So by request, I am continuing the story of my son Eric from yesterday’s post. I covered a lot of it in my previous "Unschooling Instead of High Schooling" post but I will summarize it again here.
First of all, my son Eric, the protagonist of this piece, finally read it and told me based on his recollection (which is probably much better than mine) I needed to make a few factual corrections...
- I had intended to say that Eric had not gotten a GED (Graduation Equivalence Degree) but due to a typo said that he did
- He wanted to clarify that he participated in "online communities" instead of just "online gaming communities", since only some (but not all) revolved around games
So we continue...
After the "F**k Math" incident and increasing problems getting him to school each morning. (In a "tough love" mode at that point I would sometimes resort to leaving him crying at his school as I drove off.) We pulled Eric out of school in February 2000 at age 14. We had been considering doing it since the previous year, but in discussions with Eric he had said he wanted to continue in his school to maintain his social connections with his friends there. So we said he had to commit to going to school then, thus the subsequent "tough love" at curbside.
Before pulling him out, we did consider some alternative schools. But those around us were all private and very expensive, more like private college tuition. So after giving up on that and finally pulling him out, we attempted to do academic homeschooling, which Eric’s mom (Sally) had researched, which would involve teaching or at least giving him access to the four conventional academic subjects – English, social studies, science and math. I attempted to develop a "curriculum" of sorts for him. Reading great sci-fi books for English, movies (like "Doctor Zhivago") and History Channel programs for history (plus discussion to process the material), and computer programs (purchased at Costco) to learn high school math and science. He got into the sci-fi books and the movies, but the math and science programs languished on his hard disk.
As you can imagine, this was a very frustrating and anxious period for his mom and I. Was Eric just going to hole up in his room for the rest of his life? Was he doomed to working at minimum wage jobs and being dependent of us? Had we totally failed as parents by not practicing "tough love" and forcing him to stay in school?
So after starting to fight with him again and consider coercing him somehow to do academic work, we finally decided to give it up and let him "unschool" (something else his mom had researched on the Internet... reading John Holt’s stuff among others). The first year or so of unschooling was not pretty! Eric spent most of his time alone in his room with the door closed playing games on his computer, decompressing, and testing us to make sure we didn’t have other schemes in store for him. Sally had done more research that typical transitions to unschooling involved that year of deprogramming, so held our breaths and hung in there.
At my suggestion, he got involved in the Unitarian-Universalist high school youth YRUU program and met a lot of wonderful unique kids like himself. He also got deeply involved in several on-line youth communities on the Internet, getting on the volunteer board for one even. He even wrote a virtual play that was performed on-line by all the avatars of the people participating in this particular dungeons & dragons type fantasy community. He also participated in a yearly drama camp and made a circle of friends there.
Within three years of "opting out" Eric had built at least three circles of community – UU, drama/theater, and on-line gaming – where he had friends all over Southern California and literally all over the world. He got his feet back under him, and is now one of the most charming, caring, well-spoken young person you could care to meet.
During Eric’s next four years of unschooling, basically through the time when he would have graduated from high school, we gave him his space and he recovered his self-esteem and become a very confident, caring, wise and well spoken young man, truly his own person. He has decided not to try to get a GED and has never tried any community college classes. He has worked off and on as a computer game tester and built himself several large circles of friends. Though Eric never got too much into "reading books", he reads the New York Times online every day and look up everything he encountered that interested him, or he did not know, in Wikipedia and/or other online repositories. After years of that self-discipline (which he continues today) he is a very (at least conversationally) knowledgeable person.
In early 2008, Eric pulled three other partners together and started a business called "Techies" (http://www.mac-techies.com) setting up computer systems for video editing businesses in Hollywood and also repairing Apple computers. Eric is the Chief Operating Officer, and handles all the personnel, logistical and financial issues, and is the cool head that holds the other partners together. He is also the "glue" that holds the other three partners, with all their talent and issues, together. They started their business just before our current severe economic calamity began to kick in. As COO and the chief number cruncher and financial juggler, he is learning a lot of real world math now...*g* I contributed as best I could by teaching him the basics of using Excel, which is now part of his repertoire, swapping spreadsheets with his company’s accountant.
Eric is now 23 and has not gone to school since 8th grade. Once we took him out of school he started to really flower as a talented and capable person. I don’t know if this approach would work for every kid, but it certainly appeared to work for him.
It sometimes amazes me how much more comfortable Eric is now as an adult than he ever was as a youth. Actually, the last four years of his youth at home (not going to school like all his friends) were probably the most difficult he has faced in his life and he came out of that period a transformed person. In a conversation with him recently, he admitted that in his teenage years he had developed the ability to be an accomplish liar in order to have more control over his environment at school and even at home. That was kind of shocking to hear. But he went on to say that he came to the epiphany that he did not want to relate to the world that way and made an effort to build and live honest relationships with the peers and adults in his life. Of all his friends, his younger sister Emma’s friends (she is 19 and another unschooling story for another post) and other people of his generation I have met, he is about the most comfortable in his skin than any of them.
In reflecting on Eric’s journey to adulthood and agency, I think about our cultures conventional wisdom that it is critical that kids finish high school and immediately go to college or they will "fall off the wagon" and never get on again. I generally advise kids not to go to college immediately after high school unless they have developed a real desire, in their teen years, to pursue a particular academic discipline. Better for most I think to get out in the work world, even at a minimum wage job, and begin to learn how to really live your life, and in the process hopefully discover your gift and the contribution you can uniquely make. Then go to college if it helps you develop that.