Solon Sadoway
Interviewed by William "Upski" Wimsatt
Other Interviews by Upski with Unschoolers:
"My short-term plan is to do as many things as possible and have as many jobs as possible and to really get a sense of what is out there."
Solon Sadoway is seventeen years old and his hometown is Lenox, Massachusetts.
Tripod: Have you ever gone to school?
Solon Sadoway: I never went to school a day in my life.
Tripod: What do you do?
SS: Wow. What do I do? It just seems like everything I do is part of my life so it's hard to put it into categories. I love to read. I travel a lot -- I'm never at home. I have traveled all over Europe. I have friends all over the country. I love going to visit people and stay in their town and see how they live.
Tripod: How do you meet these people?
SS: Pen pals, conferences, friends of friends. My parents own a health food store and I work there a lot. I learn the business. Most of my life was just hanging out with people and learning from everything I did. I love mountain biking so I studied about traction, friction, gravity and balance. I have a lot of friends in school and out and I think homeschoolers and unschoolers tend to be more open to learning from experience. It's true that we probably only learn what we're interested in, but we learn it thoroughly and love it, as opposed to a lot of people I see in school who see learning as a chore, a job.
Studying for me is asking my dad questions about calculus and physics. Both of my parents went through school and college and all that. I don't really sit down and do major calculus problems but I can learn really fast if I'm shown. I'm really into science and technology. I'm currently in the process of taking up guitar.
A friend of mine is a guidance counselor at a school of 1,400 students and he runs a peer leadership counseling program, and I assist him in workshops. I lead workshops for his peer leaders. (I met him at a youth empowerment conference. He was there as an adult ally.) School tends to beat the confidence out of people. The first time I went there, the high school students all thought I was a college graduate. Basically they were awestruck. I'm organizing a youth rally in Pittsfield. It's to bring adults and youth together to deal with issues in our community. In school, we've been able to bring together a lot of groups that wouldn't normally be friends or hang out: the jocks, the preppies, the nerds and the freaks.
Tripod: What does school does to your peers?
SS: Shuts them down. Teaches them to conform. Kids learn to lose hope about ever being able to change anything. Most people in school don't act like individuals. They need to wait to be told what to do, they can't think of things to do on their own. I'm not saying everyone in school is like this, because I know a lot of people who aren't.
What's coming to mind is a book by John Taylor Gatto called Dumbing Us Down. You can look it up if you want. It says there are seven things school really teaches you: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and that school is everywhere, you don't get away from it when the bell rings; it infiltrates your life.
Tripod: Any career plans?
SS: My short-term plan is to do as many things as possible and have as many jobs as possible and to really get a sense of what is out there.
Read Upski's conversation with five other unschoolers.
