Subject Areas and Unschooling

When I was sixteen, the age Holly, my youngest, is now, I was in a humanities class taught by Sam Jamison, my chorus teacher. I remember how it felt when I realized that science, art and history were all the same "subject," and that it included people and language and music. It was a feeling of expansiveness, of blossoming. I remember right where I was sitting. Whatever he had said, or whatever connection I had just made from something I read or saw in that textbook changed my life right then and there.

When I was an English teacher, I always tried to include connections and references to other subjects, hoping to induce that awakening in my students, or at least to give them the parts they needed to assemble that during an idle moment sometime in their future.

Time passed, I unschooled for years, and by the time Holly was talking, the other kids had picked up some names of subjects from TV shows or jokes or conversation. Defining a word like "science" after a kid already knows a lot about the world is nothing like using it before you tell him about a bug or a leaf. It made a big difference in my children's learning. I still didn't categorize their learning, though, even after they had the terminology.