Or Don't Teach Them Anything

In our house, the adults did not instruct us or judge our progress. I spent months obsessed with making balloon animals.

- ASTRA TAYLOR

IT WAS MY CHILDHOOD obstinance that caused my mother to embrace a more radical, hands-off approach to pedagogy. As she tells it, when I was in first grade, I was advanced at math, and my teacher wanted me to skip ahead. When the principal refused, my parents decided they would keep me home and “fill my head with facts” and make me into a prodigy. Workbooks were purchased and a curriculum devised, but things didn’t go as planned. It wasn’t long before I rebelled, adamant that I didn’t want my mom to be my teacher. “We had a lovely relationship, and then there was a power struggle,” my mother recounts. In the midst of our battle, she noticed an ad in the local paper for a homeschool group that met at a nearby park. My mom hoped they could teach her how to be a good teacher, but instead she met a woman with a trunk full of books on child-centered learning and copies of a magazine called Growing Without Schooling.

From that day forth, my siblings and I were tasked with teaching ourselves—we were “unschoolers,” a word we used to distinguish ourselves from those who dutifully replicated school at home. Our peers rode the bus, attended class, took tests, and got graded; we played games, read books, made art, or did nothing at all.