Not that the break from unschooling wasn’t a good thing. I got over my abhorance for all things schooly and discovered my daughter does enjoy some of that (on her own terms) and also that a regular bedtime is a wonderful thing for my family. But it’s good to be coming back.

I am older than the 51-year-old mom commenting [at Colleen's] about how much she knows and how therefore she should lay down the law and the limits for the young, because she knows so much. Made me laugh thinking that the real secret to being older and wiser is knowing better than THAT!

I study power of story. We in our unschooling are all about power of story.

For example, “free reign” struck me as an idea we could examine in this context. It might seem a small thing but embedded in its story are beliefs about the very Nature of Man.

First, the usual spelling is “free rein” which literally means — nothing like unschooling! — to take a systematically broken, trained, gussied, harnessed and bit-wearing beast of burden and just temporarily loose the master’s driving hand on the reins.

“Giving the horse his head” in this way is certainly not anything like actual freedom and sovereignty. The master is in complete control of the whole relationship and will withdraw the limited moment of so generously allowing the horse to have its own head.

It’s more like closely supervised recess at compulsory school, for about 20 minutes if the boy is lucky.

So a horse’s half hour of “free rein” doesn’t happen until the horse has been thoroughly schooled, is no real form of freedom or self-determination, and literally doesn’t even take place between members of the same species! — it is a subjugating relationship, much like forms of human employment used to be. Certainly not natural, free, powerful, wild, autonomous, and certainly nothing like unschooling.

On top of which, I marvel at this comtemporary alternate use “free reign” racheting up our culture’s unexamined assumptions about the imperative to control kids like animals, lest they “run roughshod” (another domesticated horsey metaphor) over parents and teachers and society. A child with “free rein” used to be a worrisome enough implication, a cautionary tale against permissiveness — but now the fear is darker yet, a sovereign child! Ill-equipped yet with free REIGN! Ruling not just himself but his home and family, a child king, dictating by whim, a destructive reign for the whole kingdom and himself. It’s a world gone mad!

(Historically there actually was a Mad King, come to think of it, King Ludwig, wonder if that all gets mixed into the power of this child-control story somehow, too?)

There’s a lot of freedom in that. Freedom for me to be myself. And for them to be themselves and find out how they want to be.

Which is not all that comforting every minute of the day!

But at least it’s not assumed that it will be a battle.

OTOH, I read a quote on an unschooling list today that really rubbed me the wrong way. Something about having a responsibility to be happy. Most likely it just hit me wrong. Maybe there’s some good thinking behind it. But I don’t feel obligated to be happy. Or anything else. I’m just trying to be real. Which is hard enough to figure out some days!

Nance