out just fine, as they say.
And more than fine.
I mean, she's one of the most intelligent people I've ever known.
And she was able to go to college, you know, without any trouble.
Had to take a couple of remedial bath courses because, you know, you don't usually just pick up math wandering around living life.
Other than that, no trouble getting into college or having a professional life.
And so I think she had that going on for her, and I just had my ambivalence toward my own education.
Right, right.
And so, yeah, because of course the first thing I hear about when I talk about this with parents, like I was just speaking at a conference and plugging the unschooling stuff, and people are like, but how do your kids get into college?
There's this...
Road that you have to take, which leads straight through the high school diploma.
Right.
But as far as I understand it, I had David Friedman on the show a couple of years ago talking about this and he said, you know, just write some entrance exams and chat with people and, you know, show all their work and they just go in.
Yeah, I have, you know, through the conference and the community and everything, I've met a lot of unschoolers who have Chosen college as a path, and none of them seem to have had any trouble whatsoever with it.
Right.
I mean, so it's a slightly non-standard application, I imagine.
Well, apparently, because homeschooling has been kind of a thing for a long time, they didn't have much trouble adapting to that.
And because homeschoolers have so consistently outperformed, especially public schoolers, that they've adapted to this, and they understand, and Generally, it involves jumping through some hoops and putting some paperwork together about what you've done and what the child supposedly knows or has studied and learned and done.
That suffices, and you do take the standardized tests.
Right, okay.
I mean, it's funny, you know, because when I was a kid, of course, you know, the permanent record of the marks and all that was considered to be so...
I mean, there was this sort of propaganda thrown at us that if we didn't get, you know, high marks in high school, but that was it.
I mean, man, you're just flipping bogus for the rest of your life.
And it seems to be a pretty sort of closely guarded secret that it's all complete bullshit, that if you can show some mental competence, you can just go to college if you want.
We just have to talk to people and, you know, take a slightly different path, but there's no big black Mordor-style gates that are thrown up in front of people who don't go through the traditional miseducation paradigm.
Right, and that's assuming you even want to go to college.
There's nothing that says that college is required for success either.
Well, okay, yes, but imagine, I mean, imagine how many more dollars Bill Gates would make, or would have made, if he'd only finished And Steve Jobs.
I mean, these guys, okay, they're rich, of course, right?
But imagine how much richer they'd been if they'd actually finished their college degrees.
And Michael Dell.
They all are sold as exceptions to the rule, but it seems like there's a pattern here.
Yeah, and do you know that Marlon Brando only took a couple of acting lessons?
I mean, imagine how much better an actor he'd been if he'd spent four years in theater school.
People, they don't...
I mean, it's so funny.
I posted this thing on climate change.
Some skeptical stuff on climate change.
And people are saying, oh, this guy is only an electrical engineer.
He's not a climatologist, this, that, and the other, right?
And it's like, well, these are the same kind of people.
Like, Einstein, he's just a patent clerk.
What the hell does he know?
He's not even a professor.
Anyway, it's just, I don't know.
People get kind of hung up on that stuff because...
It's a little hard to judge original thought.
You know, you just like to be able to quote credentials and get away with stuff.
But anyway, so yeah, it is kind of annoying to me that people put their kids through this unbelievable hell, pretty much.
Junior high school and high school are, you know, sixth and seventh layers of a Dantean kind of hell.
And people, you know, chef their kids through these sausage grinders and...
With the idea that this is the only way that your kids can get ahead in life.
Man, if they just knew how much those kids were being trained to be soldiers and workers.
Soldier ants and worker bees.
That's what that crap is for and that it's so completely unnecessary.
It's a glorified prison slash daycare and it's just so unnecessary for whatever your kids want to do with their life.
In fact, it's counterproductive because by the time they've gone through that whole process, they're usually so You know, they either have been bullied and are traumatized or are bullies and are budding sociopaths and whatever success they want in life, in particular their emotional life, it's only going to be hampered, I think, by this horrible process.
Yeah, you know, but in my experience, because I, you know, having discovered this and feeling so strongly about it, I do tend to evangelize for lack of a better term.
And when I talk to parents who have their kids in public school, you know, this is the only way isn't what they're telling me.
They're telling me that They're not qualified or that, well, you know, it's easy for us because my wife doesn't work when, you know, she quit her job to do this.
You know, we had to tighten the belt a bit to make this happen.
But almost everyone seems to acknowledge that public school is far from the ideal and that at least homeschooling would be better than that if only they could do it.
And that's what I try to help them to overcome.
Right, right.
And the myth of homework, too.
My God.
As I said, I was just at this conference, and there was a really lovely family there that my daughter played, but their daughter sort of all week long.
And it seemed like half the day their kids were doing all the homework that they weren't doing.
I think it was March break for them, but they still had a homework.
And it's supposed to be, what, 10 minutes a grade kind of thing?
So by grade 6, you have an hour of homework.
By grade 6, 12, you have two hours of homework a night.
I mean, that's sick.
I mean, you try having a job.
You know, try being a boss where you send your employees home with two hours work extra a night.
I mean, they just know.
Well, maybe not in today's economy, but any decent economy, they just tell you to go screw yourself.
And it's such an invasion of family time, and it's such a great degree of stress between the parents and the children.
It's homework time.
Finish your homework.
Check your homework.
I mean, man, this is supposed to be quality time between parents and children.
It turns out into these battles over long divisions and algebraic fractions.
It's like, God, what a nightmare.
And it's completely pointless.
I mean, they've actually done studies which show that knowledge actually increases with less homework.
I mean, all it is is just an invasive big brother punitive crap It's designed to set children against parents and get the teachers off the hook.
Yeah, and get the teachers off the hook.
So if the kids aren't learning, then the teachers can say, well, they haven't been doing their homework.
That's the problem.
Whereas it's just crap teaching that's the problem.
Anyway, so homework is a big thing.
I mean, I never did any homework.
I mean, if I had a book report to do, I'd write that because I like to read.
But, I mean, I skated through all the junior high and high school.
I mean, never did a stitcher homework.
And I'm happy for it.
All that great fun I had, not sticking with my nose in a book, and it's not like I don't have a love of learning, but the homework thing is just something that really, really bothers me.
Me too, and I'm familiar with the studies you're talking about, about how it correlates negatively with performance and with learning, but I don't think it's for lack of good ideas that the schools are designed the way they are.
We've got these studies coming out of establishment academics.
It isn't Because we don't know that it's no good that the system doesn't change.
You know, it's not like homework's going to go away now that we know it doesn't do any good.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, because the purpose of...
I mean, none of this stuff has the purpose of educating children.
I mean, because if it did, then that would be...
The North Star that they would guide all their policies by.
You know, some guy says, hey, I really want to go north, and he's heading south.
You take out a compass and say, hey, man, you're heading south.
He keeps on walking.
It's like, okay, well, then you don't want to head south.
You don't want to head north.
You just want to head south.
You're just saying north for some...
And so they have no interest at all in actually consulting with the children.
I mean, I never filled out a survey about what I liked and what I didn't like.
I mean, I order a pizza.
I get three surveys attached to it.
But, you know, 12 years of Of grinding me through this brain deadening mind crusher and nobody ever asked me what I liked or didn't like.
I mean it's all just for the satisfaction of the people in charge and the teachers and the administrators and the government officials and It's just such a horrible, horrible system.
I genuinely believe it's toxic to the soul.
It's toxic to the mind and the heart and relationships and self-esteem.
Public school is a toxic substance.
People go insane over BPA in the bottles.
There's a one in a million chances.
But oh my God.
People go insane over, oh, I heard that there were razor blades in candy bars.
It's a complete urban myth.
But people then check all their children's candy and then send them off to school.
It's like you realize that I mean, your kid would be better off with razor blade and the chocolate than they would go to public school for 12 years, but people don't see it as the toxic monstrosity it is.
Yeah, and the private schools, I wasn't even a libertarian at the time, but for libertarian kind of reasons, I did expect private schools to be quite a bit better, but I think I didn't realize the degree to which The private schools are under pressure to conform to the way public schools do things, to get accredited so that their graduates have an easier time getting into college and can get these certifications from the state that they're all right.
And so they conform remarkably well to the way the public schools do things, which is, as I've heard you say, looks like it did 150 years ago.
Well, I think that's true.
I think it's true, but I think it's an important point to remember that people think the free market is somehow moral or somehow good innately or produces good results, and that's not true at all.
I mean, the free market produces what the consumers want, and if the parents who send their children to public school Happen to be, you know, somewhat on the mean or disciplinarian or authoritarian or vain or privileged or,
you know, whatever social sort of climbing status seekers and so on, then the school will reflect that because that's what the parents want.
I mean, if nobody wants pesto pizza, there's no pesto pizza, right?
And if nobody wants bullying in private schools, there's no bullying in private schools.
So, if the culture is problematic, then whatever the free market produces is going to be infected with that problematic aspect.
So, I mean, the private schools are better in that they more closely track the needs of the parents, the desires of the parents.
But if the parents aren't listening to the desires of the children and respecting and acting on those desires, then it is only reflecting the needs of the parents.
And if the needs of the parents are not to have their children treated well, Why then private schools will provide exactly that?
It doesn't make it better because it's voluntary.
It just means that it will reflect what the consumer wants.
Sometimes the consumer wants really shitty things, right?
Yeah, or he grew up getting all he thinks is available or went through public school himself and thinks that's how it ought to be, but his kids can go to a slightly better version of the same thing.
And there are also, because not all parents want this, and also have Either not discovered or not chosen unschooling or homeschooling.
There are Montessori schools and other sorts of private schools that do give those kind of consumers what they want.
But they do seem to be outnumbered by these private schools that operate indistinguishably from the public schools.
Yeah, I mean, it's like that story about, do you have Atheist Day?
I mean, I don't know what your religious beliefs are, but I mean, if you're going to teach people different belief systems, At least teach them the sort of critical, skeptical, rationalist, secular, atheist thought.
I mean, that's not going to be the end of the world for the kid.
But what happens, of course, is the kid goes home with lots of questions about religion.
And if the parents are really religious, parents then call up the school and get really upset, which for a private school is a big problem, right?
So a private school may end up teaching more irrational stuff than a public school.
Because in a public school, you're not allowed to teach religion.
So the private school, I mean, we up here in Canada, we have private Catholic schools that teach all the children that go into hell.
Well, private, okay, semi-private, government funding and so on, but they provide a higher quality education in some areas, but Boy, you know, at a pretty significant price, if that doesn't happen to be your belief system, that's a pretty significant price to pay.
So the sort of free market stuff is not, I mean, I obviously prefer it's voluntary, but it doesn't mean that it's, I mean, you can end up with more irrational stuff.
I mean, as far as I understand it, a lot of the Amish schools are fairly private, and boy, the stuff they teach there is pretty nutty.
So, yeah, so the private doesn't automatically mean better unless the parents or the consumers are better.
Sure, and if you're a Christian or a Catholic or religious at all, you're probably going to be upset with a lot of what goes on in public school and be inclined to put your money into a school that teaches how you want your kids to be brought up instead of taking care of that yourself.
Catholic schools, for example, proliferate to satisfy that demand.
Right, right.
So yeah, more private, but not saner.
So yeah, I mean, it's not too shocking to me that the private school did not perform admirably better at an emotional level.
I mean, the emotional state of the species as a whole, I think, is pretty primitive still.
I mean, with a few random spots of light out there, but it's still pretty primitive.
You know, if everyone's into junk food and there's a free market, well, guess what the free market is going to deliver to everyone?
You know, it's just this big giant mirror of society's demands.
And since I think most people still remain in a fairly primitive state from an emotional standpoint, I mean, the market, whatever the market for education is going to be there is going to deliver that.
So, yeah, that's not too shocking.
And you were saying that the kids, because I have yet to be, I got my first unschooling conference that I'm going to in So I've not met the anti-Lord of the Flies little civilized people, other than my own daughter, who come from that.
I'm sorry?
Is that the Rethinking Everything conference?
Yes, yes.
Yes, I'll see you there.
Oh, I'm looking forward to it.
And yeah, so tell me what your experience was the first time you went to an unschooling conference.
You mentioned a little bit that these kids were walking around treating you like peers and so on, which is, I think, entirely right.
But was it a real shock to you?
I mean, because I should prepare myself, I suppose, as well.
Yeah, that was the single most memorable thing to me was the way the kids acted and interacted with each other and the hotel staff and with me and my daughter.
But really, the whole weekend was really remarkable.
I attended all the sessions that I could and heard a lot of really great speakers.
And among them, the most memorable to me was, I mean, most of them were about parenting, but they aren't all.
It used to be called Rethinking Education, and it came to be called Rethinking Everything, because it has broadened its scope a little bit.
But Dana Martin had a session called What Does Freedom Look Like, that really struck a chord with me that I think was, that was the beginning of my journey toward becoming a Libertarian, Eventually, an anarchist was just the way she got me thinking about what exactly freedom is and means and how important should it be to me.
And that was also probably a huge part of why we were able to stay the course in unschooling, given the challenges that come up.
What's out there in the market, I mean, maybe if there were something available on the market, a place we could send our daughter to, I don't know, three times a week or five or one, Or Seven, that would be something that she would find satisfactory, that we would find satisfactory, that gives her what she needs.
And if it didn't have to be us, maybe I would take advantage of something like that and find out if she wants to avail herself of something like that.
So it would be nice if there were more of a market for something along those lines.
But between what I learned and absorbed in those sessions and my interactions with the kids, if there isn't anybody else who can take care of it for me, I was more than happy to do as much as I could do it myself.
It's more a full-time job for my wife.
I'd have to earn a living.
I get to do that from home.
So during the day and then during the evenings, I spend as much time as I can with her.
But it definitely all started at that one conference, and we've gone every year but once since then.
Oh, fantastic.
And obviously, I assume that you're pleased with the results, and your daughter, I assume, is relatively pleased with the results?
Yeah, I mean, there have been some missteps along the way.
I think for the first, I don't know, year or something like that, there was, I think, a tendency on our part to kind of un-parent.
Like, if we're not supposed to use any kind of coercion or tell her what she's supposed to learn or shove things down her throat, then that means that we shouldn't do anything.
We shouldn't have any influence.
We shouldn't offer her any advice.
We shouldn't...
You know, provide any particular kind of environment or anything like that, which it took a while for us to figure out, I think, that that was a mistake.
But it wasn't a hard mistake to correct.
And, you know, she's resilient.
And, you know, she had, I guess, gotten into, you know, for example, like video games.
And in retrospect, I think it was mostly a phase, but she would get to where she would just spend all day...
Playing video games.
There were mixed feelings there because I'm like, well, I've kind of been told and I think I believe that I'm just supposed to let this happen and it will work out for the best because she's pursuing what she wants to pursue.
And I do think there's truth to that, but we weren't doing anything.
We weren't saying, well, would you rather go to the park or do anything else?
Or what is it that you find so enjoyable about the video games?
Is there...
You know, a way that we could replicate that in some other way, or would you like to learn how to make video games?
Just that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, and that.
I mean, a whole lot of unschoolers, I've noticed, kind of get into the arts.
A few of them manage to become professional gamers.
Quite a few of them end up becoming musicians and things like that.
And it wouldn't surprise me if she did end up in the gaming industry somehow.
But I wasn't sure, and I'm still not sure, if that was, you know, why she was gravitating toward the games.
You know, it seemed at the time, at least, like it was, you know, she could do anything she wanted, she didn't have any particular goals, you know, no particular reason to do anything else, and nothing, you know, being presented to her as an alternative, and so to entertain herself and pass the hours she would play video games.
And I don't think, I don't actually think that that was...
Especially healthy.
Once we realized that we just basically weren't doing anything, weren't even being parents, we didn't shut off the video games or anything like that.
We just started presenting her with other things that she could be doing with us.
We would take her places and we'd do things together and come up with projects we might want to do and she was perfectly happy to do those.
She wasn't She just didn't have anything she would rather do than play video games.
Right.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
And it's something that I've thought about as well when it comes to unschooling.
Unschooling is not unparenting, of course, right?
I mean, there's these stories about how, oh, you know, your kids eat whatever they want, they'll end up eating the right stuff.
But I think 50% of Mexican children are obese.
I assume that they're eating the things that they like.
And, you know, so as a parent...
Keeping them engaged with better choices and explaining the reasons why, you know, you can do all of that stuff without being an authoritarian bully.
I mean, you can just engage in conversation and help them to understand and so on.
And that does work out.
But yeah, I mean, so, you know, just because you take them out of your shackles doesn't mean that you let them wander alone, right?
So I think that's a good point.
Sorry?
Our approach to the food issue, because she does like I like junk food, but we just don't buy junk food.
We try to always have good food at the house that's available to eat.
She doesn't not want to eat good food.
That has never been much of an issue, that particular issue.
Yeah.
I mean, junk food is tasty.
Sugar, salt, and fat, that's all good stuff.
You can't change that.
Yeah, I think trying to just keep it away is the way to do it, so good for you.
And are there any other final tips that you'd like to mention to other people who are hopefully considering this approach?
Yeah, I touched on it just briefly, but just because I think it was my biggest mistake getting started was that unschooling is not unparenting.
You've got to be involved in your kid's life and be a part of how they make decisions and Be involved in that process.
So just because you're not making these decisions for them doesn't mean that you're hands-off and in the other room and never talk to them and have any influence over their lives.
Right, right.
Okay.
Okay, yeah.
I think that's important.
That's important.
Well, listen, is there any place on the web where people can find any more information about this that you might have written or published?
No, I keep telling myself I'm one day going to blog about it, but so far nothing.
All right.
Well, I really do, of course, appreciate your time, and I appreciate your openness, of course, as a parent to take this approach.
I think it's been – and it sounds fantastic.
I'm sort of at the beginning of this path, so I certainly appreciate hearing from people further down from it.
And, yeah, thank you so much for your time, and I'm looking forward to meeting up in Texas.
In Nacogdoches, right.
Oh, no, and I'm going to see you there, too, at Liberty and the Pines.
Oh, you're going to be at Liberty and the Pines?
Oh, fantastic, next weekend.
How nice to see that.
And what's the website for the Rethinking Everything?
Do you remember that by chance?
I believe it's RethinkingEverything.net.
I'm rechecking now.
Because we'll be there, too.
It's RethinkingEverything.net.
Rethinkingeverything.net.
I will be giving a speech there.
Liberty in the Pines, I guess that's next weekend.
And yeah, nice to chat with you.
I'm looking forward to meeting you.
Thanks again for your time.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you.
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