Astra Taylor on the Unschooled Life

good evening I'm Ashley Duff Allah family programs manager at the Walker and I'm pleased to welcome you to our first ever raising creative kids lecture at Target free Thursday night raising creative kids is the name of an initiative begun three years ago that's designed to make the Walker a destination and resource for families and parents wanting to creatively engage their children I'd quickly like to mention several upcoming family programs to those parents in the audience on Saturday September 7th free for Saturday presents rock out inspired by the upcoming exhibition dan Graham beyond the day will feature two family-friendly rock concerts by Minnesota's pioneers of punk suicide commandos and other artful activities to highlight the interests and career of American artist Dan Graham free first Saturday happens on the first Saturday of every month there's a variety of programming for families and gallery admission is free from 10:00 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. also we're still accepting registrations for myNet Google Sketch up a day-long workshop for parents and kids ages 10 to 14 on Saturday November 4th taking place at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus in this class families will work together to prototype and design an ideal hangout or fort using Google Sketchup a 3d modeling software more information is available in the lobbying of the desks I'd lastly like to thank the u.s. Institute for Museum and Library Services for their generous support in making the raising creative kids initiative possible and Target for sponsoring target free Thursday night tonight's guest is making her second appearance to the Walker stage you may have caught a stir Taylor and her documentary examined life during the Walker's women with vision film festival last March when it's screened to sold-out audiences or perhaps you were here last night for our third screening of examined life at age 30 she has directed two nonfiction features including the 2008 film examined life a peripatetic journey following nine influential thinkers who are given 10 minutes each to express their views on existence and the moral dilemmas of modern life and Dziedzic the 2005 documentary that trails famed Slovenian philosopher Slava Dziedzic aka the Elvis of cultural theory across the globe in 2006 filemaker magazine listed her as one of 25 new faces to watch taylor's interest in taking on philosophical ideas that seemed relegated to the ivory tower of academia and making them accessible to a broad audience didn't start at film school she actually never attended film school or any school until age 13 she was unschooled meaning there are no curriculum no report cards no recess or ringing bells to structure her daily regime of learning instead each day was a self-guided approach to following whatever curiosities came to the surface in keeping with the ideas central to raising creative kids we've invited Astra to talk about how her experiences of being unschooled have guided her philosophy of learning and creativity before I welcome her to the podium I want to let you know that there are select books on display and for sale in the shop that were called from a list of Astra's favorite reads and I'd like to encourage everyone to complete the visitor survey inside your program notes and you can hand them to an usher on your way out one lucky winner will be selected for to win a gift card to the walker shop also there will be a Q&A following the talk so please stay seated and we do ask that you raise your hand and wait for the mic to be presented to you as our the talk tonight is being recorded and we want to be able to hear your question so without further ado ladies and gentlemen please welcome master Taylor hello everybody thanks so much for coming out tonight um I just want to say thanks to the Walker Center for supporting examine life it's it was a real pleasure to come here and screen the film with for the woman with vision film festival and Dean Otto and Shawn Mosley were very kind hosts come around and I want to thank a sh lee for inviting me back to talk about unschooling this is not a presentation I ever given before this is not something I've ever done but it's a subject that's very near and dear to my heart and something central to everything I've done creatively filmmaking wise so it's a pleasure to get to talk to you guys about this I wish I could do it extemporaneously but I there's so much that I want to say that actually wrote a talk but hopefully we can have a conversation a dialogue and do some more improvisation after I'm finished with this in the early 70s in 1972 to be specific when my mother was around 12 years old she enrolled at the Carcross community school an alternative boarding school way up north in the Yukon Territory so North almost to the tree line as far as you can go and she kept she spent a couple of formative years there much of the curriculum if you can call it that centered on basic survival skills building cabins making crafts and hunting wild caribou despite his far-flung location in near total isolation Carcross was part of a radical education movement that was sweeping North America at that time on hundreds of other free schools crossing cropping up across the continent Carcross was a place that emphasized unmediated experience over instruction and authority it was governed by a democratic system that puts students and teachers on equal footing a few were even dating in the school's primary goal was inspiring students to participate in the running of their own lives academics were of secondary importance they were taught rather informally so sometimes the math teacher would resolve the distasteful issue of grades by just throwing a dart at a dartboard and that would be that so my mother's tailed my mother's tales of the time there are our sort of she would calls the time with fondness and they kind of emphasize two things either the endless meetings that were required for the Democratic decision my decision-making process to function so they spent hours and hours day after day in these meetings or the disgusting affair of skinning a giant freshly killed caribou still the car crosses educational ethos left a tremendous mark on her introducing my mother to the theories and practice of radical pedagogy a current that was seemingly forgotten by the time my siblings and I became school-age in the 1980s eventually my mother left the Yukon Territory and she met my father who had been subjected to a very strict at elementary school education in Bermuda from there his family moved to Canada and in comparison to the students he was very far ahead academically in fact he was the official math whiz kid of Canada and there are some amazing newspaper articles with him in his little button-up shirt and his glasses he enrolled in university at the age of 14 and he lingered on as an undergraduate for well over a decade following his two fashions playing guitar and doing chemistry eventually I was born I there's proof of that and we moved to the state's first to Tucson Arizona and then later to Athens Georgia which is where it's the place I really consider home my dad got his PhD in medicinal chemistry he had an interest in psychopharmacology mm-hmm and he became a professor my mom continued her work as a painter and an artist and for various reasons they decided not to send us to school most importantly I think was the fact that the school refused to mainstream my younger sister Sonora because of her physical disability you might remember Sonora if you've seen examine life she's the woman in the wheelchair walking with Judith Butler but I think the real reason that attending school was not a given in my household was that neither of my parents had been subjected to the conventional educational experience of moving from kindergarten through grade 12 and into college in a linear fashion my mother's countercultural upbringing and my father's nerdy precocity colluded to keep us at home so in length the rest of our peers my siblings and I slept late we never knew what day of the week it was we were never tested we were never graded we never had to memorize dates facts or figures so we called ourselves unschoolers back in the 60s and early 70s when my mom was doing her stint stalking caribou books about radical education were flying off the press first and most famously was a s Neil's book Summerhill a radical approach to child-rearing an account of running an anti-authoritarian boarding school in England that still exists and I just want to pause on the fact that this book sold 3 million copies between 1960 and 1973 so that's kind of a mind-boggling number and gives you a sense of how mainstream these conversations were there are also books like Paul Goodman's compulsory miss education in 1964 Jonathan Kozol death at an early age and free schools in 1967 and 72 John Holt's how children fail and how children learn published in 64 and 67 Carl Rogers freedom to learn George Tennyson's the lives of children and 69 these are just some of the most influential there were books like school is dead in education is ecstasy which have not become classics of the genre but I really like their titles in those early days the magazine growing it without schooling which was published well into the 90s was delivered to your mailbox in a brown paper bag as though its pages were full of something as controversial or maybe as shameful as pornography so almost 40 years ago riding the wave of political and cultural upheaval that defined the 1960s it seemed to many that education was on the brink of her breakthrough first there were the freedom schools that had been part of the civil rights movement next where there were the free schools founded across the country with a commitment to child centered learning there were hundreds and hundreds of these maybe thousands there's no exact number finally there was the widespread campus and rest the movement against Vietnam more of course and the massive student strikes that shook the nation the student strikes were really serious millions of students you know refused to attend classes and shut down their schools so and that was coupled with the establishment of open universities where idealistic students and faculty sought to liberate education from the tyranny of accreditation though it's hard to imagine it today these culture old challenges filtered into the mainstream much to the alarm of government officials who ultimately launched an effective counter-attack that we'll hear more about in a bit over the last four decades self education free schools and open universities have faded into the background of our collective memory relegated to the dustbin of failed utopian experiments today for example the prospect of a book like Summer Hill one that paints a sympathetic portrait of kids who just refuse to do with the grown-ups a reaching an audience of millions is kind of it seems absurd to me I don't think it would happen and instead of such a rousing clarion calls instead of books that deeply questioned the nature of schooling who at books that asked us why why is school really necessary we get these kind of mealy-mouthed well-meaning critiques like under pressure rescuing our children from the culture of hyper parenting or the homework myth why our kids get too much of a bad thing well-meaning studies illuminating many of the traps parents and children unwittingly set for children these in countless other recent books and articles rightly criticized the current emphasis on testing and tracking our obsession with enriching kids like their bags of flour and our single-minded obsession with climbing to the top of the meritocracy no matter how rigged and meaningless it is to begin with but in the end they make no rousing or imaginative suggestions of other ways to live and to learn instead they advise parents to stay on the well-trodden path of standardized schooling so just travel down it a bit slower after-school tutoring is okay just do a little bit of it SAT prep classes are fine just in moderation because the thing is you don't want your kids to lose the edge you don't want them to fall behind in contrast in the 1960s and 70s people were discussing the possibility of finding a different route altogether there was a public conversation underway about educational possibilities when aimed at empowering each person to find their own intellectual and creative way through the world it is certainly worth wondering where all the ideas compassion and visionary suggestions of these radical pedagogues of the past is appeared to what happened over the last 40 years to kind of erase their legacy and diminish the educational imagination that so many people tried so hard to open up I will answer that question shortly let's just say there were not very many unschoolers in Athens Georgia in the late 80s and the early 90s though are more known in state counterparts the Christian fundamentalist home schoolers could be found in abundance once we went to a home school playgroup and the parents organized the kids into a game of Religious Red Rover and basically we never went back and I really don't think they messed us it was obvious that they didn't like us at all like those families our parents weren't trying to limit our exposure to the outside world or from they weren't trying to shelter us from potentially corrupting points of view instead the world was our classroom that's what we would always say and in theory at least nothing was off-limits we were different from home schoolers in other essential ways we weren't replicating school in the home we had no textbooks no class times no schedules no deadlines no tests no curricula instead our parents encouraged us to trust our abilities to cultivate our own unique usually idiosyncratic interests at our own pace are you fascinated by primates by rocks by baseball cards whatever you're interested in go forth they trusted our curiosity which is our most basic human capacity and that really is what this whole debate about compulsory education centers on do we trust people's capacity to be curious do we trust them to be in charge of themselves or not do we trust people to be inquisitive to follow their own innate desire to investigate to seek knowledge or do we believe people need to be led have you ever met anyone who isn't interested in something obviously sometimes people's interests are not interesting to you this happens but people are always interested in something have you ever met someone who is incapable of learning think about babies generally speaking because there are exceptions do infants need to be taught to speak or walk after all we don't take babies to speaking or walk in class instead parents facilitate infant learning and learning by speaking to them and holding their hands and encouraging them John Holt who coned coined the term unschooling in the early 70s put it this way the human animal is a learning animal we like to learn we are good at it we don't need to be shown how or made to do it what kills the processes are the people interfering with it and trying to regulate or control it so it's a very romantic idea right one that goes back to Rousseau one that manifested in the modern school movement that took shape in Europe in the u.s. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which is a movement everyone should go back and investigate it really inspired Emma Goldman and many people like her it's an impulse that emerges in humanist philosophy like in John Dewey for example it's basically the idea that people are inherently good and that by removing authoritarian social constraints that goodness can flourish and so at our house the social constraints were is moved were removed sorry as much as they could be at least our curiosity and creativity was not regulated or controlled though I have no doubt that it was influenced and facilitated and those are different things I think as the oldest of four siblings I often wrangled my younger sisters and my brother into grandiose projects convincing them to star in elaborate homemade movies or bizarre puppet shows when we weren't in production and some bizarre spectacle we spent countless afternoons exploring the creeks and woods behind our ramshackle house planning gardens that really flourished or trying to talk to the landlord horses in the back fields some days we read books we made music we painted we drew other days we argued amongst ourselves and fought over the computer endless afternoons were spent watching reruns of The Simpsons even though we knew every word by heart and when we weren't that inspired which was quite often we did nothing we were allowed to just do nothing and for my family unschooling worked we are all literate we can all balance a checkbook and we have all had the opportunity whether we've taken it or not to pursue higher education and I use hiring quotes for the last six years I've worked as a filmmaker and a writer with a focus on philosophy and I don't have degrees in creative writing filmmaking or philosophy in addition to be being in my most recent documentary Senhora my sister is now 27 and she has an MFA and art practice from the University of California at Berkeley where she is currently teaching a course on animal rights and disability issues she's about to show her paintings for the second time at the Smithsonian Institute our brother alex is 25 and like me he's a philosophy nerd but he's also a big computer geek he makes his living reselling fancy microscopes and bicycle parts on ebay ATAR the youngest is 17 she actually left home at the age of 14 with the blessing of my parents who had moved with her to a town in North Carolina and she wasn't happy there so now she lives with my brother and when she's not working at the health food co-op she makes textiles and crafts earlier earlier this year she got a high school equivalency from this place called clan Laura which it basically translates the experiences of unschoolers into credit hours so that if you want you can go on to college I'm not sure if that's what she's going to do but it might be um if it seems like we're the exception to some rule were not we are the rule even the mainstream has been forced to acknowledge the success of the progressive homeschooling movement movement and it's a conservative counterpart as well kids school a home do better on standardized tests we are typically marvelously well behaved we get along well with others especially grownups and that's because we haven't been indoctrinated to the ageism at the heart of compulsory schooling Ivy League universities hunt out home schoolers even those who stayed self-taught through the crucial high school years so for example Stanford has a special you know paid part of its website geared towards recruiting home schoolers a few years ago in Brown University's alumni magazine a Dean declared home schoolers to be the epitome of brown students they are self-directed they take risks and they don't back off Harper's Magazine validated his observation reporting that one in three American adults believe that politics and government are too complicated to understand in contrast the chances that an American who is home-schooled would agree with that statement only one in 25 so that's a big difference the potential of self-education has been proven time and time again think of the literary the litany of luminaries who never went to school Thomas Jefferson Abraham Lincoln Benjamin Franklin Thomas Edison Franklin D Roosevelt this should be enough to convince even the most conservative skeptic of the power of auto didacticism and if these historic figures seem too distant think of your favorite artist your favorite musicians writers inventors and see how many of them dropped out of high school at some point or actually taught themselves or think about all the people you know fell into surprising careers they didn't get training for who practiced some sort of hobby or craft after hours or on the weekends unschooling or learning if you prefer is everywhere the question is why most schooling seems geared towards quarantine the quarantine eing the experience of learning as opposed to unleashing it because isn't that what school does right for fifty-five minutes you do math and then you do biology or whatever it might be and right when you're in the flow of things the bell rings and it's time to move on to something else the subject there's the subjects are separated from each other as though there's some reason to fear cross contamination like English can't touch history or something bad would happen I know this to be true because over the years I tried school at different junctures for different reasons my siblings and I all tried school we were curious how the other 99% lived I tried fourth grade for example where the trivializing emotions associated with immaturity greed envy fear conformity triumphed over the inspiring and desirable attributes of childhood curiosity imagination playfulness I was tormented for the usual petty things as I'm sure many of us were for not having kid sneakers for not wearing deodorant I was eight did I really need it so Nora still shudders at her memory of a traumatic day spent riding the bus to special ed Alex went to sixth grade where he was beaten up for calling the two boys who picked on him Homo sapiens these experiences reinforced our sense that staying home was a privilege we were being spared inane heckling and who wouldn't heckle us I was buck tooth and incredibly bookish my sisters disabled my brother looked like a girl we were soft targets and you know we called school we would call kids went to school school kids and we wondered why why are they so mean why are they so aggressive why do they hate us so we knew we were being spared this harassment and that we were being spared meaningless consumer pressure I didn't even want kids knee kurz I just wanted to not be made fun of and we were also being spared untold hours make that years of absolutely unnecessary and insulting boredom boredom is the big thing that's what we were released from school acclimates children to boredom so that as adults they can work long hour jobs they will more than likely describe as uneventful mind-numbing soul-destroying in other words as boring but school also inculcates children into boredom as an attitude a habit a way of being in the world boredom is more than a consequence of bad curriculum or poor teaching style it's actually an ethos one that lingers on into adult life school work for example is to be done dutifully or avoided entirely but never to be savored or enjoyed and I'm always stunned when people say to me as they often do weren't you bored at home I think these people are out of their minds do they even remember being in school schools are factories of n we restlessness lethargy monotony tedium just think back to the chewing of pencils the mindless doodling the staring off into space the desperate passing of notes the trying to look busy when you're about to start dozing think back to what school was really like and not some idealized fantasy or a few selected highlights from 13 years and chances are you will recall being bored out of your skull so we're we're bored at home no my mom would say when you're bored you're boring a phrase that still rings in my ears this phrase reveals what might be the essence of self-education the forceful injunction at the heart of unschooling it's reverse psychology if you will you don't have to learn because you'll get in trouble or because you're going to fail a test or because there's a teacher who's threatening or cajoling you right you have to learn because you want to because there's something in you that wants to reach out and touch the world and wants to communicate with it think about all those hours of time most kids are forced to waste in boredom at school sure we bickered we made mud pies we rode our bikes in circles but we also have to focus deeply on the things that we really cared about so I'm going to spare you and give you some audio-visual something around there okay so that's a puppet show I was mentioning I don't have very many digitized photographs thank God and then just to show you there I am a tie dye that I made my brother does look like a girl so that's the family painting basically you know my passion were my passion was animal rights and environmental issues because I really saw the two is linked and perhaps the reason I felt that so strongly was because my sister is actually disabled because of military industrial toxic waste that was in the groundwater in Tucson where she was born and so the idea of environmental toxicity of pollution was sort of very palpable but I never thought of it that way when I was a kid I just thought that this was the thing to be passionate about so when I was 11 and 12 this is 1992 I have made this magazine and I took this incredibly seriously and it's kind of hilarious now looking at the table of contents animal testing stinks people are so mean there's some other funny ones too ways to recycle trash so here's another issue letters to ride you can save mountain gorillas and thoughts on war by Aaron Williams age 10 this was a friend of ours about Jane Addams this is a sister sorry a profile of Albert Schweitzer sunny my sister wrote so she would have been around ten maybe and that's a drawing she did sunny got to devote herself to painting with the sort of intensity of focus that group you don't get in the regular world until you're a graduate student if you're lucky enough to ever become a graduate student she painted once she realized she could paint which is about 12 she painted every day she became obsessed with that first the pre-raphaelites and then moved on to other schools of painting from there these are some very early works maybe when she's 15 or 16 she did all these romantic paintings of women with animals that's me with an aardvark from life as you can tell this is later maybe when she was 19 or 20 this is the musician Vic Chesnutt who's an amazingly talented man says these are large about 8 feet maybe by 5 feet this is her most recent work this is a huge painting of chickens then this is the little sister Tara Taylor who's 17 now and related crafts this is one of her craft setups with vegan cookies in the corner some crazy stuff she made my brother doesn't get any slides but but like us his interests you know his interest in video games for example is taken really seriously he taught himself how to animate in program to do 3d modeling and design before going on to intern at a firm in New York when he was only 16 but what that helped him do is realize he didn't want to work in the field professionally he actually didn't want to be a computer programmer and if he had been on the Orthodox path he may not have realized that until after he had a degree in this field that he really didn't want to be employed in he wanted to do it as a hobby but he didn't want to do it for work so the point of all this is that we liked unschooling it freed us to be ourselves but as the oldest kid in my small community I was concerned about my future I didn't have any role models and we were isolated in a pre-internet bubble what became of grown-up unschoolers I had no idea at the time I thought I wanted to be a physicist or some sort of scientist and even if I could have managed to teach myself hard science I was pretty sure that that wouldn't count for much in the outside world so going to public school as far as I could tell was my only option so at 13 I enrolled in 9th grade and the truth is I was shocked disappointed even by how fast I came to identify with my public school peers feeling just as disaffected and trapped as I imagined they must feel day after day I had to remind myself that I was actually choosing to be there my parents in sharp contrast to most people would have welcomed me home with open arms if I had stood up in the middle of a monotonous lecture and just stormed out they would have they would you know I could have marched past those police officers and they would have welcomed me with open arms and said yeah schools a drag it's like a prison come home they would have been pleased but and but even though I had their support which is far more than most people have I lack the larger social support necessary to make such a bold move Society told me that if I didn't go to college I would fall behind in adult life even if I avoided being ignorant I would not be accredited and that frankly seemed like an even more damning fate it was better to be dumb with a degree so when I first got back - so when I first got to school I presume that the other students would be envious of my laid-back upbringing but to my surprise most of them were absolutely aghast they would say things like I wouldn't know what to do with myself all day or I wouldn't want my mom for my teacher the majority were incapable of imagining that my mother wasn't my teacher and that's what was so great about it we were our own teachers but there were some kids a minority that really got it right away and I realized they were trying to cultivate in the school what we already had at home these were the kids who failed classes not out of ignorance or indolence but because of the sheer inanity of it they were the ones who read books like catch-22 under the desk during grammar lessons but I was reading less over the course of three year the three years I attended public high school I read fewer books than I did the month before I enrolled all told I read what was a sign in the textbooks things fall apart by Chinua Achebe Uncle Tom's Cabin and a book by Nancy Reagan's astrologer for an Advanced Placement political science course so that was a far cry from what I'd read when as a nun schooler when you couldn't get books away from me I remember one time I was so immersed and watership down that my and I would not respond to my mom that she literally grabbed the book for my hands and threw it out the moving car window and rightfully so because I just I would never pay attention to her I was always just in my books so I went from being a lover of words to being a lover of standardized tests you know I took so many standardized tests those three years public high school was a sociological experiment and existential adjustment and extended lesson in procedure routine convention never before had as permission to have a drink of water go to the bathroom never did I have to feign activity and look busy when in fact I was bored and doing nothing important the academics were a breeze I was years ahead in math and science in English and history I was behind in Spanish but I confess there was a certain pleasure I found a certain pleasure in handing over my agency in shifting from the ambiguity of unschooling where there are no clear metrics for success to the authoritarian structure of school where I knew that I was doing well by the system's own strange logic I got kudos daily not for my brilliance but for my diligence and like all students I began to see myself reflected in the marks I received in high school I will admit my social life improved in fact one of my friends who I my first friend I made is in the audience somewhere so I was fortunate enough to kind of skip the awkward middle school junior high school years and my enroll in public school I wasn't being made fun of for my lack of kids anymore I found the Fred that I'd wanted not to mention a handful of committed teachers who I'm still in touch with but not the nurturing intellectual community that I craved determined I held out for life after graduation convinced college would be different because that's what they tell you but by the and so by the time I was 16 I abandoned high school to enroll at the University of Georgia and then the next year I went to Brown University in Rhode Island I was going to the most liberal school in the Ivy League a place where everyone assured me I would belong I realized my mistake the first day at Brown when the administrators assembled the entire freshman class in the auditorium you are all the most smart and capable of your generation they told us this is the best place to be and you're here because you were the best and when I was sitting there I knew that what they were saying wasn't true and I knew that I had made a terrible mistake I knew that we weren't the smartest or the best and I had this suspicion that actually we were kind of the cowards of our class that we were the grade mongers the brown nosers the play by the rulers the approval seekers right we hustled for A's and submitted to the system doing pointless assignments building our resumes at the age of 16 and 17 writing obsequious college essays and we were kind of too spineless to rock the boat so as the semester progressed I felt trapped in a ghetto of my peers and even more isolated from the outside world than I had in high school one cold afternoon I was complaining to a friend of mine happiness this was a friend who was not a Brown student a friend who had been raised in a housing project the friend who didn't know his dad whose mom was in jail a friend who never went to college even though he's now the CTO of this big liked company I don't even know what it does he's a computer programmer he writes all these books about writing computer code so he was a nun school or by inclination but also by necessity because you know educational opportunities I took for granted were not available to him so he asked why I I was attached to the idea of getting a degree in physics he said he said why it's not like you do science when you're not in school as off the coffee is off-the-cuff remark shook me to my core I enjoyed physics in math it was true but he was right I didn't really engage with the material on my own time out of the classroom was there anything I loved enough to pursue outside of that framework did I even know who I was or what I like to think about anymore our conversation forced me to ask some uncomfortable questions how does someone who has embraced the ethos of unschooling measure success why had I felt compelled to enroll in an Ivy League school to excel by the standards of compulsory education instead of making my own way what was I afraid of my parents thought Brown was a joke they never seemed impressed by my acceptance at this elite university and they only seemed relieved that I got financial aid years later my dad said he was happy that I got over my silly Ivy League thing looking back I must have as a small kid somehow absorb the skepticism of strangers who would sometimes come up to me and in a very condescending way go can you count to 10 do you know your alphabet I had seen articles and growing without schooling about home schoolers who had gone to Harvard and I must have decided I should do the same and that that would show all the cynics but is that what unschooling is all about finding a backdoor to conventional academic accolades is it just about being the meritocracy at its own stupid game does my miserable stint at Brown or the fact that I got my BA which I did the neck year back in Georgia and then enrolled in graduate school at the age of 19 really mean anything at all on the one hand these achievement signal that I was academically competitive despite my unusual upbringing which is comforting to some on the other hand they also reveal my own competitiveness which probably stemmed from insecurity the fact they needed to be validated that I needed to be accepted in a social world that I felt wouldn't see or accept me if I didn't bear the proper insignias what I realized at Brown during that disappointing year was that unschooling is a lifelong commitment it's not something you do until you are 18 or you get your high school equivalency degree it's not a stepping stone to career or college unschooling is an ethos kind of like boredom but hopefully its opposite I realized it was my duty to take back the reins of my own education to get in touch with my inquisitive nature to set my own standards for engagement and mastery the difference between educating and credentialing is profound which isn't to say you don't need credentials sometimes in this world to get a job to make a living because you do my point is simply that we should not mistake one process for the other and if we're talking about a basic high school or college degree it's worth asking the question what do academic credentials signify anyway as I see it they are assigned that a person can play by the rules and can be managed in an insightful article published in 2004 John Taylor Gatto who is actually a former New York State Teacher of the Year in cotton public high schools for 30 years argues that is not the potential of self education that has yet to be demonstrated but that its success has to be suppressed in the service of compulsory education stru purpose the cultivation of thoughtless acquiescence and conspicuous consumption defines our culture and fuels and fuels the economy that's the education systems ultimate goal according to Gatto isn't to impart knowledge or to inspire love thereof but to train young people not to think much at all because that's what makes them good employees and good consumers if that's a bit too conspiracy theory for you please reconsider despite their democratic claims our society's elites have long seen compulsory schooling is a mechanism to contain and control a potentially unruly citizenry in 1909 Woodrow Wilson who was then president of Princeton University put it this way in a speech to the New York City School Teachers Association we want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons a very much larger class of necessity in every society to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to reform specific and difficult manual tasks a half-century later Sidney P Marlon was appointed commissioner delicate of education under Richard Nixon and given the mission of increasing job preparation among students during the recession of the 70s right as employment opportunities were trying up in 74 Marlon said we should view the future generations of learners in America as coming to maturity at a time when society may not and require all their intellectual and developed capacities in the workforce in other words the economy doesn't need nor does it have the space for an abundance of developed self possessed thinking citizens and such citizens are just trouble anyway according to scholar Irish or in the eyes of Marlon and Nixon the quote broad critical learning possible in the liberal arts in women's courses minority programs interdisciplinary studies represented the political problems of the 1960s men like Marlon and Nixon consider the humanities which foster critical thinking and political consciousness a serious threat to social stability economic productivity in the status quo they promoted vocational training and job preparation as the solution so the wisdom presented by writers like a.s Neil John Holt john taylor gatto and others is simple enough that people need less schooling not more but today the answer is always more we need more funding more teachers more textbooks more discipline more class time more homework more tests more standards more accountability more authority more preparation from meaning menial and meaningless work since the 1960's the school day has the school both the school asre and the academic year have lengthened considerably the amount of homework assigned to a first grader has more than doubled since 1981 this surge is even you know made the New York Times sound the alarm as if that's not enough parents buy Baby Einstein programs they fork over fortunes for private tutors they hire professionals to coach their kids through the college application process schools meanwhile have become monumental warehouses holding thousands of students many of whom begin their day watching Channel one for for-profit news channel or they use computers with advertisements on the screen you know some of them are whisked off to McDonald's for credit so petty domination more often than not is the order of the day they're monitored by security guards by police they're subjected to an ever increasing number of standardized tests and diminishing educational opportunities in the fine and liberal arts to cope people turn to chemicals ritalin for example is prescribed to millions of children I think six million kids are on some sort of behavioural modifying drug but in the 1960s people believed the system was sick but now it seems we think our children are no wonder my parents wanted to help their kids escape from this absurd fate and with the physically disabled child the school system refused to mainstream they had extra impetus to do so I'm grateful to them as you can probably tell but standing here now as an adult with progressive politics the whole discussion brings up some uncomfortable contradictions now that I've son unsung and schooling's praises I want to share some of my doubts about it in his book free schools published in 1972 the great education critic Jonathan Kozol you guys might all know his book savage inequalities it's kind of a classic right makes a provocative case against progressive education becoming yet another exclusive realm of the privileged starting an isolated upper-class free school is a great deal too much like a sandbox for children of the SS guards at Auschwitz he says with his usual panache Koval is very harsh free schools however is not just a critique but a practical guide one aim to inspire and instruct teachers and parents to found free schools in urban and suburban communities the book is based on a now forgotten history the enormous contribution people of color made to the alternative education movement the radical education movement of the sixties got its start anywhere it was in these freedom schools that emerge during Mississippi's Freedom Summer 1964 and these have kind of been written out of the history of alternative education in this country so close all's contention simply is not that preschools or unschooling are bad but that the very populations that are in need of these types of educational aren't getting aren't getting access to them so the problem is not that some children are saved from the public school system but the ones who really need to be saved aren't in the face of public school deprivation when thousands of kids like text books or even clean bathrooms the dream of democratic education strikes many is hopelessly frivolous and self-indulgent naive insensitive this is a world after all we're the children of an all-black school in st. Louis receive a public education with 8,000 a year while their white counterparts in Lake Forest to receive 18,000 for many practical concerns trump radical critique theoretical conversations about the psychic effect of compulsory schooling kind of seem spurious when the bottom line is it grows often race-based inequality others have argued that by sending children to private schools are keeping them at home parents passively reinforce social segregation allowing public schools to fall into even greater disrepair in their absence so we're in schooling sorry we're n schooling is concerned I just want to ask some questions what's the relationship between the individual and the collective between the private and the public the fact that some of the most vocal supporters of learning at home are people like Grover Norquist who famously says he wants to shrink government down to the size where he can drown it in a bathtub should give us pause what kind of individualism does unschooling promote is it an isolationist individualism a sort of I've got mine mentality my kids are safe at home being creative too bad for everybody else or is it an expressive individualism one that empowers kids to trust themselves they're into trust their instincts their personal learning style their unique abilities their sense of right and wrong does unschooling privatize the educational experience close during it with within the parochial democrats are a domestic sphere or does it make learning a public act right something that is not done hidden away behind closed doors in classrooms but then in social space encouraging children to take advantage of every new experience and encounter as an opportunity for investigation and illumination and while I'm pointing out problems how about gender issues how about the fact that the great theories of liberation education I just mentioned John Holt I've been Ilic john taylor gatto the list goes on are all men but the people who actually do the unschooling who stay at home with the kids are more than often a women we need to ask ourselves whether as a pedagogical practice unschooling jobs with our feminist values our importance of racism our desire for a society without economic inequality the fact is there are many ways that unschooling can reinforce social hierarchies and these issues have to be discussed these aren't easy issues to settle because we live in an imperfect world compromises must be made in many ways unschooling was a compromise the more appealing of the only two extremes available to me I could either stay at home and teach myself or I could go to public school and have my spirit crushed what I really wanted and what I still want is that intellectual community I was looking for in high school in college and never really found and in many ways I think the films that I've chosen to director attempts to create such a community and unexpected spaces in cinemas I would have loved to commune with other young people and to study marine biology or number theory or playwriting a couple afternoons a week but for some reason such a possibility was unthinkable a wild fantasy instead the only option available was to submit to a rational authority eight hours a day five days a week in a series of cinderblock holding cells we should wonder why there's no middle ground often when I talk to people about these issues they say unschooling worked for you but admit that it won't work for everyone on the one hand it implies that my family's exceptional that were gifted to use the public school parlance so okay it's kind of a compliment but on the other hand it implies that most people are not gifted and that they need to be guided molded tested and inspected but what makes us so sure most people couldn't handle self education why do we want to believe that the masses can't be trusted to teach themselves why are we so militantly against the prospect of other people's kids being left to their own devices to daydream to play to figure out what it is they want to do john taylor gatto put it this way after a long life and 30 years in public school trenches I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt we suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women we shouldn't forget Wilson Marland and Nixon powerful politico's who actually engineered academic curriculum to instill lowered expectations and a willingness to settle for less and the students exposed to it the empowerment that comes from liberal education was something they wanted to reserve for elites like themselves as someone who actually believes my family was exceptional only in our actions and not in some innate sense as someone who actually believes genius is as common as dirt I don't want to reinforce these elitist divisions even inadvertently unschooling fundamentally is driven by a profound trust in the human capacity to be curious the challenge we face and it's a difficult one is finding a way to extend this trust outwards beyond the home and into the public sphere where it is so desperately needed thank you very much we just have a dialogue anybody want to throw in some two cents I think we need a who's got the microphone okay we must wait for the microphone could could you distinguish between your conception of homeschooling yeah versus non schooling yep the distinction between homeschooling and unschooling yes home schoolers are a various group and some actually unschool but in general it's this idea of replicating school in the home so you actually do school in the sense that you have a curriculum you have a schedule you have some sort of sense of things you need to master in a certain timeframe and you need to ambassador them according to certain standards right so that would be homeschooling and maybe even your parent probably your mother but maybe your father sort of plays teacher with you right and you do a lesson together you have a lesson plan you have some books that you you know it's like you go to math class it's just in your kitchen unschooling i doesn't isn't hung up about school at all it's not it's the total absence of those those pretenses to you know you're not playing school that you're playing right and it's this idea that you can kind of if you allow a child to just express their true instincts while they're true instincts are ones that move towards they move towards the world they're curious about the world they're going to learn about things you don't need to channel it into some sort of framework that resembles what we have in school so there was a complete absence of you know any sort of routine or schedule that you know a school kid would recognize from their usual experience right yeah talk much about your parents did they really play no role in supporting your education I'm also curious about if you're just playing and exploring how did you discover that you needed physics books and where did you get those yeah serials yeah I mean I said sort of you know I sort of I said that we were in flow instant facilitated right but not necessarily lead so I always think of our home is sort of a nutrient-rich environment right and they kind of Unleashed us they let us explore this environment so there were musical instruments and there were science books might my parents have a really good library book collection and computers so it was a very rich place to be there was a lot to be interested in and of course they indulged our passion so when I wanted nothing more than to make this newsletter somebody has to drive me to Kinkos you know but they didn't they didn't sort of always stand over us it was like okay you need some tools well here are some tools and occasionally there was resistance like I wanted piano lessons at one point I just yeah if you don't have the motivation to teach yourself piano like I'm going to get you a piano lesson so but there was this fundamental encouraging and facilitating is the word that people often use you know you don't say okay well I don't have anything to do with you and your education teach yourself but it's like well what do you want to do I'll help you I have three children and they all go to a local democratic free school that's actually on its 40th year this year here has 30-some children and the kids are basically unschooling at school so they have a great social interaction and they have each other some years are more academically minded than others and the kids are free to do what they want and I guess my question kind of piggybacks the last one when I think about my eight-year-old who is I'm certain as a genius but spends weeks and months with Legos but I can't get them to sit down and read was there some point where your parents got panicky like I get panicky about their future I mean for myself the reason they're there is I hate at school every day and everything I learned I taught myself yeah but I don't see that same desire sometimes with them but maybe that's because they have the to take their time Horace I really didn't yeah um I have different thoughts I mean one thing my parents ever work I'm almost amazed at how my parents didn't seem to worry I never saw it if they were I'm quite a bit older than my youngest sister I was 12 when she was born right so when she was 9 I was you know 21 or something and I am sunny and Alex and I were a little worried by the fact that she was kind of illiterate and I thought this is kind of a problem um so I remember I talking to them at one point thinking what should we teach her what should we do should we secretly teach her things or not even secretly my parents they wouldn't have minded but basically one day she discovered the Internet and she discovered eBay and she discovered you could search for vintage Barbies on eBay and all of the adults around her got bored of doing this in five minutes you know none of us wanted to search for vintage Barbies on eBay and I'd swear that's what motivated her to learn to read and write and now she's an avid reader and writer but there had to be something that was that important so I think the thing is I've known other unschooling families and I thought the thing part of why our situation worked as well as it did was that the trust was absolute like the trust I don't think my parents found my magazine very interesting and we certainly didn't find my brother's baseball cards interesting when he went through that phase but there are interest were always respected whatever they might be and we kind of were able to really indulge in them and work through them and maybe there was something we were getting that wasn't apparent so I mean I think if you're going to take the alternative education route that that Trust has to be really profound and I think I you know when I saw myself with my younger sister not having that trust and it was interesting if you come from your family which you have a father who is working working in academia that might be different in my family which is a single mom who's barely surviving financially like they have the trust that they can afford to support you perhaps into your adulthood until you're ready yeah no I mean my parents went I mean my parent my crypt when I was 18 or something like that so I never sort of thought I was going to be financially supported but there was this there was not a fear of the Academy that was certainly true right like there wasn't a sort of fear of the ivory tower a sense that it was inaccessible to us and I think that was a a privilege right the sense of sort of entitlement to that world if we wanted it and I think it does have it gets very different meaning for the chat the children of a professor to be kept at home and unschooled as opposed to you know a working class single mother I mean our people strangers will project something different on those experiences and I think that's a problem but it's I'm not sure I don't have kids I'm not sure how to raise them I only know what it was like to be one yeah um you you've talked a lot about your siblings and we have an only child and I'm wondering how you think that would impact this whole unschooling if you were an only child yeah I think it would make it a bit urgent more urgent to have what I what what I wanted actually is a kid which I kind of wanted to 'unschool myself for my academics but then to get together with other kids to be really creative and do projects and do things that were fun and maybe that had some sort of you know intellectual overtones but the socialization I think would be certainly more crucial but I think another secret another aspect of unschooling I'm really grateful for was just the aspect of solitude I mean there were three of us at home when I was growing up you know because the youngest one is so much younger than me she doesn't really count but a lot of it was just I mean I never actually I left home when she was very young so but we were by ourselves all the time you know in our own rooms in our own space I mean you know we played but we also there was a lot of solitude and I feel very grateful for that especially now that I'm sort of off on my own being self-employed and making films and I feel so I'm not sure I would be so afraid of having an only child in school I would just want to make sure that they were in a community that was a bit more accepting or open-minded or larger than ours was yep I just had a quick question on I don't know if you had seen that movie surf wise but it's almost like a documented zooming movie just what your thoughts were on that yeah yeah surf wise it's a movie about a guy who's a doctor he's very straight-laced in the 50s and he kind of discovers the counterculture and has this total flip kind of like Timothy Leary or somebody like that and becomes this crazy figure and has like 10 kids and keeps them in a nomad like a what do they called a Winnebago I I saw that a year ago my mom just thought actually we were talking about it and she her thoughts on that film she basically thought it's too bad that guy wasn't doing it a few years later when there was more of a community or some sort of sense of social support and he was such he was so the vanguard of that lifestyle and from to my mind he was a bit too militant and authoritarian but I thought it was interesting and I thought you know his his kids didn't seem any worse off than they would have been if they had been sent to school and they had such a weird dad yeah what struck me about your experience is that both your parents seemed very educated your father's a college professor your mom's an artist how do you see unschooling working with people who perhaps don't have that type of preparation or perhaps don't have the resources perhaps you've met people and you could kind of comment on that yeah there were our unschooling community and was very small but the other families actually tended to be more blue-collar so my very best friend growing up her dad birthday Kinkos and her mom worked at a restaurant so um you know it they all turned out fine I think that question makes sense but it also comes from a place of assuming that you know you need to be educated to 'unschool your kids and that's that I kind of don't agree with that um but I I mean we again it's an imperfect world it's a complicated world and society will perceive you in a certain way if you don't have certain degrees and you're keeping your kids at home maybe doors won't be open to you I mean I think more than my parents being educated was this sense as I said before of not feeling like that world the ivory tower world was closed to us we knew we had that privilege and that was empowering but I'm not sure that was such an essential ingredient to the actual experience of learning well I mean things what I meant was things like I'm you know the book watership down happens to be in your house or yeah you know you had musical instruments perhaps mm-hmm if parents weren't less school they may not know to have that those resources yeah no I think so in that I mean I I really you know I tried to make it evident in my talk that I I actually support the sort of public the cause of public education and I think that's one of the reasons is the sharing of resources and I just wish that it could be done in a less all-consuming way you know so sure there could be families I mean there probably families where I would think god I wouldn't want to be your child at home with you all day long in your house full of books I don't agree with but I'm not sure that educational credentials are having degrees are the criteria I mean for example my sister might very well never get a college degree and you know but I can see her homeschooling her kids just fine so I think it's complicated it depends on the person I have two questions the first question has to do with financial support because just wondering if you have any suggestions for how would you support your kid financially yeah if you have a comment about that who is heading into their late teens or their early adulthood Xand you know anyway if you just have some suggestions about that the second question was is this was a really really good lecture that you just gave are you thinking or is there any possibility that you might start taking this into a larger venue like into the home schooling communities and become a keynote speaker at some of those events because I think a lot of the information you had to share tonight about your own personal experiences and your thoughts on unschooling are extremely valuable and would do a lot for people in all types of different educational forums oh thank you I know I just get wherever at the talk for tonight so I hadn't really thought about it it seems very idiosyncratic to me so I wasn't sure if it would relate to people for supporting kids in their teens and 20s I don't know I sort of I mean I think one thing one distinction in my mind and it might be completely arbitrary between homeschooling our and unschooling is that homeschooling kind of in my opinion is more based on this coddling right like the constant the constant engagement with a child the teaching them the sort of helicopter parenting as we like to call it you know but maybe more intense I'm just going even that people don't think it don't think of it in this way it's very hands off right it's like so I as far as like supporting a kid in their teens and 20s I mean sometimes a lack of support can be very useful a lack of guidance can also be sort of useful that said I think my parents are still supporting my brother his 25 so they didn't do that for me but that's why I'm tougher I don't really know I'm I'm reminded of what Oscar Wilde said about education he said education up he said the only time my education was ever interrupted was when I had to go to school yeah the Reagan cut um the the people you mentioned you know uh actually Thomas Jefferson was formally educated up to the age of 16 at which point he went to he entered William and Mary College he had a private tutor but the other ones you know and there's many many many more than that you can go back to Plato and Socrates and all that also the thing about the ivory tower thing there's a cult of education at our universities and colleges no it's it's a I was an independent scholar at the University of Minnesota for 33 years before I was kicked out of the library for trespassing they the they there's some things that is a lot of it as politics at the universities and colleges that that the the professors don't even agree with each other on on curriculums and and and and points of interest in in in in facts I was I going to say it was a question I was going oh yeah the question was um that I don't know what why why do people think that the norm is actually a education is a process not an institution and the norm is people just learning most people learn most of what they know on their own anyway they don't learn them in in in universities and colleges I have great education and I mean formally and I learned everything i Eric Hoffer was my idol when I was a lot younger he was the guy that had almost no formal education at all and he was appointed to President Johnson's council and civil disorders mm-hmm and uh he he he wrote several books called ordeal of change a true believer a lot of a lot of great they were kind of conservative but they were they were you know really good books on on on sociology my question was the question you know the question was why should it be um why do people think that that's that's unusual to be you know to not have formal education it it's actually the norm I think that's all ya know I mean I agree with you I think one thing I try to say is that unschooling happens all around us and it's sort of something we don't recognize the other thing is this equation we have you know of learning with schooling that is just sort of problematic I mean one doesn't necessarily equal the other as far as my comments about the ivory tower in the Academy I mean I I hope that my lecture expressed some of my ambivalence meaning you know my passionate attachment as well as sort of my passionate critique of the university system I mean as you see in those quotes from Marland and the subretinal sent this sort of liberal curriculum the humanities a lot of the stuff that's taught in the university is threatening to the status quo and so the university does need to be sort of protected and cultivated and I think it is necessary I love the sort of eccentric focus that certain professors are allowed to cultivate within the Academy and many students have their minds blown there you know and are exposed to things they would never otherwise be exposed to so I think it's an important space I just wish that its doors could be opened a bit and that's for example what I tried to do with my film examine life taking these philosophers you know into the streets and into movie theaters and trying to bring a discourse that is typically kind of out of view of most people because it's a very academic one and sort of share it with a broader public oh um I was just wondering this earlier you had talked about um unschoolers that had been probably caught up in the system by like you know their parents who wouldn't even think to have their children do that and so they go to high school and then they go off to college so I was just wondering what your take is what would be on um like universities that you know allow you to build your own program since you're already used to like the like curriculum like having day-to-day assignments but yet you really want to learn on your own what like universities Adam let you build your own curriculum as opposed to like a self paving self-taught education higher education yeah um ultimately that's what attracted me to brown famously has no core curriculum you have to take and then when I back to the University of Georgia I did an interdisciplinary degree that I kind of designed and I also have an interdisciplinary degree I have a master's in Liberal Studies from the new school so that was the framework that I felt most comfortable in but with I think the thing is there's really no reason you couldn't have that outside of the university framework and not pay so much money for it right like I'm going to my Hegel reading group on Saturday morning with ten people some of whom know Hegel much better than me and you know we meet every week and it's very serious and it's like a graduate seminar but it doesn't cost six thousand bucks so it depends really you know what are you going for what are you trying to get out of it and I you know again I'm just I'm committed to this idea of some sort of intellectual community that doesn't end at the age of 22 or 27 or whatever that can be part of your daily practice I don't understand why that's so elusive I was just thinking that in alternative education it seems like less is more and for those who have less what are the absolute essentials to to access that level of education that people with non education yes okay so you're asking me what what is what are sort of the essentials that sort of less privileged populations need to access well they need to access one thing that I don't think they're really getting in the public school system often which is a sort of trust in them right I mean public school the public school system is famously imbalanced in its treatment of people from different class backgrounds right because it's funded disproportionately so I'm not I'm not sure that it's so clear that unschooling is only sort of an option for people of economic privilege or intellectual privilege man sort of would coat the point I was trying to make through kozol which is that the people who are really being beaten down in public schools and being tracked into remedial courses and we told they're not gifted and being told that their feature is working at McDonald's are precisely the people who need the sort of spirit of unschooling which is the spirit of trust in curiosity trust in your capacity so what do you need access to I'm not sure you know a few good library some inspiring role models who are really interested in things so that you can see that it's sort of life of the mind is an exciting and engaging way of being I mean I'm not I don't really have an answer I just know that school isn't always the best place even for those who have the least yep nope you're as far as I can see psych you placate you hey um I have a child I'm homeschooling for the first time this year and I don't I guess we're not I'm I guess I'm tired of the unschooling versus homeschooling and you know curriculum based versus you know relaxed classical approach um I came tonight because I'm kind of worried is there's been a couple articles that a gentleman has done on salon and it has gotten overwhelmingly negative nine hundred letters per I read the first one that I was like well he's setting himself up it was he was really skewered yeah and um and I sort of appreciated its article just because you know he really kind of laid out how he was doing it um because I think sometimes when you're new to it everybody's like well it just happens you know and that kind of angeas not always helped but that facto matter was he was just skewered by a really liberal base yeah and um I guess I would just like to see like those like those distinctions between like how we homeschool you know what in stop calling it you know if you happen to have curriculum that your helicopter parenting or you know I just I think those sort of judgments on those worlds are the same ones that make it hard to 'unschool because people are dug deep I don't I mean I think yep I think about discussion has to be broadened that we're just doing what's best for our kids I have one child who's still in public school i one that's at home because that's what they chose this year one chose to stay at home one chose to go to school because he loves it you know so in our house it's important that we're not you know hacking on one yeah oh and I think that uh as a were such a small minority of people that educate their kids at home with our own resources with our own time and it's you know whether or not you're leading or not it's exhausting you know and then the fact that a liberal base is still sort of hacking on one another and then there's this discourse between you know I just I would like the there to be a better culture of acceptance whether or not you know people are conservative or liberal or you know just that you've done something brave and wonderful and you know obviously it shows that you know it working for you guys I agree with the sentiment of camaraderie but I disagree with letting the distinction between the words go away I think words real matter and that unschooling has a meaning a resonance ditches homeschooling just doesn't have its it is more pointed in it but it's also more direct than it was a more honest term to describe what I experience and what I thought was valid about it so I think that you're absolutely right people could talk about homeschooling and unschooling and not be superior not be critical be mutually supportive and that would all be good but I think the word really matters I wouldn't I wouldn't be as engaged by the word homeschooling I think that it doesn't communicate to someone coming from a different world what it is I'm trying to communicate so directly and as far as the response to the salon article I mean I'm not surprised I used to be very confused when I was a kid and my mom we sort of run into people you know strangers would come up to us at the grocery store in the afternoon and go why are your kids here and she'd be like oh they're just out you know out of school for the day and she wouldn't sort of say to them we homeschool we unschool and she at one point she said it's because I just don't feel like getting in an argument I don't feel like making that person feel as though I'm judging them when I'm not I just happen to choose to keep you guys at home or you guys are choosing to stay at home and that's that so 90% of times she wouldn't engage anybody about it because that hostility was the common reaction so I think you're right that you know solidarity and mutual support in this movement is a good thing but I stood yeah yeah well I think that they're I'm not sure they're so worried about what it is you're doing they're worried about what it is they're doing or it wouldn't be that intense and critical and hostile you know it's like well what are your kids doing today that's so great and maybe that's what you're worried about you know so because that it that that intensity is really it's visceral and it's because you're threatening something that they probably spent 13 to 17 years of their life invested in and they've invested their children's lives in so that's a very that's an intimate thing to go challenging right yeah just by being out cool um I think are we done okay thank you all for coming to my very first lecture I appreciate it

Channel: Walker Art Center

Views: 167,776

Keywords: astrataylor, homeschool, film, education, educational, lecture, talk

Id: LwIyy1Fi-4Q

Length: 75min 24sec (4524 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2009