Have you ever made a decision and committed yourself to a
course of action, only to awaken one night in a cold, panicking sweat, convinced
that you made a terrible, terrible mistake? If so, then welcome to the human
family and to my world in particular. Mistakes seem to have become somewhat of a
hobby of mine more often than I’d like to admit. But I’ve also learned that not
everything that scares us sleepless has to be wrong. In fact, fear can often
mean that we are doing something exactly right.
In their book You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear,
Frances Moore Lappé and Jeffrey Perkins write about fear as an evolved survival
mechanism warning us to stay with the pack – or else!
“But here’s the rub: To create solutions for our lives right
now, and to reverse planet wide decimation of our very life-support system,
requires two things of us: that we do something different than we are doing
today, which is just another way of saying we must walk into the unknown
and that we be different than we are today, which by definition means that we
risk separating from others.”
Lappé and Perkins go on to say that whereas “staying with the
pack” once meant life, “now it means death, death for our spirits, and
ultimately for our planet.”
Which brings me to what has been keeping me up at nights over
this past year or so – namely, unschooling my 12-year-old son. My wife Dana and
I made the decision to unschool Avery very early on, when he was virtually
indistinguishable from a butterbean-sized alien (or so the ultrasound images led
us to believe). We were both teachers and knew firsthand what a
spirit-squashing, soul-sucking place schools can be, especially for kids (and
adults) who are inclined to march to the beat of their own drummer. We wanted to
give Avery the freedom, trust, and respect that would allow him to naturally
grow into the wonderfully unique person he was destined to be.
And we did. And he did. For 10 years. And then came the
dreaded “N-word.” No, our son was not a prepubescent racist. The “N-word” I am
referring to is NINTENDO! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! After a few years of successfully
fending off this video game beast, we finally let our guard down and allowed a
handheld Gameboy to cross the sacred threshold of our home. But there was no way....
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Jim Strickland lives in Everett, Washington with
his wife Dana and children, Avery, Jamison and Owen. He is a community-based
educator in nearby Marysville and works to create democratic, non-coercive
learning opportunities. He is a community organizer and passionate promoter of
sustainable living in his local area. He attributes his commitment to
unschooling to his hero of many years, John Holt.
