After college, beginning to unschool

Reflections on my frustrated educational desires and the learning-liberated future that awaits me.

So I procrastinated on writing, again. Not that I didn’t have anything to write about. Indeed, I felt like I had too many things to write about, such that I was too sucked into the thinking to translate any of it into writing. Consistency is a process — a learning process. I’m learning to work with the offbeat skips and flows of my bodymind. It’s not executive dysfunction, it’s a practice of harmony-in-anarchy among the multitudinous parts that make up Margin.

I am reminded of an essay I wrote when I was in the 11th grade and served as a High School Ambassador for the youth-led non-profit Student Voice. Each of us ten Ambassadors that year had to contribute once to the Student Voice Medium publication. My essay, “The Sound of School,” is a sonically-focused poetic critique of the regimentation of the school day into discrete periods of study demarcated by the school bell, and imagines what school and education could sound like if it encouraged our innate drive to learn:

When we regiment classes by the bell, we often cannot fully engross ourselves into learning. Is it worth it to enjoy class if I will be sore when the fun reaches its untimely end? We learn it’s okay to just “do” things without completing them or doing them well. We learn to be satisfied with the extrinsic rewards of grades and live by the external rhythms of clock-time. Rarely are we let loose to seek the intrinsic rewards of “Eureka!” and groove to the internal rhythms of thought-time. Rarely do we discover our potential for a challenging and deeply satisfying self-fulfillment; rarely do we have a taste of flow.

As a passionate intellectual, I was lucky to be truly interested in most of the subjects taught in school. Yet as a quirky child formally identified as gifted and informally labelled “sensitive,” “moody,” “socially awkward,” or even “troublesome,” I was irate at the fact that a lot of my needs were not being met. I had read The Gifted Teen’s Survival Guide as a fifth grader, and one thing that stuck with me strongly from that book was the concept that as a gifted student, I had a right to an appropriate education. Years of boring school mathematics classes had me fed up, yet it was a battle with my parents to convince them to let me have the challenge and enrichment I craved. And although I was not officially “twice exceptional” (a term used for students who are gifted and have any sort of disability, but especially a learning, developmental, and/or emotional disability), I pretty much considered myself as such and knew that I had psychological needs that were being neglected, especially since my parents were against psychotherapy.

It is really striking for me, looking back, how many of the people I was most intimate with (keeping in mind that I struggled with social skills and was not truly very intimate with anybody) either were known at the time or eventually turned out to be neurodivergent and/or queer. I did not yet have identity, but I had affinity. Without words to label myself and expressly advocate for myself, I advocated for other people like me, channeling my rage and frustration into activism for student and youth rights. Yet the particularities of my being did reveal themselves too at times, especially in writing. That essay for Student Voice, for example, seems now to be an ode to the time-blind thrills of hyperfocus, a common and cherished experience among many neurodivergent people. Not that it doesn’t apply to people who are not neurodivergent, for it does; the essay feels just strongly marked as the creative product of a bodymind incorrigibly living against social norms.

If I had the power to choose for myself, I would have sought to attend a school that gave me room to learn what I wanted, how I wanted. As a student I once saw an ad for such a school nearby my home, that was especially designed for twice-exceptional students. I remember seeing the ad and wishing that I could attend that school, that my parents were not so conventional about education (and seemingly everything else). Later in high school, my curiosity was captivated by descriptions of gap year programs that took young adults out into the wilderness, or to other countries, or into the depths of their psyche, initiating them to both the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood and nurturing their spirit-in-transformation. And when I woefully conceded that my parents expected me to attend college immediately after high school, I fascinated myself with the websites of unconventional colleges like St. John’s College and College of the Atlantic. My excuse for myself was that I was researching such colleges in order to encourage other students, who might be less caged-in by narrow-minded parents, to consider them for themselves; indeed, I wrote an article for my school newspaper about colleges with unique approaches to education. But really, underneath my passionate activism (which sometimes became excited info-dumping and overeager preaching) was a lot of pain and anger at my own loss of educational freedom.

I graduated from Haverford College this past May, with a B.A. in music and in mathematics. Though its academics were fairly traditional for a liberal arts college and its oft-touted student involvement in college governance was not as thoroughly democratic and empowering of students as would be my ideal, Haverford was a wonderful place for me to grow emotionally and socially, inspired by Quaker values of intentional community and mutual trust (yes I sound like an admissions rep, but I actually became interested in Quakerism, especially its activist social values that honor the Light in every person) and spiritually guided by professors and college-affiliated psychotherapists who helped me to free myself from the fetters of my own mind. In many ways, however, my journey of learning feels like it’s only just beginning.

Schooling is not the same as education, is not the same as learning and growth. For me, school, including college, was an emotional sanctuary. I was always freer to be myself, the intensely thinking and feeling person I am, at school than at home. Many of the people whom I’ve considered personal mentors have been teachers, counselors, or other people I’ve worked with through school. A lot of my personal growth has happened because of school.

But I am so done with school now. (Not that I won’t attend grad school at some point; I most likely will, just not very soon, and preferably a program like those at Goddard College which are structured around self-directed learning.) I need to stretch out my wings and learn how to learn, not as a student, but as a human. There are families who practice unschooling, a radical form of homeschooling that emphasizes above all else the child’s own interests, freeing them to run around outside all day if they want, or play video games or read inside, or go out in the world and explore careers that they might be interested in; without being forced to learn before being ready to, the child naturally develops a desire to learn what they personally need to learn in order to pursue their dreams for their future, or even better, a dreamily liberated present. (If you’re curious or skeptical about this concept, check out this essay by Akilah S. Richards on why she unschools her Black daughters, Iris Chen’s list of 42 freedoms of unschooling, and this article about Sudbury Valley School, a famous “unschooling school” — more commonly termed a democratic, or free, school — that has championed a very successful educational model centering the highest degree of student agency.) I never got to unschool as a child, but I can now as an adult.

I am learning about the workings of my bodymind: my needs, desires, passions, and patterns of functioning, and how they interact with the expectations of the world. I strive to break out of the schoolish habits of submission, conformity, and excessive self-censorship, holding blazing idealism together with grounded realism: I do have to learn to survive under late-stage capitalism and the systems of oppression that undergird it, but I do not have to let them mold my being. I must reckon with the trauma that schooling and schoolish parenting has inflicted upon me, and in healing I must hold my tender, wounded bodymind with gentleness and grace.

You are okay now, little child. You are afraid and ashamed, and your fear and shame have protected you in hard times. Now the times are different, yet I remember you, my treasure, my bao bei. We will grow free, together.