I just started reading a work on what I’ve learned is called “unschooling”. I had never heard that term before now, however it seems to somewhat align with how I learned - or at least some of how I learned. Growing up I was homeschooled. This is something that I’ve given quite a lot of thought about over the years. Sometimes I’ve felt more or less distraught about my childhood education. I used to wonder if a lot of what I thought were social shortcomings were influenced by my homeschooling. After much further reflection - I think that disparity has much more to do with my autism and queerness, rather than simply my education; and from living in a system designed to leave people like me out - or worse destroy us. However I also know that my homeschooling adventure wasn’t perfect. Namely because my parents weren’t perfect. I remember fondly the aspects of my education which aligned with unschooling much better than the parts that were home-schooling. Examples include my learning how to program computers, and disassembling VCRs, and looking at mushrooms and birds, and looking them up in books. My parents did do a decent enough job providing me with access to some amount of resources for allowing me to just learn and explore what I wanted to. However, then came church.
My parents and nearly all of my family are deeply lost in stuffy Baptist churches that smell of dust and rubbery green beans and sound like casual bigotry and fluorescent lamps. I grew up in churches like that. So the lecturing and conforming that I lacked at home, I got from church. I remember Sunday school lessons taught by long-retired school teachers who smelled of gas station cigarettes and thought the paddle was the best thing to ever happen to kids. In my reflection now, church was worse than school in most regards. It pushed rhetoric and the idea that there was a “norm” I had to comply with. Then it pushed homophobia and causal racist remarks. And then it followed me home.
Growing up was confusing in many regards, because for every interesting thing I could chase down, there was something else my parents refused to let me explore. Mushrooms and plants and computers and electronics were all fine. But then then there would be something that clashed with the church. They refused to teach evolution, refused to teach anything about sex or gender, refused to comment on racism or queer identities. I remember when I first started getting curious about sex, I worked up to it, and then asked my parents about masturbating. Their response? “Never do that again.” That was all I got. This was very confusing to me, why was this off-limits? I started having other questions, questions I couldn’t get the answer to, I started wanting to explore what it would be like to be fem instead. But that knowledge definitely wasn’t allowed (not that they had it in the first place). It wouldn’t be until much later that I would learn of transitioning, and hormones and gender and sex. Because that was forbidden knowledge.
Then, there were dad’s meetings.
Now I know them as alt-right neo-Nazis. The people he hung around with. We would go every Tuesday to the meeting. Men and women were not allowed to sit together. The room would be literally divided in half. Then they would start talking. What was said in those rooms was beyond causal racism and bigotry. It was hatred. They hated anyone different, anyone who didn’t conform. Even back then, I knew I was a part of what they hated. While they spouted how much they hated minorities, I drew robots and circuits and plants on their printouts. Printouts that said they were going to go stand in front of monuments to long-dead racist fascists - and shoot anyone who got too close with assault rifles. On top of those words, I drew flowers.
I understand now why I felt the way I did about public school, about the system, when I was younger. The truth is, I was never born into the Matrix in the first place. So I stood outside and could criticize its shortcomings. I saw people my own age being treated as prisoners, trapped in big cement block buildings, where they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom. Huh. “Weren’t allowed to use the bathroom.” Almost poetic isn’t it. I remember first interacting with other kids, and learning that they hated reading and they hated learning. This was so strange to me! I didn’t understand how anyone could hate ALL of learning! What an awful thing to say. Now there were parts of mine I did hate. The parts that weren’t unschooling, and were just schooling. My mom hovering over me while I sobbed trying to finish math problems. I would have to do a big sheet of them, but instead stared out the window at birds and dreamed. I think I would have found a better love of mathematics if I was allowed to come across it organically. Same for spelling, another area in which the system said I struggled. However, I do also understand that my parents hands were tied on this. If I didn’t perform well enough on a standardized exam each year, they would be forced to enroll me into public school. I hated those exams. Long slogs of math problems and questions. Then, later on, came standardized testing. For someone who grew up outside the system, the SAT and ACT were hell. It was being forced into the Matrix. I was being assimilated into a world I knew wanted to destroy people like me. I didn’t really understand this then, so it left me with more questions, questions that would eventually lead me to start questioning the system, to turn against the “it is what it is” mentality.
I used to be critical of my parents for homeschooling, but now I realize it’s the system that deserves that criticism. They just didn’t quite escape, and live one foot in, one foot out, pulled back in by religion and tradition.
