For years, conservative homeschoolers have romanticized Little House on the Prairie (books, TV, fantasy) as the way life should really be, as the way America *was* and as the way their family will live. There was a curriculum, a cookbook, fashion choices.
Below are Brie Jontry's responses to someone's explanation of paleo-dietary considerations expanded to encompass other parenting decisions:
As for caring for the baby we then looked to paleolithic and tribal peoples for guidance.
Over the past ten years or so there appears to be a resurgence of romanticizing "primitive" cultures, especially in regards to parenting and diet. While one of my favorite things in the world is to sit in front of a campfire and stare at the flames feeling a connection to the people who've come before me and found the same warmth and entertainment in the dancing flames, I think that cherry picking other cultures for their feel-good bits is not only blatantly ethnocentric but also detrimental to unschooling in the modern world. Deschooling on the part of parents, requires an incredible amount of critical thinking. Examining your own culture and that of others is helpful, for sure, but romanticizing something simply because it is the way people did things thousands of years ago will not give you the insights you need to move into unschooling (well).We found that nursing on demand, sleeping with the baby were commonly done and this also worked for us.
Yes, these are wonderful things to bring back to modernity, but they are also things that have never ceased to exist, either. My mom nursed on demand almost 40 years ago and she kept me in a side-car homemade crib attached to her bed. In many of the cultures that people currently attempt to emulate, partially, mothers take extreme measures to push their sons away from the women's enclave at specific ages. Is that something you'd embrace? Slapping your son or turning your back on his cries because he reached five years of age? That might be a necessary (to the survival of the culture) act for some peoples, but is it for you? Would you marry off a daughter as soon as her menses came? Of course not! Would you circumcise a teen? Most likely you wouldn't—why are some things that have been done for thousands of years deemed beneficial to a good life and others not? Just because something is 'old school' (excuse the pun), it doesn't mean it is valuable or indicative of a fulfilling and healthy life.When it came to education we once again questioned the common wisdom of schooling. It turned out that unschooling was the closest thing to how paleolithic children learned.
Paleolithic families had Internet and Netflix and PS3s? Did they have park days and YouTube? Were their parents distinctly turning their backs on the dominant culture and letting them learn in ways that felt kinder and gentler? Were they, in many cases, living at significantly lower income levels so one parent could stay home, at least part-time? Unschooling is nothing at all like paleolithic life.Unschooling is working for our family. As it appears to have worked for countless generation of children.
Unschooling has worked for a generation or two, but it hasn't been working for countless generations. That kind of thinking might get you all bound up in confusion as your son gets older and more aware of the modern world, and it may hinder your own ability to define what it is your family is actually doing.Brie
"The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical." EEEK! That quote is from this article, where the flute image was. What kind of evidence might they have left, then? Perhaps like this:
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Schuyler (anthropologist married to an evolutionary biologist) wrote:Oh, Brie, I know this is outside of the remit of the list, but still, I wish I had a warehouse of posts like Sandra does so that I could save your post for all to see!Sandra: I'll warehouse it. But under what? Romance? Drama? Logic?Schuyler: You could put it on all of them, y'know, so that people would be 3 times as likely to read someone stating that unschooling is more than just living with your kids in a rural idyll, or jungle idyll, without other options.Sandra: Maybe "reality."
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Brie Jontry:
Unschooling has worked for a generation or two, but unschooling it hasn't been working for countless generations. That kind of thinking might get you all bound up in confusion as your son gets older and more aware of the modern world, and it may hinder your own ability to define what it is your family is actually doing.Sandra Dodd:
The idea that unschooling is the way people learned before school was invented baffles me, too. Anyone who's read anything about history knows that there were all sorts of ways kids were put to work early, even rich kids—sent to sea, sent to war, sent to fields, went to universities (for the past thousand years+ in Europe), apprenticed out, sold off...Nobody kept their kids home for 18 or 20 years just discussing life with them, hanging out, playing games.
We probably wouldn't be either, if it weren't that we're biding time until the clock runs out on compulsory education.
So even as we unschool now (and I'm not talking about people with toddlers who aspire to become unschoolers over the years), it's in reaction to the culture around us, it's finding a way to live in an alternative fashion within this culture.
People can't actually leave the planet and can't actually go back in time. The only place we can live is the here and now.