Who Needs School?

“Mom, I don’t feel like going to school today.”

“Okay. Do your chores and we’ll go to the beach (or the museum, or the zoo).”

Chores were huge in my house growing up, three boys and a single mom. Muck and feed the chickens, all-male killer geese, and duck (only one, I forget how). Stack firewood. Mow the lawn—three hilly acres with a 20 inch push mower. Turn the soil in the organic garden. Weed. Weed. Weed. But we agreed, Mom called the school, we did the chores.

And then we packed a picnic and piled into our green Pinto wagon or our gold VW 412 wagon or our blue Chevy Cavalier wagon—we had a succession of some of the worst cars ever made—and drove to the beach. During our years in upstate New York, the “beach” was Lake Taconic; later, on Long Island, it was Field 10 at Jones’ Beach. We ate, read, swam, and built sand castles, school a distant memory. (Far earlier, living with my grandparents in the New York City suburbs, we skipped school to go to the Bronx Zoo, or the Botanical Gardens (boring), or the Museum of Natural History.)

Mom knew, intuitively, that what are now called “mental health days” were as much a part of childhood as days behind a desk in a string of mediocre public schools. And, knowing that we didn’t “have” to go to school made it less onerous actually to go. (Going to school, for years, involved bus rides each way of an hour and a quarter over rutted back roads, obtaining from an early age an informal and unreliable education regarding sex, foul language, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation, things with engines (mostly snowmobiles and motorcycles), dysfunctional family dynamics, fighting, stink bombs, and practical jokes, an education that remains more vivid than many classes in school. The Internet? Who needed it. We had the older kids at the back of the bus.)

These memories return when I think of a former student—I’ll call her Zephyr—who simply didn’t go to school (except for an experimental semester here or there in Scotland, or Russia) between 5th grade and 12th grade. Zephyr came from an eccentric family—single mom, again—that simply up and left, traveling the world and, well, living. Around the age of 17, Zephyr decided that she’d like to graduate from an actual high school, so she called us, from Nepal, to see about applying.

How do you apply to a school when you have no transcript? You write a letter describing your life since you left school. You include a list of the books you’ve read—an impressive, extensive list. You list the languages you’ve learned during your travels. And the school takes a chance on you.

Zephyr showed up in September, cheerful, intelligent, and game. She moved, with great equanimity, at her own pace. She agreed that she was ignorant in science and math, and set out to correct this deficiency. She had read most of the books in our curriculum, so she would sit in a corner while the other students were reading, say, Moby Dick, and study geometry. She found geometry easy, and decided to catch up in algebra and other topics in order to join her class in calculus. It took her about a month.

Looking back on her year with us, I’m impressed by how quickly someone of normal to high intelligence who decides to learn something can learn it.

I used to say, somewhat tongue in cheek, that no one should start school until the age of 16 or 18. I guessed that you could learn what you need to know—reading, writing, math—more quickly as a more mature person than you would if you were forced to inhale it, like dust, slowly, year by year by year from the age of 6 or so on. Zephyr was schooled through 5th grade. And she came from an attentive, literate family. And she had travel experience at a young age that few of us will obtain in a lifetime. Regardless, I believe she’s part of a proof of concept that schooling is overrated.

As John Taylor Gatto says, good basic literacy requires only a couple of hundred hours to acquire. Why do we sequester students for twelve years of schooling? The answers may be too unsettling to confront—we’ve created a world in which children are extraneous, even an irritant. We need to “dumb them down” in order for the “establishment” to perpetuate itself. And so on.

My focus here, however, is not on conspiracy theories or the unintended consequences of bureaucracy in education. It’s on the amazing power of the human being to learn. And, from at least one point of view, school just seems sort of beside the point.