Children’s ability to learn experientially through day-to-day living is the foundation of what happens in democratic schools and unschooling homes alike. Part of that experience is kids doing real work in the real world, motivated by their own real interests and goals. It is not pseudo work where kids are “allowed” to “help” adults or where they pretend to do real work with the aid of toy tools.

Unfortunately, there are few places where children can experience the adult world in that way. Most children – and even many homeschooled ones – don’t have nearly enough opportunities to be with adults who are doing their own thing in the real world and not, as John Holt once put it, “just hanging around entertaining or instructing or being nice to children.”

The working world of adults is not very accessible to children because we fear they will get hurt, get in the way of or slow down production, or abuse or break the equipment. But in my experience, that has not been the case. Take my own family as an example.

Our unschooled daughters Melanie and Heidi (now 35 and 37) grew up living, learning and working in the midst of our busy home-based publishing business. They had access to all the tools of that business and never abused them. They mimicked the careful manner in which we used those tools and respected them as necessary for making our family’s living. More importantly, they used those tools in creating their own businesses, which we respected in return.

But one of my friends, who also happened to be a writer, was horrified to discover that our children were able to use my typewriter, then my word processor, then later my computer, as well as various photocopiers, typesetters and other related equipment. She said her kids would wreck hers for sure if allowed anywhere near them. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to trust her kids enough to test that theory.

There are many opportunities for children and young people to learn in and be of service to the real world. They include volunteering with community organizations, participating in their parents’ businesses or at their workplaces, working for pay or as apprentices at neighborhood businesses and running their own enterprises.

Although I don’t want to romanticize the past or ignore abuses against children, at other times and in other places, children had or are given the opportunity to do real work at their parents’ side, as well as on their own accord, and to be involved in the life of their communities. In our more complex society, this same type of opportunity and respect for children’s abilities is still possible if we all share a sense of responsibility for helping develop the minds and attitudes that will lead us into the future. Today, no one has all the experience and information necessary to prepare young people for a rapidly developing future. But we can share our skills and experiences with our children or take on other people’s kids as apprentices in order to pass along our knowledge and attitudes.

Unfortunately, that sort of real world learning experience is often easier to describe than to arrange. A group of parents came together in a community park to build a series of cob structures housing a sink, cooking fireplace, baby-changing station and, ultimately, a composting toilet with a rammed earth foundation. (Cob is a traditional style of construction that uses a mixture of sand, straw, clay and water and is people-friendly, low-tech and community-building.) Aside from filling a need for those facilities in the park, the project was designed to offer people of all ages a chance to learn how to build low impact shelter. But the municipal bureaucracy decided to enforce labor code regulations, which required a six-foot-high fence and excluded the participation of children.

Our education system was designed to fight and win political and economic wars. We needed people to build bombs, radar and airplanes. We now have different problems, such as climate change, hunger, toxic waste, terrorism and looming shortages of clean water. These issues require new types of solutions.

Unfortunately, our public education system is not geared to solve these modern problems. Although today’s young people are living in a sophisticated, fast-paced, highly technological world, the schools we make them attend are still operating much like they did a century ago. The dilemma is that as long as we educate people in traditional ways, they will perpetuate the current way of doing things. In order to make change, we must fundamentally transform how we think about learning and the position of individuals in society.

By our very use of words like “teaching” and “schooling,” we seem to accept the idea that some people at the top are doing things to other people farther down the totem pole. Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted. That is no way help children grow up into problem-solving, assumption-challenging, compassionate citizens who think independently and participate in the life of their communities and countries.

Sociologists, futurists, politicians, entrepreneurs and even some educators talk about the need for a revolution in education. But what they envision really amounts to nothing more than tinkering with the old, crumbling structure. Although there have been many cosmetic alterations to public education over the past century, the traditional blueprint for education persists…and it looks like a factory. From time to time alternative schools and programs emerge that are teaching a so-called “child-centered curriculum”, or that are using team-teaching or a program of integrated studies or some other new pedagogy.

But the context of these well-meaning and sometimes less oppressive alternatives is still hierarchy and coercion. Most people still believe that children and young people must be made to go to school or else they won’t become educated. And even the most radical critics of the school system seem not to want to abandon the belief that children must be processed for a life as producers and consumers.

What’s in a name? Lots, when it comes to describing something that’s as emotionally and politically charged, not to mention as full of assumptions, as parenting and education.

In many cases, the terms “homeschooling,” “deschooling,” “unschooling,” “home-based learning,” “home-based education” and “self-directed learning” are used interchangeably. Unfortunately, there is no standardized terminology that everyone understands as describing the type of learning lifestyle that involves self-directed, non-tested, non-graded, non-curriculum, community-based learning from life.

Although “homeschooling” has become a generic term, it has many uses and contexts, some of which are not always accurate or precise. I have unquestionably helped popularize the term “homeschooling” since beginning to promote the phenomenon in the 1970s, but would rather not use it today because it has come to describe a parent-driven, school-at-home style of education. It is not accurate to describe a learner-driven style of education, which uses life and the community – even the world – as its resource, and which most certainly doesn’t look like school. (The trappings of school, such as grading, testing, labeling, compulsory attendance, one-size-fits-all curriculum, and so on, have nothing to do with learning and, in fact, get in its way.)

Some people find the terms “deschooling” and “unschooling” and even “radical unschooling” preferable to “homeschooling.” Others see them as a subset of the homeschooling movement – one end of a spectrum of styles, in effect. However, I dislike them just as much as I dislike the term “homeschooling.” If used at all, I believe, they should be used as verbs.

The late educational reformer and author John Holt coined the term “unschooling” in the 1970s and author Ivan Illich used the term “deschooling” in the late 1960s to describe the process of removing school from people’s lives, and to help people realize that school is not the best way for people to learn.

“The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.” Bertrand Russell

Not only is it ineffective to try and force children to learn, it is also unjust. But if you ask most people why we need a strong public school system, they will talk about social justice. They will tell you that the public school system forms the foundation of a caring, tolerant and democratic society. They will also tell you that a strong public school system provides equal opportunity for all, regardless of socio-economic background.

Those are terrific goals. Unfortunately, the reality does not reflect the ideology. Scratch the surface of most public school systems and you will find something quite different than justice and democracy, in spite of good intentions. You will find an archaic institution, which defies everything we know about effective organizations and what we have learned about cognitive development. You will also find an institution that perpetuates social hierarchies, disempowers people and forces them to do things against their will – supposedly for their own good – while encouraging a destructive level of consumerism and consumption. If a democratic society is one in which people are collectively in control of their lives and the lives of their communities, then our present-day school systems are anti-democratic.

The chief function of state-run public education has never been to empower citizens to make responsible decisions about the future of the earth or to provide the intellectual means for people to live harmoniously together. The purpose of schools has always been, at very least, to train an efficient workforce and, at worst, to imprint a social script written by the governing class. And that social script involved, as H. L. Mencken wrote in 1924, mass standardization.

One influential model of public schooling was created in Europe in the early 1800s when the Prussians needed a system of forced schooling that would teach men how to take orders so they would make obedient soldiers. Prussia was not alone in its need for a strong army and virtually all of the early enforcers of compulsory school attendance laws were European military dictatorships.

In Canada, one well known early pioneer of public education was Egerton Ryerson, who set up a free, compulsory school system in Ontario in the mid 19th century. One of his main aims was to preserve the class structure in place at the time. One of his system’s main features was corporal punishment, which quite handily (pun intended!) created docile, passive and submissive graduates.

Modern versions of those qualities are still the norm. Children are often promoted from one grade to the next based on desired social behavior, such as a strong work ethic, obedience, neat work habits, completed homework and good attendance. In some schools, especially in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, you can pass a course just by showing up and doing what you are told, while not learning much or any of the content. (Many of us get good marks in such situations, but we have memorized the material on the exam and promptly forget it, which is not learning.) Processing students in this way efficiently gets them through school, gives them a diploma and might slot them into a job. And for this, they are supposed to be grateful and even eager to attend regularly!

So much for school being the great leveler, providing children with the opportunity to break out of poverty! In a study called “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” the late sociologist James Coleman found that “schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Similarly, school boards that track the economic background of students and has consistently find that economic background is the best indicator of whether students will end up in blue collar jobs or in university.

Sociologists seem to agree that schools play a primary role in reinforcing the social and economic tone of a society (as opposed to changing it). At this time in history, the very structure of schools delivers a hidden socioeconomic curriculum of standardization, competition, productivity, linear thinking and hierarchical top-down management by experts. Virtually every facet of modern schooling seems to have been designed and implemented to promote the smooth functioning of the system, rather than for optimum learning. And as governments tighten their fiscal belts and slash school budgets, the system inevitably is refined for optimum efficiency.

If efficiency, productivity, accountability and standardization are desirable features of the social and economic climate in which we want to live, then schools must be doing a good job. However, if we strive for a more humane, democratic, creatively thinking society, then schools should be helping us understand where we have gone wrong and how to change things, rather than perpetuating systems that are not working in everyone’s best interests.

As we have already seen, children learn by example and from their environment. Most children’s early experiences are undemocratic. Their human rights, including free speech, are ignored in the name of protection. They are in the way and they are legally minor. At very young ages, they are forced – sometimes literally kicking and screaming – to attend an often unfriendly and sometimes threatening place that robs them of even more of their rights.

Teachers (benevolent and unaware as they often are of this situation) are allowed to exercise a kind of power over their students that has fewer restrictions than that allowed by caregivers in other institutions like jails. Students are taught about human rights and government in social studies classes and sometimes even play act the roles, but they are not able to practice these vital components of good citizenship in their daily lives at school. Children do not need to be taught about oppression; they are oppressed. They do not need to be taught about human rights abuses; their human rights are trampled on every day they are in school.

In the same way that children in our schools are ruled and regulated by a group of friendly “experts,” citizens in our countries are governed by a professional class of politicians and, in some cases, media. They are both similar to the competitive, top-down model of the marketplace. Instead of self-government, we have a representative democracy in which the elite have centralized power for their own benefit, just as power is centralized in school. And that is the way those in charge like it. Telling us what is good for us and selling us something (products or prescribed facts) is easier than to have us meddle in education, politics or economics.

In this kind of democracy, the role of citizens is not to author public policy, but merely to influence it. The object of political debate in a schooled society is not to discuss via a two-way dialogue, but to persuade, in the same way that children sometimes wheedle and pout and throw tantrums in order to get their way. Because most of us have never learned to take the initiative to make change, we resort to protesting, criticizing and complaining about what we are being fed…or to misbehaving when the teacher is looking the other way.

Physical domination because of size, age or gender has taught us that power flows from the top down. Big kids bully little kids, teachers and principals have power over their students, strong men abuse physically weaker women and children, big countries take over smaller ones and everyone trashes the environment.

Over the centuries, many religions and philosophers (not to mention mothers!) have feared and even damned boredom. My mother, prompted perhaps by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who said it first, called boredom “the root of all evil”. The poet Wordsworth described it as a “savage torpor”. Early Christians classified it as one of the seven deadly sins. Even today, we talk about being “bored to death”, “bored stiff” and “bored to tears”. Crime waves are often blamed on disaffected youths who claim they cannot find anything useful to do.

However, I propose that we reverse this fear of boredom because, in addition to negatively numbed minds, there are also constructively bored minds. If one is brave enough to hang out with boredom for a while (in oneself or one’s children), they will find that boredom can be the great motivator and a push to develop one’s inner.

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald felt that boredom can be tool for developing creativity. He wrote, “Boredom is not an end product; it is, comparatively, rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.”

And my experience is similar. Many times while writing I have found myself lingering over the keyboard, considering some new procrastination tactic, feeling bored and uninspired with my work and unable to write another word. But I pushed on through those feelings, past that situation, because I am a writer…and thus motivated to write (partly because I love the very process as much as the rewards that come with the product). Actually, as I think about it, I did more than push through boredom; it pushed me.

Boredom seems to have been the mechanism that prompted me to clear my mind and refocus. Sometimes I’d go for a walk or clean the kitchen. But I didn’t stay bored for long, because I began to look around and notice things I hadn’t seen before – including new thoughts. Maybe the unfocused time had allowed my mind to rest and my subconscious to scan the horizon for a new perspective, which was followed by new interest in the task at hand. For whatever reason, soon I would be back engrossed in productive work. And inevitably, that work would be better than what I was producing earlier.

Psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihaly would say I was back into the flow. Csikszentmihalyi is chiefly known as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity. He describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

So maybe, when we’re bored, we seek to feel those good feelings associated with flow. In his book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play Csikszentmihaly examines motivation based on a study of a half-dozen groups of people involved in pursuits like rock climbing, composing, dancing and playing chess. He chose these groups in an effort to understand more fully what motivates people to stop watching boring television shows and instead, engage in activities that are extremely challenging or offer few external rewards (like writing a poem or pondering a chess move). He found, simply (and these are my words – he seldom writes simply), that the answer is in the high they get from experiencing flow.

I remember as an only child feeling bored sometimes (at least that is how it was labeled at the time), especially during summer vacation when my time wasn’t programmed by somebody else. If my mother noticed, she would nag at me to “do something”, then she might create some busy work to try and alleviate my boredom. It seldom worked, possibly because I was stubborn enough to reject her suggestions on general principle, probably because she confused solitude with idleness, maybe because you can’t alleviate somebody else’s boredom for them, and often because I wasn’t really bored, but tinkering, messing about, just looking like I was doing nothing. And sometimes, my cries of boredom were really cries for my mother’s attention, rather than for one of her projects designed to keep me out of her way. Eventually my down time would end and I would find something new and more challenging to do than the busy work she provided. If left alone long enough, boredom motivated me, forced me to lean on my own inner resources, to develop my imagination and to envision wonderful possibilities. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for things that would let me experience flow! And probably there was lots going on in my subconscious while I was bored, which surfaced at some later time.

At other times, I remember being bored because I was disinterested in what the adults around me were chatting about. Bored with the conversation, I would become enthralled with people’s voices and with the sounds of their words and their accents. Later, in the safety of my own room, I would try to replicate those accents, an activity which no doubt increased my vocabulary and trained my ear for future writing projects. In the same way, I once watched my young daughter lying on a blanket under a tree. As she grew weary with observing the passing clouds and gently blowing branches, she suddenly sat up and began to point out faces, animals and other objects that she was seeing above her. Soon, she had picked up a pencil and was feverishly drawing what she was imagining. Boredom turned quickly to creativity; doing nothing had allowed her to “see” things in a new way and inspired her to “do something” as her grandmother would have worriedly urged if she had been there.

When I was a young mother, I wore a t-shirt with the words: “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat.” The phrase put a spin on a 19th century poem entitled “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rules the World” by American poet William Ross Wallace. I understood at the time that becoming a mother was increasing my desire to create change in the world, although I didn’t know where that would lead me. I had already realized that, as the feminist movement espoused, the personal is political. I had already challenged a few assumptions about how life was supposed to work – including rejecting both the style in which I’d been parented and the institution of school as an effective vehicle for education.

As much as I didn’t like the rules of the status quo, I also didn’t like labels – even the ones that accompanied my rebellion. In fact, I’ve fought my whole adult life to avoid descriptions of myself that involve isms and ists. I dislike being referred to as an environmentalist, an activist, a feminist, a humanist, a homeschooler, a radical unschooler, a life learner…although each of those words describes an aspect of my life and work. As helpful as such labels can be to connect with others who think similarly, they can also constrict, separate, polarize, alienate and confuse. And because they name groups with a specific set of “membership requirements,” they help perpetuate stereotypes.

School is where we learn to sort, segment and label in that manner, where knowledge is broken up in to subjects and students are grouped by age and their ability to perform on tests. And the post-secondary world has turned segmentation of knowledge into an art. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised the first time an academic feminist scorned me because of my advocacy of life learning and its apparent support for the stay-at-home mom. However, it had never occurred to me that unschooling and feminism were mutually exclusive. In fact, I am quite certain that it, in all its label-defying glory, is the ultimate feminist act, for a variety of reasons on which I’ll elaborate in this article. But over the years, I’ve encountered many people – including some self-doubting life learning feminist moms – for whom the picture isn’t quite that clear.

I wasn’t always quite so sure of myself and once upon a time was even apt to wonder if my outlook on education was at odds with some of my other progressive stances. That changed when I began to observe young children and how little respect they and their caregivers receive.

I trained to be a teacher in 1969 but realized after just a few months that neither I nor most of the students wanted to be in the classroom. So I quit teaching. Researching a more suitable career and curious about how children learn (something that hadn’t been a major part of the teachers’ college curriculum), I spent some time working at a daycare center.

Daycare centers were not that prevalent in the early 1970s, but my developing feminism led me to believe they were crucial if society was to move beyond the nuclear family and its smothering hierarchy. But I was astonished at how undervalued and underpaid the entirely female staff was, especially for work that was so stressful and so important…and at what uninspiring places the centers were. I am a questioner by nature, and that experience inspired a lot of questions: Why was our society apparently undervaluing this work? Was it because women were doing it? Or did we value the care of the next generation so little? What is “liberated” about paying other women a minimal wage to look after our children so that we can have high paying careers? Does one have to have a paid job in order to be a feminist? Why do women have to embrace the male model in order to challenge patriarchy? Is there a third way?

My husband Rolf and I soon chose to begin our family. Once pregnant, I struggled to understand why feminism wanted me to make a choice between my rights and those of my future children. We decided to create a life that would affirm the rights of all members of our family. And thus it became my life’s work to advocate for children’s right to be raised and educated with respect and without the “isms” – sexism, racism, classism, ageism, consumerism and other elitist or destructive social influences.

Motherhood focused my early political consciousness. It helped me understand how the choices I make in my personal life are linked to those I make on a larger scale. I remember thinking that a mother’s body is the first environment for human life, so I’d better ensure I was providing a clean, nurturing place for my unborn child to grow, as well as ensuring a safe, respectful world for her to live in after birth. And that’s when I began to weave change-making into my life.

At the personal level, one of the things this meant was that our children would learn without school. And so my husband and I set about creating circumstances to allow that to happen. With the panache of youth, we started the family business that publishes this magazine, thinking we would all stay at home together for the next decade or so, happily living, learning and making money together. While the fairy tale didn’t turn out exactly as hoped, our lives taught our children – by experience, which is the best kind of learning – about making a living, about working out differences, about the need to be critical of the power structures in society and in the microcosm of family and personal relationships…and much more.

In some ways, what I was living has since been defined as “empowered mothering” by York University Women’s Studies professor and founder of the Association for Research on Mothering Andrea O’Reilly. However, I don’t identify with this label any more than any others because O’Reilly’s stance is woman-centered, rather than child-centered. She describes empowered mothering as using the role of mother to challenge systems that smother women’s choice, autonomy and agency. And that seems to leave out children’s choice, autonomy and agency. Dismantling patriarchy is crucial to creating a whole society but we can’t accomplish that by ignoring the rights of another group of people.

Perhaps O’Reilly and others in the educational industry think that our public schools are taking care of the kids. But they’re not. As I wrote in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, our public school systems perpetuate social hierarchies, disempower children, coerce them – supposedly for their own good – and encourage a destructive level of consumerism and consumption. Furthermore, they are not democratic because they don’t allow children and young people to control their choices and their daily lives. School teaches submission to power based on size, age, intellect and sometimes ability to bully, and there are race, gender and class biases, and even sexual harassment. The very structure of schools delivers a hidden socioeconomic curriculum of standardization, competition and top-down management by experts.

In short, schools – and society in general – treat children the way women don’t want to be treated. They don’t trust children to control their own lives, to keep themselves safe and to make their own decisions. In this way, feminism and life learning are one and the same because they trust people to take the paths that suit them best.

Aside from allowing academic freedom, life learning is about living more mindfully – acting altruistically (instead of earning gold stars or the approval of authority figures), respecting individuals for who they are, overturning discrimination, being aware of and remediating the conflicts inherent in our society, working cooperatively, and learning about and improving the world by living in and acting on it.

For the past 40 years, I have had a vision of a world where children and young people are equal members of society, where they are liked, respected, trusted and empowered to control their own lives and to make their decisions about learning and life. And, for the past 35 years, it has been both my passion and my work to give life to that vision. My vision challenges many closely-held assumptions about how we nurture, educate and live with the younger generation. It also, by necessity, challenges assumptions about economics, women’s role, and many other aspects of life on this planet. Being a relentless challenger of those assumptions is the way that I contribute to fundamental change – radical change that, true to the Latin origin of the word, digs at the root cause of what’s wrong with how our society educates its young.

Like most other people, my upbringing and my schooling in the 1950s and ’60s taught me to accept what I was told by my parents, my teachers and everyone else in my life. I did that well. I was the only child of working class parents living in a Canadian mid-sized industrial city. My parents had waited out the Great Depression to get married, only to have difficulty conceiving, so they were 41 and 48 when I was finally born. I was a good little girl who got good grades in school with little effort, thanks, I imagine, to good test-taking skills, which were grounded in my strong reading and writing abilities. One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called “learned incompetency” and a fear of not being able to do things “right” the first time.

Nobody in my family had gone to university and nobody suggested I go there either. My dream was to be an airline stewardess as we called them then. But I had not been encouraged to go after my dreams; instead, I was supposed to know my place. And, in my mother’s mind, school was my place because teaching was a suitable job for a woman and, as I realized much later in life, it had once been her dream. So, as a relatively naive 19-year-old, I went to teachers’ college. I was a good little girl there too and got good grades once again. I did especially well at lesson planning and bulletin board decorating. And, bolstered by my winning of public speaking awards in elementary school, I actually got quite excited about the prospect of standing in front of a class and filling those adoring and adorable little heads with important facts.

When I graduated, I got a job teaching working class kids in my old neighborhood. What disappointment and disillusionment to discover that I was spending most of my time yelling at ten-year-old boys to keep them from swinging from the lights and jumping out the windows! They were not interested in my carefully planned lessons and colorfully decorated bulletin boards. In fact, they didn’t want to be there at all. And, I quickly realized, neither did I. So, contrary to everything I had been taught, I terminated my career as a school teacher.

Then I did what I should have done while I was attending teachers’ college: I began my self-education. I started to think about how people learn…as well as what they need to learn and why – and what gets in the way of learning. As part of my research, I spent some time working at a daycare center.

Daycare centers were not prevalent in the early 1970s, but my developing feminism led me to believe they were crucial if society was to move beyond the nuclear family and its smothering hierarchy. But I was astonished at how undervalued and underpaid the entirely female staff was, especially for work that was so stressful and so important…and at what uninspiring places the centers were. I am a questioner by nature and that experience inspired a lot of questions: Why was our society apparently undervaluing this work? Was it because women were doing it? Or did we value the care of the next generation so little? Did caring for the next generation involve more than Kool-Aid and regimented “play” time? What is “liberated” about paying other women a minimal wage to look after our children so that we can have high paying careers? Why do women have to embrace the male model in order to challenge patriarchy? Is there a third way? And where do the children fit into all of this?

As for education, I decided that all those lessons I had so carefully memorized in teachers’ college about how to motivate students to learn were absolute nonsense. I realized that people (those kids in school and the daycare, as well as myself) learn things better if they are not compelled and coerced; if they are given control over what, when, where, why and how they learn; and if they are trusted and respected. I realized that until schools get in the way, children do not need to be forced to learn…because curiosity about the world and how it works is a natural human trait. I realized that memorizing material for a test (which I had done so well in school) isn’t real learning.

Fortunately, around the same time, I met and married a man who somehow intuitively knew all of this, although he hadn’t articulated it before. In the early days of our relationship, Rolf and I spoke often about how and why we would not send our future children to school, not quite understanding what a monumental decision that was. While I took my first tentative steps towards believing in myself as a writer and change-maker, he and I started a family. When I was pregnant with our first daughter Heidi in 1972, I fought anger, frustration and sometimes despair at the state of the world into which I would bring her. As it does for many women, motherhood was focusing my early political consciousness. It was helping me understand how the choices I make in my personal life are linked to those I make on a larger scale.

Propelled by a desire to create a better world for our children, we decided that Heidi and her sister Melanie, who was born 18 months later, would grow up not only absent from school, but unfettered by many of the assumptions people make about children’s subordinate place in the world. Rolf and I began to create a life that would affirm the rights of all members of our family. With that, I embarked on my life’s work to advocate for children’s right to be raised and educated with respect and without the “isms” – sexism, racism, classism, ageism, consumerism and other elitist or destructive social influences.

Then, in 1976, when the girls were ages three and four, Rolf and I started the home-based business that remains a vital part of our lives and my work to this day. With a small credit card advance, we launched a company that would publish both books and magazines, beginning with Natural Life, and would allow us both to stay at home with our daughters. We were in our mid 20s, with no training or experience in the media world. He was a plumber and I was an unemployed teacher/fledgling writer. But we had the panache of youth and we knew from experience that there was a need for information and inspiration to help people question the status quo and the conventional, consumer-oriented ways that were damaging our Earth. In those days, questioning the status quo meant joining the back-to-the-land movement, growing one’s own food and learning about non-conventional methods of parenting. So that is what those first few issues of Natural Life were about, with articles about how to plant cabbages, have a home birth and construct a wash bucket bass fiddle.

Our home business was, itself, a deliberately alternative economic, social and environmental choice. But little did I know that the experience would have ramifications far beyond the value of putting food on our family’s table – or that it would teach me to challenge assumptions…about economics, education and food production, about what is truly important in life. Since my business education was self-directed, it also provided me with a living model of the sort of life-based learning experience I was beginning to envision for children – one that involved a combination of motivation, hands-on experience, questioning, mentor seeking, reading, error making and correction, and discussion. (It also provided me with the ability and the impetus – a decade later – to create The Home Business Network, which would legitimize home business and help other women create careers for themselves while staying at home with their children.)

Along the way, my family and I lived a good life, while being true to our principles, at least most of the time. Instead of writing advertising copy to sell breakfast cereal or press releases to “greenwash” the public images of various multinational corporations, or composing mind numbing speeches for well meaning politicians, I plugged away at semi-profitable alternative journalistic pursuits, using my talents and skills to create change. We walked or rode our bikes whenever possible. We recycled and reused long before it became chic. We grew some of our food and bought locally grown organic food when we could. We made our own clothes or purchased them with no concern for brand name labels (and a fierce desire to avoid advertising those labels on the outside of our clothing). We also made our own entertainment. And for our young daughters, we facilitated life-based, self-directed exploration instead of sending them to school.

By the late 1970s, I was feeling the need to reach out, to communicate with other families who were challenging the assumption that children must attend school. But there was no mechanism for that. So, using my editorial platform in Natural Life magazine, I went public with our family’s educational choice. Soon, we were in contact with a few other like-minded families who were pioneering homeschooling. And I found myself to be in demand for media interviews, endlessly explaining how children learn without being taught, that a self-directed education does not equate with poor socialization, and that non-academic does not necessarily mean anti-intellectual. My speaking out led directly to a couple of run-ins with school authorities who mistakenly assumed that their authority legally and ethically extended into our home. At that point, I realized there was a need to educate school boards and their employees about homeschooling law, to advocate on behalf of homeschoolers, and to more formally organize what was becoming a movement. So, I founded the Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers (CAHS). It was a national network that provided both advice and credibility to homeschoolers, and that nurtured many of the provincial support and advocacy organizations that are in place today in Canada.

In those days, my thinking was developing apace, helped along by discussions with John Holt, who was kick-starting a parallel American movement and sought our publishing advice as he launched his Growing Without Schooling newsletter, and with many strong homeschooling mothers on both sides of the border. With the help of this growing network, I formulated a list of the questions I was most often asked – and was most curious about myself – and contacted as many homeschooling families as I could find with the first Canadian homeschooling survey. This early research, which I published in 1989 – as imprecise and unscientific as it was – put a face to the movement in Canada, allowed me to estimate the size of the homeschooling population, and provided the basis for future studies.

All the while, I struggled to reconcile my trust in children’s ability to learn about the world unrestricted with the growing number of religious families who were choosing homeschooling in order to control how and what their children were exposed to. As uncomfortable as I was with enabling school-at-home, I felt that the small and fragile movement needed to support all motivations and styles.

Truth be told, in 1979 I had not yet fully slayed the schooling dragon in my own mind. If I had, I might have given the Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers a different name! After all, the learning experience that my family was living had nothing to do with school (except for a determined lack of it!) and it was more community- than home-centered. Nevertheless, when I wrote my first book on the subject, I gave it a confusing and oxymoronic name: School Free – The Home Schooling Handbook (1987, The Alternate Press). I eventually came to understand that what we now popularly call “homeschooling” is not meeting its full potential – and, in many instances, is becoming more like school and therefore less of a real alternative. But in those days, homeschooling was not at all common and I was trying to reach as broad a spectrum of readers as possible with the message that, since public schools were not meeting children’s needs, alternatives had to be created and supported.

I have since become more precise about my use of language to describe my vision. But that early “big picture” thinking led me understand the need to reach out to people espousing other alternatives to public school. (I had already decided that the public school system was so broken it could not be fixed, so I never contemplated working for change within the system.) My work as editor of Natural Life connected me with many wonderful people and a few organizations which shared the holistic view that everything – including education – is woven into the fabric of life (a notion that I find somewhat lacking in many of today’s progressive organizations, which often ignore public education’s problems).

This morning, as I walked through the harborside park near my home, I watched a mother and her young child who were also enjoying the warm sunshine. The little girl had on an immaculate white dress, white socks and shiny black shoes. Oblivious to what her activities might do to her clean clothes, she was excitedly watching some worms wriggle through a puddle of water. Gently and with great joy, she was trying to coax one of the worms onto a stick that she patiently held at the edge of the puddle. Unfortunately, her mother dragged her, screaming, away from her science lesson with the admonition that she would wreck her clothes “playing in the dirt.”

I hope (but doubt) that was an isolated action on the part of the mother, since interfering with the natural learning process destroys children’s pleasure in discovery. It also contributes to the compartmentalization of learning and reinforces the myth that we only learn in certain places, during certain hours and when certain people (usually older and wiser than us) are in control.

One of the principles behind most of the writing and speaking I’ve done about education over the past 30 years is that education is not something one produces in someone else; rather, it is something one does for oneself. Real learning is that which we have gained for ourselves, based on our own interests, motivations and timetables.

Now, that’s not news to adult educators, who regularly toss around terms like “lifelong learning”, “learning organization” and “learning society”. In the adult education world, it is assumed that learners will set their own agendas, study independently and think creatively. But the contrast between that and the way we treat younger learners is striking…and a bit puzzling. A good example of what I’m talking about is a recent study authored by academics at two post-secondary institutions that called for less learning autonomy and more “program experience” for young children in daycare in order to prepare them for school. This is the very sort of academic who, years later, has to put more programs in place to help all those teenagers with “program experience” recover from it and learn once again how to be autonomous learners in order to thrive at the post-secondary level! How much sense does that make?