AN INTERVIEW WITH ASTRA TAYLOR

CitizenShift spoke with  filmmaker Astra Taylor about her personal experiences with being unschooled. Here are some highlights from the interview.

 

An Average Day in the Life of an Unschooler

 

CitizenShift: It seems as though the most fascinating topics on unschooling for the public are – generally everything, because not maybe people are familiar with the concept itself. So we were wondering if we could start with basically an example of a typical day in the life of an unschooler. 

 

Astra: Well, it was a long time ago – but we’d wake up late, never wake up before 9, maybe 10 and then wander… stumble out of bed, have breakfast and sit there and go what am I going to do with my day. Perhaps being captivated by a project I had going that day, make video, finish a book, maybe just did nothing but kick up dirt and sit on the porch. Each day you had to face this blank canvas and say “What am I going to do with my time.” So its a lot like my adult life actually because I haven’t had a regular job now… I was in NY during September 11th but soon after that I quit my job and said, “That’s it. That’s my last day job. I’m not happy with this lifestyle and I want to go back to that unschooling feeling.”

 

CitizenShift: Were your parents involved in guiding you to figure that stuff out everyday? Or was it basically just up to you?

 

Astra: It was basically up to us. The older I get the more I respect my parents and the choices they made. What they did is, I always envision it as this sort of nutrient rich broth, and they put us in it and we grew in that. So tons of books, books on everything books on horticulture, mysticism, science, everything you could imagine– and this was not the age of google so there was no Internet. We always had a piano, guitars, and drums. We always had pens and papers and paint. Anything you could want to create or make was there. There just wasn’t formal instruction to go with it. And it’s not to say that you couldn’t ask mom and dad for help… if I hit some sort of empass I could always say, “Dad could you help me figure this thing on piano.” They weren’t really guiding, they were more facilitating… helping us to figure out what is it we wanted to do.

 

Motivation for Learning

 

CS: Was there any temptation to just kind of sit back and… not learn?

 

Astra: The whole thing is that- you can’t not learn. That’s the whole philosophy because John Holt’s famous example is a baby. You know, you have a baby and you speak to it and you interact with it and it learns language. It is just has this natural facility for learning and we all have that all the time, it’s always operating. So if you expose a kid to any sort of stimulus, anything that’s interesting or captivating it will just naturally learn. So I think it’s like, you don’t even have the option of not learning. Any time you interact with someone – good or bad, commonplace or unusual, there is something to be gleaned from that. It’s very romantic. It’s just trusting that innate human capacity.

 

I don’t think you can unschool half-way. I think you really have to somehow make your kid believe that it’s all up to them. The trick is that, it doesn’t mean that your kid is totally free to flower and to grow, it’s much more reverse psychology. “Not only do you have to learn, but you have to love to learn.” The message is in a way even more twisted. It’s not, “You have to read this book and take this test because that’s the way it is. And you have to get an A or else you’re gonna fail- sorry that’s just the rules.” Instead it’s, “you have to read that book on our shelf and you have to read them all out of love because you are just someone who loves to learn and if you don’t love to learn well then you’re just a loser.’ It’s more complicated motivation. There has to be some element of guilt at work there. My mom used to always say, “if you’re bored you’re boring.” I didn’t want to be boring.That isn’t to say that trust isn’t at work there either”

 

 

Math, Grammar and Social Interaction

 

Astra: Certain things like grammar, basic skills – things that are driving into people’s minds when they are young children… I didn’t have that. It’s my excuse for everything. The rules of grammar sort of laid out. I never had that sort of formal education. Even though I did actually go to high school for a couple years, they didn’t have those sort of classes in Georgia.

 

I’m not sure that math is such a big deal. It’s interested because we really valorize that type of knowledge; where do you get your math education, your science education, this or that. In educating people its much more important to say, how do you teach someone to teach themselves. How to do you teach someone to have a facility to finding things out, wanting to find things out in the first place. This facility with learning itself as opposed to the actual subjects, and that is something a lot of people are really intimidated by. Unschooling is sort of a meta introduction in being a learner and like someone who will just do that for themselves. One thing I have is that I’m very fearless. Even with filming, I’m just like – I’m just going to do it. The idea that you would learn it by doing it and just make some mistakes along the way, that seemed fine. It seemed like the natural way you learn anything. It didn’t seem like it was this thing that I had to master in a classroom and then apply as like a field of expertise. And so I think that’s very much like the unschooling approach.  Learning by doing. Anything I’ve done as an adult I’ve done as a kid.

 

I do not think I would be a more confident adapted personal if I had to suffer through that fourth grade experience over and over and over because I could just feel that it was chipping away at everything that was me. The fact that I didn’t wear the right clothes or the fact that I didn’t have the right shoes with the right label and the fact that I didn’t eat the right food – there is only so much fighting you can do. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing to shelter your kids a bit from that. I guess as a parent you don’t want to make your kids to soft and naïve or something like that.

 

So many people who I know and love now as adults, it took them years to detox from the experience of high school and realize that they actually like to read and actually like to write. They were just so turned off by the experience of school.  

 

The Job Market

 

CS: What are the options for jobs if you don’t have college experience?

 

Astra: It’s interesting. I mean, I’m a filmmaker but I didn’t go to college to study film. And I do writing but I didn’t go to college to study writing. You just do it. I think there are certain things you really have to have higher education for. If you want to work in the academy you have to have some sort of higher education or if you want to be a lawyer or a doctor. But if you want to do a million other trades, at a certain point nobody asks you where you went to college. It’s interesting.

 

When you talk about skills you need to survive in the world, there are lots of jobs where the main skills you need are tasky, the way that school is tasky. But there are a lot of other fields where it’s really conceiving an idea and having the motivation to follow it through. I think unschooling doesn’t necessarily give you the best background for the first set of career options, but it’s very good for the second set; which is finding something that resonates with you and being able to immerse yourself in it and actualize it. Those are my greatest memories- the feeling of total immersion and all the time in the world to do whatever it was that I was obsessed with at that time.

 

Community and Political Idealism

 

CS: Were the reasons for your parents initially choosing to unschool you political at all or did they find their politics later?

 

Astra: Unschooling is definitely part of this anarchist tradition or has that overlap but my parents came from it, I would describe as a counter-cultural perspective. And a sort of a romantic perspective in the sense that it’s based on this idea that human nature is good and human beings want to learn and human beings want to co-operate. And if you just free them from the constraints of the system that these positive traits will just naturally emerge. There’s a critique of conventional values built into their decision. What are some of the negative things that public school inculcates in young people? Competition, learning for grades as opposed to learning for pleasure, memorizing facts and tables and figures as opposed to sort of experiential learning or processional learning, learning on the clock as opposed to setting your own schedules, teaches you not to trust your instinct so much… like so many people feel so beaten down in schools because they couldn’t learn a certain way and yet they grew up to be incredibly successful artists or something else entirely. But in the school system they felt “something’s wrong with me, I’m not fitting in, I’m stupid.” Anything that would be a hindrance in public school you kinda take it and turn it into your talent. Ok so, maybe you hate math, but maybe you love art. Then you focus on art, you focus on what you love. It’s very positive. Things that could be strikes against you in public school you make them the strengths in the home.

 

There was certainly a critique of mainstream education but at the same time it wasn’t really that explicit in the day to day. In the day to day it was just sort of what we did.  We did sort of have an ethos of being weird...because we were just so weird. I mean, you’re the only kids who are out and about Wednesday afternoon and everyone is like, “Why aren’t you in school?” I mean, you’re weird. You’re not in school. Other kids seemed weird. Other kids seemed so fixated on things like how old you were or something like that. I think that’s one of the best things about unschooling is that it breaks down the age barriers in really interesting ways. You don’t get so caught up on is somebody 7 or are they 8, are they 27 or 18. I mean your friends could be anybody of any age who you connect with. So of course we liked our friends who were our age and had a special relationship with them, but I think I never taught to fear adults as these authority figures because they weren’t just coming down on me all the time. So that’s another thing I think is really cool, you’re not always caught up in these social hierarchies that are just really essential to the school mechanism.   

 

Unschooling and Social Trends

 

CS: It seems that home school and unschooling are becoming a little bit more common. Do you see that and do you think we are going in that direction as a society?

 

Astra: I think a real dominant tread is actually hot house children. You see these kids with the baby Einstein paraphernalia and the flash cards when they’re three years old, and the SAT College prep class when they’re 13. Since the early 80’s the amount of homework has quadrupled. On the one hand, I see this insane cultural trend of not letting kids be kids. Every hour is cut up into time to do this, time to play this sport, time to play this game, time to play piano… that is the dominant trend. Because that is so intense you can’t help but have a reaction in the opposite direction. It might be increasing in popularity, but I see it as flying in the face of the dominant cultural trend which is one towards evermore pressure to get into a good college, to get good grades, to have a resume by the time you are 17 or 18 years old. You shouldn’t have to think in that way. The whole thing about unschooling is against resume thinking. You’re not trying to build a resume, you’re trying to build a life. It’s a risk to trust that your kid will be able to function and learn and integrate into society when all these people are paying these huge prices to give their kids every advantage. A lot of people mitigate against risk, that’s what they do.  

 

Unschooling and Gender Roles

 

Astra: One interesting thing to talk about here is the gendered issue to. A lot of it is supposed to be so radical, but it’s always the moms doing it. So it really reaffirms these stereotypical gender roles. I have yet to meet a family where the dad is unschooling the kids all day and the mom is working. So it’s an interesting dilemma.

 

The gender issue is a big pitfall right now. There is a really good article in bitch magazine a few months ago about this new generation of young mothers who are unschooling their kids and how they are wrestling with the fact that they are basically stay at home moms… and does that jive with their feminism? Does that jive with the fact that they don’t want to only interact with those in their own class, race and privilege? There are potentially hypocritical sides to unschooling.

 

CS: Do you have any thoughts on why it seems to be a female driven movement?

 

Astra: The responsibilities of child raising just falls on women. Even when you’re a feminist and you’re trying to create the perfectly egalitarian chore wheel or something, we’re not at point in our society where that’s not the case. Typically the guy has more earning potential and blah blah blah, but certainly as a community, it is dominated by women.

 

How to Make the Unschooling Experience Better

 

Astra: When I was a kid I wanted a place where kids could go and unschool together. That would have been the most awesome thing I could picture. I remember a couple of times we got to go to alternative education conferences, literally just twice actually. And those were these utopian memories – I guess the way people think of summer camp or something. Where it was all these kids and they all had this unschool mentality and we just go to do whatever we wanted. Regular life was slightly alone, the sense that we didn’t have a community, that we were outsiders. So I think the thing I would search out for my kid would be a free school and send them there a couple days a week or something like that. I certainly wouldn’t want to force them into the kind of isolation that we nonetheless choice for ourselves, because we knew we could go to public school. I think it turned out fine in the end. Being a little isolated just caused us to turn inward and cultivate something in ourselves. It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t this idea of an unschooling community that I always had in my imagination.

 

What I would have loved is to be an unschooling in an urban environment where you could go to art museums and take awesome classes about film making when you’re a kid because then you could have all the richness and all the social interaction but just none of the bullshit – which would be the best of both worlds. That’s how I’d like to live now… it is how I live now. So why wouldn’t I want that if I were a kid?