Five Unschoolers
Interviewed by William "Upski" Wimsatt
Other Interviews by Upski with Unschoolers:
"It's as if you fall off the face of the Earth if you don't go to college."
Mavis Gruver and Nia Kelly are sixteen; their hometown is Duluth, Minnesota. Lauren Wales is fifteen and hails from Cincinatti, Ohio. Kesi Stoneking is fifteen and lives in Keezletown, Virginia. Jessica Spencer, age fourteen, unschools herself in Tuscon, Arizona.
Tripod: So, what were you thinking, dropping out of school?
Nia: I've had enough of this! I'm not learning anything and I'm not having fun and it's just not worth it. Why should I spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of my life doing something that sucks?
Mavis: We were the youngest in our grade so they said we had to do kindergarten over again. It was a really sucky public school.
Lauren: After 5th grade, I didn't like it. We moved to a school in Ohio and there was so much conformity. I couldn't stand it. I pretty much got everything but beat up. I didn't read the Teenage Liberation Handbook until I was out of school. I don't know if I would have stayed out if I hadn't read it because my dad thinks I'm gonna be stupid if I don't go back to school, and it takes constant validation for him to see this is not the case. His big problem is math, but since I got a checking account he shut up about that.
Kesi: I've never been to school and I'm really thankful for it. My mom decided when I was two that she was going to homeschool me. She read John Holt. I went to a pre-school that my mom taught at, but she didn't teach me. That's not the way she did things. I wasn't required to do anything except wash dishes and stuff. I help my dad in the garden and I go to a homeschool group once a month. I met all my friends that way. They're still my best friends.
Jessica: My parents kind of knew school wasn't working for me because I was getting really bad grades and I really hated it so I started homeschooling. At first it was just school-at-home. That really sucked. Then we read Grace's book and I started unschooling.
Tripod: How old are you again?
Jessica: Fourteen. People always think I'm older. When I was 12, someone asked what college I went to. I was like, "first I have to go to high school." I think that because I unschool, I am able to carry on conversations with adults just as well as with people my age. Like this job I got at the historical society. I'm the youngest person to ever show interest in their program.
Because I don't go to school, I always look for opportunities to learn something, besides reading a book. Most of the people who work there could be my grandparents. I also volunteer at the library one day a week. Shelving books, I came across books I never would have read otherwise.
Tripod: What else do you do?
Kesi: Babysitting. I love babysitting. And I take dance classes five hours a week in ballet, modern, tap. I've been doing that for about three or four years now.
Jessica: I babysit twice a week and it's more than two kids so it's almost like a daycare. And for money, I clean houses with my mom.
Mavis: I hardly do any specific things. I do a lot of little things.
Kesi: It's not like you have to have some schedule planned for every day.
Jessica: My friend was unschooling for a year and she didn't feel like she was learning because she was mostly reading about concepts. So when people ask her "what did you learn today?" she'd feel like she didn't know any facts to answer them with.
Tripod: Mavis and Nia, what's up with your magazine?
Nia: My mom got the idea in June '92. Mavis and I were approaching adolescence. My mom had an awful adolescence. She totally lost touch with herself and it took her about fifteen years to feel normal again. She was looking around for books and resources and she read Meeting at the Crossroads, a book about the Harvard Project, a study of girls and self-esteem during adolescence. She was looking for something new to do with her life and she's like: "How about a magazine for girls and done by girls?"
We were like: "We're twelve and you don't know anything about magazine publishing. We thought she was crazy. But then we got some friends involved. We put out our first magazine in March '93. We started with 500 subscribers. Now we have 18,000 subscribers. It's called New Moon.
Tripod: What do other people do?
Lauren: I'm an apprentice to someone who makes Civil War period clothing for Civil War re-enactments. There's a market for it. You go to one of these Civil War fairs and you can find anything from music to guns. I'll go for a four-day weekend. I love history. I think it's just incredibly interesting to see what's different and what's the same. I love costuming and clothing. It's one of those things I want to do with my life. It was the clothing that got me. It's interesting how body styles have changed because being fat in the Civil War was really not a problem. You weren't fat. You were just plump.
Tripod: Life after unschooling?
Nia: Actually, unschooling never stops. We don't stop learning over summer break. It's as if you fall off the face of the Earth if you don't go to college.
Kesi: I have a friend who's been unschooling all her life. She took the SAT and she got all these calls from Harvard and all these other colleges wanting her to go there. This is after never studying in her life. I'm not planning on going to college. I'm not worrying about finding a career to settle into. Just having a job that I'm interested in at the time, taking jobs as they come, as I find them.
Read Upski's essay about why he quit college.
