Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Unschooling

On November 23^rd, the Times published an article that remained on the most e-mailed list until Monday. Susan Saulny's piece, "Home Schoolers Content To Take Children's Lead", focused on a subculture within a subculture. Among home schoolers, a growing number take their children out of all traditional education, "not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums, and textbooks."

The children do what they want. That's how they learn. They are unschooled.

The interest in this article reflects a growing split on the American political and cultural left. On one side are modern liberals, devotees of the Enlightenment project of reason and equality. They trust physical and social science, follow the imperative to measure problems statistically, and commit to rational, systematic solutions. Technology and education are among their most profound moral concerns.

On the other side are postmodern liberals. For them the Enlightenment project is a dangerous sham. It produced capitalism, pollution, and environmental destruction. It generates culture-destroying corporations, soul-destroying and invasive health care systems, and land-destroying developments. Postmodern liberals seek alternatives: alternative music, alternative medicine, alternative media. They aren't buying the corporate line.

Modernist liberals watch PBS. Postmodernist liberals watch Free Speech TV.

The split is still unfocused, still undefined except by such marginal issues as genetically modified crops. But it is real. What we have in Saulny's piece is a snapshot of the conflict.

We begin with the fact that these home-schoolers are not Christians. "Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, unschoolers tend not to be religiously motivated." They are closer to bohemianism. "They simply do not approve of ordinary education, and have decided to rearrange their lives around letting their children explore their worlds, unencumbered by the usual pupil-teacher relationship."

For them the freedom to explore is a crucial value. Being motivated in everything by love and passion is a measure of authenticity.

So the educational priority for unschoolers is not training, but rather the love of learning that enables a person to thrive regardless of where life takes them. Paul Kowalke, a 27-year-old journalist who was unschooled, says, "You don't know everything, and there are definite gaps in most unschoolers' backgrounds, but you cover most of what you need. And if you find out that you need something that you haven't studied, you'll have much more drive to actually learn it."

So the parents don't schedule their kids according to subject. If parents read aloud, the children will seek out books. Says one mother of her son, "Will had never been given a lesson in reading, but he read at 7. I tell people it took him seven years to learn to read because all of his experiences added up to learning to read."  Unschoolers don't grade. The same mother said, "If you attach a number to your child, your opinion of the child changes, good or bad."

It's hard to argue with these insights, especially since they are informed by good parenting: learning is relational.

This appreciation of relationship seems to be at the core of unschoolers' conflict with the establishment. Unschoolers "bristle . . . at the thought of standardized testing." My child is not standard. Unschoolers react to what they see as "crowd control" in schools. My child is an individual.

Saulny allows Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Columbia's Teachers College, to supply the contrast. "It's not clear to me how [unschooled kids] will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing, and math."

He notes families "are engaging in these radical forms of school" legally. Then he makes a fascinating statement - fascinating in its imprecision about the democratic process and in its view of education as training. "If the public and policy makers don't feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly."

There is modernist liberalism in all its utilitarian glory: the policy makers and the people decide by their standards what makes your child productive.

Reaction to Saulny's piece was so intense this week, the Times took the step of assembling letters about it and putting the link on its homepage. Two of the seven letters singled out Huerta for rebuke. Three others were broadly supportive of unschooling, while two expressed shock and incomprehension.

The left has not yet decided how life should be lived in contemporary America. Its positions are in flux. What evangelicals have missed is that many secular people respond to the degraded culture by using a powerful tool to pass on their philosophy: a good family.