A Debate About Unschooling

“How can you tell if someone’s a vegan?” goes the common joke.

“Don’t worry. They’ll tell you.”

You can change the joke to unschoolers and it works almost as well, at least among libertarians. “Let me ask you something,” a libertarian will say when he finds out you work in education. “Have you ever heard of John Holt?” Or John Taylor Gatto.

Cato Unbound describes itself as “a virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace.” A product of the big brains at the Cato Institute, the current issue is all about unschooling, which as the lead essay by Kerry McDonald makes clear is not the same as homeschooling. Dwelling on the “central tension” between “the coercion that undergirds most American education and the values of liberty and responsibility from which freedom spreads,” McDonald notes that homeschooling mostly recreates the coercive nature of education and transfers it into the home, “importing forced schooling’s authoritarian tactics and similarly dulling a child’s free will.” Libertarians, of course, don’t much cotton to forcing anything on anyone. Unschooling thus separates education from schooling, offering children the “opportunity of self-determination” and letting them follow their curiosity where it leads. Unschooling principles may be “applied in many ways by a diverse set of individuals and organizations,” McDonald writes, but what they all have in common is “the fundamental belief that children should not be forced to learn. Autonomy and individuality are paramount.” She cites Alexander Sutherland Neill, the founder of England’s Summerhill school and another revered figure among unschoolers. “The function of the child is to live his own life,” he wrote, “not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.” This is a key point: McDonald’s essay suggests that unschooling is not merely good for kids but correct. Whoso would be a libertarian, must be an unschooler, (or unschooled) as it were.

Not so, argues the next essay in the volume, by Kevin Currie-Knight, an Associate Professor of Education at East Carolina University. He, too, is a political libertarian and a “champion of unschooling” (which must make for lively faculty meetings at his ed school), but he rejects the idea that it’s “any sort of logical extension of a politically libertarian position.” The best reason to support unschooling is “not that it is most consistent with a libertarian framework or stands the best chance of raising little libertarians. It is that unschooling seems to be an impressive way to equip students for adult life, especially in a post-industrial age.”

A third essay in the virtual volume, by Corey DeAngelis, the Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation, makes what should be the obvious point, at least outside of the (small, very small) libertarian bubble. The evidence in favor of educating children at home is limited by selection bias. “Advantaged families are more likely to have the resources needed to opt their children out of the ‘free’ government schools to educate them at home,” he writes. “In other words, the improved outcomes experienced by homeschooled students may be the result of family background rather than educational setting.” Moreover, expanded school choice generally leads to less home-based education, he notes, “presumably because many families switch to the ‘free’ alternative when given the option.”

I suspect I’m far more comfortable with libertarian ideas, both politically and educationally, than either the average educator or policy wonk. But unschooling makes me nervous, chiefly because of the fad-prone nature of education and Dewey’s maxim that “what the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community.” McDonald and Currie-Knight are among those best and wisest parents. Surely their diligence and attentiveness matters as much as the freedom afforded their children. In its absence, the potential for disaster seems significant. “Freedom, not license” is the key, as Neill suggested, and which McDonald cites, to her credit.

There were a lot of things that were forced upon me as a child that I only came to appreciate as an adult, like Shakespeare, working with my hands, and Johnny Cash records. Some passions that I developed on my own, like the New York Mets, have brought me mostly sorrow and misery. It simply does not follow that the things that capture our imagination as children are fruitful and enriching, and that the things we are led to by “coercion” are lacking in value. Coercion does not taint the thing that is coerced. If I make my child eat her peas, that does not make peas bad (or make me a bad parent, I hope). There will always be a role for adults and, forgive me, authority figures to guide us toward the valuable, the beautiful, and the enduring. Our lives are often grounded and enriched by exposure to relationships with institutions in civil society from schools and churches to clubs and charities. That our relationships to these community pillars might be forced upon us initially in childhood does not make them any less meaningful to us as adults. To insist on the superiority of that which is chosen merely because it is chosen seems a non-libertarian argument.

Reading and re-reading the thoughtful essays in this volume have given me an appreciation of the potential value of uschooling, which candidly I have been mostly dismissive of in the past. But I remain unpersuaded. I have some well-honed views about the schooling that I want for my own child, and (if you insist on asking me for advice) about what you might seek out for yours. But critically, I have no particular interest in convincing you that my preferences ought to be yours. Does that make me more libertarian than some libertarians?

SOURCE: “Unschooling and the Rights of Children,” Cato Unbound (July 2019).