S2E12 | Unschooling Isn’t Freedom Gone Wild: Why Choices Matter More Than Ideals

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

S2E12 | Ladies Fixing the World

[00:00:00] Cecilie Conrad: So today we are finally back. For us, it's finally, because I've been sick for a while, for the listeners, it could be just five minutes ago, you turned off the previous episode. We feel we are finally back to record episode 12 of season two. , I'm really happy to be around my friends.

[00:00:18] Cecilie Conrad: Sarah and Sue again, welcome to both of you. Hi Cecilia. Hi, Sandra. Hello. Hello. I'm looking forward to talking, chatting again. It's gonna be nice. We promise to talk about freedom. Freedom and choices. Making. Choices and freedom is this word people throw around. We're free to do whatever we want. It has this connotation of.

[00:00:48] Cecilie Conrad: I don't know, positivity , and also some sort of bravery. I recently, I wanna say I read the book, but actually I didn't finish it yet. There's this book [00:01:00] out. And it's only Danish at this point because it's quite new. It's a Danish, I wanna say philosopher, but I think he's, his education is anthropology.

[00:01:10] Cecilie Conrad: The book is called The Price of Unfreedom. , it's quite interesting about how we somehow allow for a lot of our freedom to be taken away. Usually. The arguments are something about safety or convenience or comfort or social choices. But maybe it has become a little too much and we. Forget to talk about what is the price of letting go of freedom.

[00:01:40] Cecilie Conrad: And we talk a lot about the price of freedom and not too much about the price of unfreedom. I'm reading that book and I have the guy on the other podcast, self-directed. I'll put in the show note which episode I can't remember. His name is Dennis Numark. So as we're talking [00:02:00] about freedom today, I think we could just start by the core definition, the negative definition.

[00:02:06] Cecilie Conrad: Not negative as in not good but the basic notion philosophically of freedom, which is the freedom to do whatever you want to do. No one to stop you. There's no one to tell you what to not do. That's the basic freedom. And, in the core of that. Once you start thinking about it, that could go wrong in so many ways.

[00:02:31] Cecilie Conrad: So most people who talk about basic freedom talk about you're free to do, you have the right, you're born with this right to freedom or actually, You're just born with this freedom. You're here and you can make your own choices and do whatever you want to do as long as it's not taking away freedom from anyone else.

[00:02:51] Cecilie Conrad: That's the moral code, the basic moral code. And I find that notion quite interesting. It's not [00:03:00] freedom from a lot of things. Freedom from paying tax or freedom from school, or freedom from curriculum, or freedom from in-laws, or it's just freedom to make your own choices, but make them within the frame of thinking about are you restricting anyone in that basic.

[00:03:22] Cecilie Conrad: Right to make up your own mind. And I know that Sandra very soon will get the torch and have some critique of the word freedom. And I'm sure I will agree with Sandra because I usually do. But at the same time, I think for me, actually, it is in the core of why I unschool why we became an unschooling family.

[00:03:47] Cecilie Conrad: It is because we believe in making our own choices and we want our children to learn to make their own choices. And while doing it thinking about other [00:04:00] people and the planet, everything in their context, I'm making this choice and what's the impact and is that okay? And am I okay with that?

[00:04:08] Cecilie Conrad: Is this the way to go forth? And I think living in a more structured life world where you might, school is. The thing we took out of that equation, the big thing someone else is telling you what to do, how to do it, and whether you did it right or not all the time. And that stops the flow of making your own choices.

[00:04:35] Cecilie Conrad: And it means that growing up those 10 years, my kids are not in school. They get to make a lot of choices and have a lot of experience with making choices, their own choices, and also taking whatever consequence or ripple effect is of that choice they made. And this is I think, very, for us, a core [00:05:00] element of the basic education.

[00:05:02] Cecilie Conrad: We want them to have to stand on their own legs when they are young adults and know what it means to make a choice. Know what it means to stop and think about what you're doing. Know what it means to evaluate a choice. Was this a good choice or not? And would I do differently? Next time. So even though I'm ready to listen to the critique of this whole, oh, we're so free lifestyle I still do think that it's a centerpiece for me and for our family and for our choice of becoming unschoolers.

[00:05:37] Sandra Dodd: I think that it's much easier and healthier in discussions about unschooling and learning and families to talk about choices that now you have more choices than you had before and. Look how many choices we have and how much room and time we have to make more choices because that's hard to argue with.

[00:05:57] Sandra Dodd: But when people say, oh, we're gonna be free, my children are [00:06:00] so free. We're so free. I've seen that abused and misunderstood to the point that families aren't getting along and we might get to worst case scenarios, depends how the conversation goes. But English as usual has too many words and it makes it more confusing because we have the ideas of freedom and freeing.

[00:06:19] Sandra Dodd: So if a child is in school and feeling really trapped and unhappy, very miserable in school, the parents can free him from that. The other word we have is liberation. Liberation is done by somebody else for sure. So if you're liberated, somebody came and saved you and freed you. So I understand that when people are first done schooling, they can have those feelings.

[00:06:40] Sandra Dodd: Like I used to be stuck here. I used to have to do these things without choices, and now my parents came and rescued me and now I have choices. But if they say I'm rescued from, I'm free of this, or free from this. Not just plain, ordinary, vanilla free. So that's where I, that's where [00:07:00] I would like to go first is how much better it is to think of the choices that you can make once you're not involved in so much compulsion and structure.

[00:07:12] Cecilie Conrad: So that is also my centerpiece, making, choices of your own.

[00:07:20] Cecilie Conrad: And the two layers you can make all kinds of decisions. And actually during just a regular day, you make a lot of decisions. And I like, I personally like my free life, that it's not pre-planned too much when I get up in the morning. I don't have a structure. but I also the broader perspective to stop and think about is this the organization of my days in plural that I want?

[00:07:55] Cecilie Conrad: Am I on a general base doing the things that make me healthy and happy [00:08:00] and am I contributing in the way I want to on a larger scale? and I do seeing my children do the same thing. Is it freedom?

[00:08:14] Cecilie Conrad: I don't know. I think if we are saying that, so there's a different, there's a different conversation I've had a few times recently that also evolves around the word freedom because I'm in this traveling community and the thing with the travelers is that it's very hard for them to commit. Most of the nomadic people I know, they're not committing, they like, and they call it freedom.

[00:08:40] Cecilie Conrad: They like the freedom, I don't know where I'll be in October, and I like that I can just be spontaneous and do whatever. I understand that a lot of nomadic people also paid high price to become nomadic. They let go of a lot of comfort and security and, [00:09:00] yeah, maybe a lot of nostalgic things like their house and To, get this life of moving around and so the freedom is.

[00:09:10] Cecilie Conrad: It's the prize somehow. And the thing is just, we've discussed a few times in the community how if that door is just open and there is no commitment, there are lots of options that we lose if we don't commit. And we have to make some choices, we have to make some structure. If I'm telling people where I am in November and I can say that now where it's June my friends can align and maybe I can read a book about the place where I'm going and maybe I can beforehand make sure that I know what festivals are in that area at that time.

[00:09:49] Cecilie Conrad: And maybe I realized, oh, it's going to be cold. Maybe I should buy a woolen base layer instead of getting sick. So [00:10:00] sometimes there's also layers of freedom, a freedom.

[00:10:05] Cecilie Conrad: Inside a restriction. Does that, does, am I making any sense?

[00:10:11] Sandra Dodd: If you commit right now to where you're gonna be in November, you've just taken away some of your own choices?

[00:10:16] Cecilie Conrad: Yes, because

[00:10:17] Sandra Dodd: you have to, you've built yourself a have to because other people are expecting you to do something. So it's just people trade off.

[00:10:23] Sandra Dodd: People will be on a sports team or in a play where they voluntarily commit to something that's going to curtail their freedom. It's going to give them a schedule that they have to adhere to until that season or that play is over. That's normal. If the government's not forcing you to be in that play on that sports team, it's, still about choices,

[00:10:43] Cecilie Conrad: but I'm also giving myself choices.

[00:10:45] Cecilie Conrad: If I choose to be on the sports team, I have the choice of working with my ability with this sport. I have the option. Can we, where are, where's the concept of options here? So there are [00:11:00] choices. Options. If I commit to something, it gives me a different set of options. So what I'm usually saying when we talk about commitment in the traveling community is commitment gives me a different kind of freedom because it gives me different, a different set of options.

[00:11:22] Sandra Dodd: I don't think commitment provides freedom because you're, committing your whole family. If you have to be somewhere, they have to be there too. Yes. Not for life. It's not, it is not for once, once you join this, once you enter this government school, you're gonna be here for the next 10 years or what, however many years it is.

[00:11:39] Sandra Dodd: That's, I think compared to school, unschooling can seem like total freedom compared to school. At home, it can seem like total freedom. And so there's that first. Celebratory Woo-hoo feeling of, I am liberated. But I've seen in some families, the parents needed that more than the kids did. The kids would like some [00:12:00] closeness and hugging and structure and the parents are like, my whole life I've been waiting for this.

[00:12:07] Sandra Dodd: And the parents themselves go crazy and make it about their own freedom. And the kids are like, mom, hello. What about dinner? And so I've seen some families where the parents go a little far to, to celebrate their wild freedom. And because we're, because it's an international discussion and you're talking about meeting up with people in, different countries in Europe who have come from all over the world, all over the place.

[00:12:35] Sandra Dodd: It's, I think it's worth pointing out that

[00:12:39] Sandra Dodd: everybody lives somewhere. Everybody lives in a town in a. Whatever, whatever layer of bureaucracy you have. I'm in a town, in a county, in a state, in a nation.

[00:12:52] Sandra Dodd: I'm, I have all kinds of people expecting and requiring all kinds of things of me, and there are very few people who, [00:13:00] they might think that they don't want the government requiring anything of them, but if their neighbors being hateful or neglectful, they're gonna want the government to make that stop.

[00:13:07] Sandra Dodd: So there's a balance there too. How much freedom do you want for every parent to do whatever they want to do? And I still think if you, have, if you go back to choices, you're better off now. I chose to do this, they're choosing to do something else. Now I need to decide what choose whether to call social services on my neighbors or not.

[00:13:27] Sandra Dodd: And sometimes, unschoolers become the people who live in glass houses. They need to be careful. I.

[00:13:32] Cecilie Conrad: Yes,

[00:13:33] Sandra Dodd: because whatever the neighbors are doing, it probably not as weird as what we're doing. So it's good to be cautious and be courteous and be responsible with the CHO choices and the options you have.

[00:13:46] Sandra Dodd: So can

[00:13:46] Sue Elvis: I, analytical tell us more. So is where we started with freedom when, I don't wanna go over the backstory of how we got to unschooling again, but we unschool we went off [00:14:00] track and we came back. But in that, in, in that, time in between unschooling and unschooling again, I got to the point where I was so stressed out when I knew we had to make some changes and I thought about unschooling and I thought we won't have to do anything.

[00:14:24] Sue Elvis: If we unschool that I'll have the freedom to do nothing. And that sounded very attractive to me that all of my commitments would be gone because I had the wrong idea about what unschooling was. But I thought, isn't that a fantastic way to live, that you don't have to do anything? But I've since discovered that's not what freedom's all about.

[00:14:49] Sue Elvis: And then I think we all have our own freedom might be at the center of all our lives. And Cecilia, you've shared about, what freedom means to [00:15:00] you, but over the years, what freedom means to us, is that what you said? Everybody is free and I, agree with that, but everybody also has a responsibility to use their freedom wisely.

[00:15:14] Sue Elvis: And what I think for our family, what I've come to believe is that we all have the freedom. To make right choices that, but what is right, For other people, but also for us. And I think at the end of the last episode, we were talking Cecilia about choices and our mistakes,

[00:15:41] Sue Elvis: bad choices, or are they just different choices? And so I guess it depends on what we think is right and wrong, but that's at the center of our unschooling life is that everybody, hopefully with these good relationships that we've been talking [00:16:00] about, we can teach our kids what is right and what is wrong.

[00:16:03] Sue Elvis: We can pass it on or we can share, by example, by our discussions, whatever. And we hope that our children will make the right choices with their freedom. And that's, to me, what freedom is all about is choice, like Sandra said. But it's, I got this idea of right choices, right for other people around. We all live in society, we all live within families, but also for ourselves because certain things we could do, but they're not right for us.

[00:16:38] Sue Elvis: We won't be happy, they're destructive or whatever. and thinking that if we unschool, I wouldn't have to do anything ever again, was obviously the wrong choice, the wrong idea. And if we had put that one into action, it would've been chaos and not the right choice [00:17:00] at all. But I think, a lot of people do have this idea that if they are in schooling, you see them on social media or we're on the beach, we don't have, we're free.

[00:17:11] Sue Elvis: We're we're living this wonderful life. But is that, what does that look like? Just getting up every day and doing whatever you like. Let's go down to the beach. I, nothing wrong with going to the beach. We did it lots of times, but is that the central part of unschooling? And do the, do people who unschool in that way, let's do whatever we like.

[00:17:40] Sue Elvis: Does it last very long?

[00:17:43] Sandra Dodd: I've seen chaos. I've seen families jump too far too fast and not know how to recover. And that's, it's sad and it's, and. Very many people have come back and said, I wish I hadn't done that. They'll just, the day that they decide to read about unschooling, they, the next time they get a chance, they [00:18:00] tell their kids, okay, guess what?

[00:18:01] Sandra Dodd: You can eat anything you want to. You never have to go to bed. There's no more bedtimes. You can do whatever you want to. And the kids are like, why? You know what, And so the kids haven't done all the reading, the mom's done. They don't know what she's talking about. And it can just cause a lot of confusion and lack of faith in moms stability and intellect, what is she talking about?

[00:18:25] Sandra Dodd: So that's a problem. Also, I've seen some parents when they didn't understand how unschooling could work, how if you make a rich life, there's learning all the time. If you have, like we had one of the best discussions we've had as a group here, I think it was conversations about the value of conversations and how learning happens.

[00:18:43] Sandra Dodd: Just from discussing things, answering questions, I. But parents who don't know that, who think that unschooling is just a wild freedom doing nothing, being crazy every day. Some of them have told their kids well. I told him he was free to [00:19:00] choose to do whatever he wants to. He's free to choose to learn whatever he wants to, but he needs to decide because he's responsible for his own learning.

[00:19:07] Sandra Dodd: And then the parents wanna sit back and do whatever they do separate from the kids. And the kids will be free to choose what they learn, which is not how unschooling works.

[00:19:18] Sue Elvis: that's a false idea that I'd had at that time. And so we didn't choose unschooling. We got to it gradually, naturally. And we didn't even realize we were unschooling in the end, but as a choice.

[00:19:32] Sue Elvis: That's the idea I had. And I decided that although it sounded pretty good, it wasn't right. But to you, Sandra saying that, I've had a lot of people say to me also, we started unschooling and my kids can do whatever they like. So they're choosing not to do anything. I feel find it hard to believe that a child won't do anything, but maybe not do what the parents feel is valuable.

[00:19:58] Sue Elvis: Maybe, [00:20:00] they're watching a lot of TV on YouTube, whatever, and that's not what the parent has in mind. so that's a problem. And then the parents take away that choice. And tighten up, take away the freedom and go back to where they were.

[00:20:20] Sandra Dodd: So the parents, in almost every case I've ever seen like that the parents didn't understand unschooling, they hadn't deschooled very well.

[00:20:26] Sandra Dodd: They didn't know what math could be outside of a page of calculations. They didn't know that they're, not wise to the value of going to a movie and telling someone what you saw at the movie, what happened, that's, that, that's a valuable part of language arts, of learning to analyze literature, to communicate all that you can look, you can see all the value in those things.

[00:20:54] Sandra Dodd: If you can look at it with eyes that are, that have stepped away from the school long enough [00:21:00] to see those things in a non schooly way, to see the essence of what language study or language learning can involve that isn't writing a book report. Because we, know what looks like school, because that's easy for the teachers to grade.

[00:21:17] Sandra Dodd: I shouldn't say easy, but, it's doable that the teachers can take this pile of papers, go through, sort, tell, the kids who has the best grade and the middle grade and the worst grade. So unschoolers are free from all that. We have freedom from homework maybe, that sort of thing. The things that the children didn't like or the parents didn't like about school schedules, getting up early, uniforms, whatever it is, fees, having to wait till everyone eats lunch, and then it's only half an hour and it wasn't very good food.

[00:21:48] Sandra Dodd: all those things that people are sad about when they're in school or when they leave and they think back. So you're liberated from that. You're free from that now that you've stepped away, now that you've [00:22:00] been rescued from this situation. Now what? So it's that from that point. That new unschoolers or unschoolers who are trying to get good at it, who are getting, trying to get better at it, their kids are getting older and they wanna learn some new tricks, some new solidifying practices and ideas.

[00:22:17] Sandra Dodd: I think it helps very much to step away from the idea of freedom and toward rich, enriching life and having choices, helping kids practice making choices. Because I, people my age, who went to school like I did sometimes didn't have a lot of choices. They were told when and where for everything. Even when they're almost 18 and then they hop off to university, some of 'em go as far away as they can and then they do all the things that their parents didn't let 'em do.

[00:22:46] Sandra Dodd: So there, it's, there's some wild freedom that has hurt a lot of people. It's now I, don't have to go to bed. Now I can drink. Now I can smoke pot. Now I can run around and be wild and stupid and loud. It's not [00:23:00] helpful. It's better to let little kids practice with some loud, and then say, okay, listen, what happens now that you're 10 and you're being really loud?

[00:23:08] Sandra Dodd: Did you disturb anybody's sleep? And are you scaring the neighbors? You're making dogs bark, in a little kid way you can practice with seeing the consequences of all those sorts of choices. Probably not smoking pot when they're 10, but It's like practice with harmless things and let them get the idea of when I'm making a decision about whether to drink, where to drink, how much to drink, what are the factors?

[00:23:38] Sandra Dodd: What are the options? Cecilia said, what? So what am I considering and why and how? And and if they've been in those kinds of conversations since they were young, they'll already be really good at knowing. I've seen my kids when they were teens talk other kids down from stupid ideas, just calmly.

[00:23:57] Sandra Dodd: Not in a, that's a stupid idea, but it's [00:24:00] yeah, but you know that, I don't think that's a good idea. We might not get invited back or that's not legal. And what if the police come and, or whatever it is, just minor reminders that there are other people in other, factors and laws and realities in the world.

[00:24:17] Sandra Dodd: I've seen it, I've seen it in other families too, because the parents practiced with them saying, yes, but wait, maybe we can do this. Let's think it through.

[00:24:27] Cecilie Conrad: I think an important thing you're pointing at, Sandra, oh, louder. Louder. I think an important thing you're pointing at Sandra when you put a little alarm next to the word freedom, is if you choose to unschool and you have this word, freedom is. your guiding star, you risk letting go too much too fast basically before you, you are ready, before you stop to think about it.

[00:24:58] Cecilie Conrad: And you also [00:25:00] risk having this ideal but no real solid ground to stand on. Yeah. And

[00:25:09] Cecilie Conrad: I understand how that can happen and I understand how it looks, when you're at the beginning and you look at those who are a few steps further down the road. I think it is very important. Again, we've talked about it before to talk about parental responsibility. I do think we are all born with our innate freedom, that taking away the right to make your own choices.

[00:25:43] Cecilie Conrad: Do what feels right from other people, including our children. It's something we have to stop and think about. Why am I telling my child to do or not do this thing? And you said before, Sue something about making the right choices. And I also have a little bit of hesitation with using that [00:26:00] language because who is to who am I to say that something is the right choice, not the wrong choice.

[00:26:07] Cecilie Conrad: I think an important, very important thing to think about when we unschool and when we have this guiding star of freedom or we have this ideal of freedom and this freedom word is flowing around, is leveled parenting. That we are not authoritarian. That if we have a deep respect for our children and the deep respect for their existence, basically.

[00:26:36] Cecilie Conrad: They are here and they are very dependent on us when they come. They're a hundred percent dependent in the beginning. And then this ability to handle yourself, it grows over the years with our modern society, you get maybe well quite far into your twenties before you really, you can sustain your own life.

[00:26:58] Cecilie Conrad: For some people [00:27:00] it's, like that if you do university, it's a lot of years of being dependent. And we shouldn't take advantage of that. We should take our responsibility around that. It's my responsibility to take care of them. I chose more or less to, put them into this world and, now it's my responsibility to, to hold that space for quite a lot of years. So I find it personally very important to.

[00:27:30] Cecilie Conrad: To have a leveled relationship with them, that I do respect them and I do listen to their opinions and I do try to see them as they are and how they grow with all their nuances and their personalities and needs and, passions so that they can unfold. If I have an idea, and I do have a lot of ideas about what is the right choice, I do, I have strong values and strong opinions, but [00:28:00] I'm also willing to listen if it's not right for them.

[00:28:04] Cecilie Conrad: And I have noticed, by talking to people from all over the world and by traveling, and I'm not trying to frame myself as any kind of perfect at all. I made my big load of mistakes. But I think I do come from a culture with a very leveled relationship between adults and children. I noticed when we were discussing the Danish way of parenting and with a few other conversations about people who have researched parenting in different cultures.

[00:28:36] Cecilie Conrad: So I think this is, if there's a takeaway, if you're on the beginning stage of, on schooling and you, sorry, and you have this freedom idea, maybe freedom for the children comes from not just letting go completely telling them they can eat and sleep whenever and whatever, and, just sit back in [00:29:00] the sofa and try to shut up and not interfere.

[00:29:04] Cecilie Conrad: And I think that's, what Sandra is talking about. Too much problem, but learn to have this leveled relation and this, these leveled conversations where you get to have opinions, but they are not more important than the opinions the kids have. things, they know things. We're having this conversation about the situation and, there is this misunderstanding in mainstream parenting that I'm the parent, because I said, so it's a good argument for a lot of parents and it's actually a shit argument.

[00:29:44] Cecilie Conrad: So if you, if that's your, the, your punchline, then maybe you're getting it wrong. But if you're not saying so, if you're sitting back in the sofa sipping it and choosing, oh, I'm an [00:30:00] unschooler, so there's no, I said, so I have nothing to say in the, I said so, and that's the other end of the pendulum.

[00:30:06] Cecilie Conrad: And that's too much and or too little. And I hope I made my point because

[00:30:13] Sandra Dodd: now I, you, talked about right choices, but I never do not about the right choice. There are better choices. So given a choice, there's a whole range of op of possibilities. And it's probably not right or perfect, but there can be better.

[00:30:31] Sandra Dodd: And so some people have said, you're the one who's gonna say what's better. It's no, you and your kids are gonna say, what's better? Maybe your neighbors or the police are gonna say, what's better? Try to keep your noise in your own house. That would be better. Sometimes you can tell better and it's just better in the moment.

[00:30:45] Sandra Dodd: It's better in that, in, in under those circumstances. There's some times when you can go out in the woods and yell as loud as you want to, and there are other times it might not be a good idea for one reason or another. there's some baby birds trying to learn to fly that you don't wanna [00:31:00] scare them onto the ground.

[00:31:01] Sandra Dodd: They're just, there are so many considerations and gradually from the time kids are young. If parents can learn to see those things and share them with their kids, that makes it better. There's some criticism that is made of homeschoolers. Sometimes it's criticism of families that are doing school at home.

[00:31:19] Sandra Dodd: Who are teaching and having, their own schoolish lives, and outsiders will say, then the children might only or can only learn a subset of what the parents know. That might be true if the parents are keeping the kids away from books and the internet and other people, but it's, a criticism that makes sense in a case when the parents are trying to isolate their children, trying to teach them a certain small set of information.

[00:31:49] Sandra Dodd: They don't want them to know about evolution. They don't want them to know about whatever it might be, different politics than the parents agree with, or different religion than the parents agree with. And so that may [00:32:00] be true with freedom, though it is very true that the parents can only give their children a subset of the freedom the parents have.

[00:32:07] Sandra Dodd: You can't really share it equally with them because you have duties and obligations legally, morally, ethically, that the children don't have.

[00:32:16] Sandra Dodd: Part of accepting that you have rights within that, assuming you do, assuming you still do, because people can lose their rights. then it's good for the parents to remember that they need to keep their children somewhat contained and informed, and I don't wanna say controlled, they need to be aware of where their children are.

[00:32:44] Sandra Dodd: If it's winter, they need to be wearing warm clothes. If it's summer, they shouldn't be wearing two warm clothes. They need to have shoes that work. And the government expects that of you. Your neighbors expect that of you, your, parents, your the kids' grandparents expect that of you. And not unreasonably.

[00:32:59] Sandra Dodd: [00:33:00] People expect that parents will be taking care of their kids. And so that's that curtails freedom, reality laws. Social and legal expectations. There used to be some groups in the United States. I was having fun with this. I was going to conferences too, but there would be some families that sort of lived on the conference circuit and they, that's where their friends were.

[00:33:26] Sandra Dodd: That's fine. They loved the other unschooling parents as adult friends. That's fine. It's all fine. But sometimes people would go a little overboard and they would act like and talk like that. There was an unschooling world. in the unschooling world, in the unschooling community among Unschoolers, Holly was probably 12 when she said, what are they talking about, mom?

[00:33:49] Sandra Dodd: There's no unschooling world. They're all living in the real world. But some of the adults had gone freedom crazy and forgotten about that. They thought that maybe if the unschool other unschoolers [00:34:00] agreed with what they were doing, that was just peachy keen as though there was some overriding unschooling government that could save them, that they could appeal to.

[00:34:07] Sandra Dodd: And there's not. So all unschoolers are living in the regular real world. Not only that, but you're gonna take a little more criticism than you would have if your kids are in school, if you were doing everything more traditionally. People will be hyper aware of how your kids act, of how you are taking care of your children.

[00:34:26] Sandra Dodd: If somebody whose kids are in school isn't, sends them with clothes that aren't very clean a few times, or they haven't had a haircut for a long time, or whatever it might be that other people notice. it's gonna be 10 times worse if they're unschoolers. People are just, it's gonna show because there people are looking at you to see if it's cool, if it's nice if they might wanna consider that.

[00:34:45] Sandra Dodd: So that can't be helped. Anytime anybody's in a minority group that's getting attention, for whatever reason, they become representatives of that group. And if they're doing a really bad job, it reflects on the others. [00:35:00] So that's been, but it also

[00:35:01] Cecilie Conrad: reflects on themselves. it, we are just more vulnerable in many ways.

[00:35:07] Cecilie Conrad: If, we know, we all know that we are being looked at and judged. everyone are being looked at and judged. That's how we assess social life, all of us. There's nothing actually intrinsic wrong with it. It's just a question of how aware you are of your own judgment. And so whether it becomes an unfair situation and a ridiculous situation, or just basic.

[00:35:34] Cecilie Conrad: Assessment, unschooled families are being looked at with scrutinizing eyes in a different way. And we've been around this topic before, how there can just be no ketchup on your t-shirt and you cannot have that, hole in your jeans and you need to brush your hair and do things because your public [00:36:00] appearance is reflecting back on our lifestyle choice.

[00:36:03] Cecilie Conrad: Not just the community of unschoolers, but our family. And we are being judged in a more harsh way. It is what it is, but I think it is so for everyone that we have to be aware of how we present and carry ourselves in the social life and in society. That there will be a context. There's no one schooling world where.

[00:36:32] Cecilie Conrad: Everyone understand what you're doing or why you're doing and there's no judgment. And actually to be fair, to the extent there is an unschooling world, the resonance box of all the other unschoolers, there's a lot of judgment going on there as well. So we have to somehow, how always carry ourselves in a way where we are aware of what's going on this.

[00:36:59] Cecilie Conrad: And I've [00:37:00] seen it too, Sandra, how you can see unschooling families let go completely and teenagers in their pajamas in the street with the dreadlocks at three o'clock in the afternoon. and whatever, that in and of itself might be fine, but it just brings upon the family a lot of social judgment that is not necessary.

[00:37:26] Cecilie Conrad: It's not necessary. It's where they are.

[00:37:28] Sandra Dodd: When people used to say, I have the right to wear what I want. I can do what I want. I'd say, are you gonna act the same way at a wedding as you will at a funeral?

[00:37:36] Cecilie Conrad: And just let that happen. do you have the right, but do you really want to? That's the thing.

[00:37:41] Cecilie Conrad: yes, I have the right to be naked right now if I wanted to, but do I want to?

[00:37:45] Sandra Dodd: No, there are laws against it. You might else people off on social

[00:37:50] Cecilie Conrad: media, there's laws against it. But for the time of the recording, I could maybe, yeah, you

[00:37:55] Sandra Dodd: live in crazy wild Europe where people can run around naked all the time.

[00:37:58] Sandra Dodd: Yes. I think there are [00:38:00] just a couple of beaches in France, aren't there?

[00:38:02] Cecilie Conrad: No, I think I can be, I actually, legally in my country, I can't be naked everywhere all the time. As long as I'm not offending anyone

[00:38:10] Sandra Dodd: at a funeral or a wedding, I feel offended.

[00:38:12] Cecilie Conrad: I have to put on clothes for the record. I don't do that. I don't like being naked.

[00:38:16] Cecilie Conrad: One of my childhood trauma things from my crazy Scandinavian hippie years. I was born in the mid seventies. Was that we had to be naked when they took out the pool in the summer in my kindergarten. And I brought my swimwear because they said they were taking out the pool and I was not allowed to wear the swimwear because kids had to be all natural and cool about being naked.

[00:38:42] Cecilie Conrad: And I told the kindergarten teachers, I'm not doing that. I don't wanna be naked around other people. I, can be naked at home. I'm not naked in the kindergarten. I must have been something like five years old. And, they kept pushing and I kept pushing back and I was actually, [00:39:00] what's the word? There was this penalty that if I was not taking off my clothes to be naked, that day in the kindergarten, in the playground with the pool insisting on wearing my swimwear, I couldn't go outside.

[00:39:15] Cecilie Conrad: I had to stay inside. You failed all alone, all day failed. What you failed nudity. I've failed nudity in kindergarten at five, and I've actually been very, I'm very Scandinavian and I'm not afraid of, the naked human body at all, but I've been very aware of this problem that there was this ideal, that it had to feel in a specific way to carry my body in a specific way.

[00:39:44] Cecilie Conrad: When I was five, there was an ideal in society of about how that had to feel. And if I didn't feel it that way, I was failing. And I'm from a country where there's a lot of nakedness. People take their clothes off and run into the ocean, [00:40:00] for example, naked. That's quite normal. And if you don't feel like doing that, why don't you just bring your swimwear, it's fine.

[00:40:10] Sandra Dodd: Is Denmark one of the places where people will jump into freezing water and roll in the snow?

[00:40:17] Cecilie Conrad: we don't have a lot of snow, but we have a lot of winter bathing. And actually I'm cold dipping and it's not the reason for my pneumonia. I am cold dipping with the group that at the moment, and I will say, so it's not that cold, the tic sea at the moment.

[00:40:32] Cecilie Conrad: I don't know, maybe it's 14 degrees. It's actually not that cold. but people do wind debate here. And the problem when you do that, when you get out of the cold water into the cold weather, it's quite cold in Denmark is the wet clothes. If you're not wearing clothes, you get dry and warm quickly. But if you have to get out of something wet and there's the wind, and I understand why people do it naked.

[00:40:56] Cecilie Conrad: So anyway, I think I'm losing my point here [00:41:00] about freedom. How did we arrive at naked?

[00:41:04] Sandra Dodd: you said you had the freedom to be naked and I objected. So you're, you. Proven your point in an embarrassing way.

[00:41:12] Cecilie Conrad: No. So yeah. Okay. We, got distracted from the, from my childhood freedom to be naked, but not freedom to not be naked.

[00:41:21] Cecilie Conrad: Trauma I carry with me 45 years later. What I'm saying is basically we do have a lot of freedom to do whatever, but the thing is, do we want to execute that freedom and do we want to teach our children to mindlessly do whatever? And I think it's become almost in somes school communities and unschool talks.

[00:41:48] Cecilie Conrad: It's become this, like in my kindergarten there's this, there's a gold star for staying up until four in the morning. There's a gold star for going to bed before your 2-year-old [00:42:00] and, fall asleep. because you've let go completely of bedtime. There's a gold star for letting them have candy for breakfast and, or not have breakfast because they don't wake up until three in the afternoon.

[00:42:14] Cecilie Conrad: And at that point they're having a pizza, whatever. And I am, I can be judgmental around food choices, but what I'm trying to say about food choices here is just why, am I a better unschooler if I'm not telling my children? if you go to bed at the same time as everyone else, we all get more sleep.

[00:42:39] Cecilie Conrad: And I do know that you're working on a running challenge and the running happens in the morning. So if you can't get up, how will you complete that goal that you set? why am I. Why am I not a real unschooler if I'm telling them I think it's a [00:43:00] good idea to speak five languages, not just one, but you're

[00:43:03] Sandra Dodd: conversa, you're conversationally reminding them of the factors involved in their choices.

[00:43:09] Sandra Dodd: So that's different. Also, you guys are living in a camper sometimes, so you all have to sleep or wake up at the same time. But people in big houses do have more weight leeway about that. So that's, but that's another factor, how much room do we have? is there a way that the people who are awake can go in the kitchen, make a lot of noise, making breakfast and not wake up everybody in the house?

[00:43:30] Sandra Dodd: So that's dependent on the size of the house and everyone, every, unschooling family has those factors to consider. I have had many over the years, many unschoolers will come and say, I have the right to unschool. It's not if you're in Germany, I have the right to unschool any way I want to.

[00:43:51] Sandra Dodd: Not if you're in Pennsylvania, so let's, if you're talking about, I have the right too, it's according to which government, I don't believe that people are [00:44:00] born with any rights. People are born in different places. They're born out of different parents to, a very poor baby born to alcoholic parents who are fighting with each other and probably won't stay together for a year, does not have the same rights as a healthy child, born to wealthy, intelligent, happy, kind people.

[00:44:20] Sandra Dodd: And if another government comes and takes over, they all lose all their rights. I don't, it's, I know that part of the, whole American mythology is that all men are created equal and born with an inalienable rights and all that stuff, but it's, poetry, it's inspiring language. It's not fact

[00:44:41] Sandra Dodd: I recited that. maybe everybody should have the right. But circumstances prevent people having those rights.

[00:44:51] Sandra Dodd: I've been thinking, I don't think everyone ha should have the right people who are child abusers lose their rights.

[00:44:57] Sue Elvis: No, Born with rights.

[00:44:59] Cecilie Conrad: I'm [00:45:00] saying because if you're a drug abuser, I know that's a very complicated

[00:45:05] Sue Elvis: you, do things that, that you end up having your rights taken away.

[00:45:13] Sue Elvis: But that's a choice, isn't it?

[00:45:15] Cecilie Conrad: No. Usually it's maybe some points of choices actually. If you're in Germany and you say, I have the right to unschool, you do, but then you have to leave Germany. Yeah. if you make the choice of staying in Germany, you can't homeschool. Oh, it's very complicated to homeschool.

[00:45:31] Cecilie Conrad: It's done. I know a lot of German families who homeschool, if you stay in Sweden It's impossible. But you have the right to leave as well. You don't have the right to live in Germany as a legal resident and unschool, but you do have whatever we can also, and born with you can make

[00:45:52] Sue Elvis: the choice to leave because the unschooling bit or the homeschooling is more so important to [00:46:00] you that you would rather live somebody somewhere else than your own country so that you can do it.

[00:46:06] Sue Elvis: And I've known people who do that, but it's not a, an option that everybody will choose. But what I find really interesting, Sandra, as we've spoken about this a few times, or I've heard you speak about this a few times, about how we don't all have, we're not all in a position to unschool and so many times.

[00:46:32] Sue Elvis: I've had emails or messages from people who say I live in Germany, or I we're a double income family and I can't give up work or whatever. There's a reason, but they still one-to-one school. And I've always felt that pressure to help and almost like I am in a privileged position here. 'cause we are doing, we have the freedom to do [00:47:00] live the way we want to live within those constraints of law and other people around us.

[00:47:09] Sue Elvis: and I've always sat there and tried to come up with some ideas how these people can have a similar lifestyle to me when they don't have the same living circumstances. And I found it really refreshing, Sandra, and freeing that you say, some people can't. And she, it's almost I want to please everybody.

[00:47:36] Sue Elvis: I wanna solve everybody's problems. Whereas you are more realistic and you will say. Some people don't have the freedom to do that. yeah, I found that, something to think about for me. That, he just wants to help everybody and I can't,

[00:47:57] Cecilie Conrad: but sometimes it is, we all live in [00:48:00] a context, and that's your, one of your points, Sandra, there's laws around us and there's a social field around us.

[00:48:07] Cecilie Conrad: There's culture around us. We have physical bodies. We have abilities and inabilities. We have forces and, draw things we can't do. We have stories, we have different levels of income and, there are so many factors to our specific context, giving us a specific set of options and. I do think you're right that this freedom word, which is free.

[00:48:35] Cecilie Conrad: what does it really mean? and what kind of freedom are we looking for? From what? And to what are we doing with that freedom? That's the first thing you have to think about. If you feel you have some freedom, then okay, that's not, that has no content, that has no, there's no point to that before you stop making that's sustainable.

[00:48:54] Sandra Dodd: You can't just, it's not when the kid leaves school, but you can't be excited about that same freedom for 10 more [00:49:00] years. No.

[00:49:01] Cecilie Conrad: Now freedom for

[00:49:01] Sandra Dodd: what?

[00:49:02] Cecilie Conrad: And also, you have this freedom, but the really interesting question is what are you going to do with it? And then we arrive at the choices right away.

[00:49:11] Cecilie Conrad: So I, honor your point very much. I also think you are saying something really important, and maybe we have a navigation here to, to not, I don't know, be too judgmental or, send the wrong message. You're very good at navigating that, Sandra, but really. If you start unschooling, you start reading about unschooling and you want to have this freedom, maybe you want to be a radical unschooler and you've seen these posts about bedtime and food and going to the beach and there's no curriculum, no demands, no anything from the parents.

[00:49:52] Cecilie Conrad: It creates a lot of uncertainty for the children. If you have no opinion and you have no structure and you have [00:50:00] no you, you offer no guidance. And I think one of the really big problems with that as is you do have these opinions. If you haven't deschooled enough, you still have these opinions. You're just not sharing them.

[00:50:17] Cecilie Conrad: So you're actually being false or secretive around your children. And if you de, you talked about

[00:50:22] Sandra Dodd: the competitive nature of groups of unschooling families together. Where they're trying to one up each other. It's not healthy. It's not healthy. they shouldn't be concerned with what other unschooling parents think of them.

[00:50:37] Sandra Dodd: And they might be false, as you say about it. They should be looking at the peace within their families. are the parents getting along or the, children sleeping well? Are people feeling safe in their own homes? Those things are what's important, not whose kids stayed up the latest. I know that's just silly, [00:51:00] but the, I have heard people in the United States say this unschooling is legal in every state, like somebody who's in a dis in a discussion and somebody asks oh, I'm in Missouri.

[00:51:11] Sandra Dodd: What do I need to do to unschool? The answer is always find some other unschoolers where you live and ask them, look at the laws, but then ask some people who are actually doing it, how they're managing to get around. the weird looking requirements. do they find unschooling supervising teachers and stuff like that?

[00:51:31] Sandra Dodd: there are ways people have found ways in every state. I can't speak for Canada, but in Canada, some of the provinces have stricter rules than others too. But it's not the right answer. It's not a good answer for anybody to come into the discussion and go, you can do what you wanna do, because unschooling is legal in every state.

[00:51:47] Sandra Dodd: I don't think there's any state law that, that mentions unschooling in a positive way there. I know there's one that mentions it as something not to do, so that's made unschooling illegal there. But what it really means [00:52:00] is the people who wrote that don't understand unschooling and the person who wants to unschool needs to understand it extra much in that area.

[00:52:07] Sandra Dodd: So wherever there's a prejudice against it or the rules are trying to fence unschoolers out and away, the unschoolers really need to understand it. Two very sad things have happened to me. Same thing, but two different people, two different states. I would get a phone call at my house and somebody, I would say, oh, I'm in, your, one of your discussions, unschooling discussions or always learning, and I was wondering, if I pay your way, could you come to X town in X state where I would didn't live?

[00:52:40] Sandra Dodd: And because I'm in a custody hearing or a divorce proceeding. So both of 'em needed to go to court, wanted me to come the next day Oh. And tell the judge that unschooling works. Okay. At that point, all I could have told them is, unschooling doesn't work in your family. You're getting divorced. [00:53:00] You can't agree about custody.

[00:53:02] Sandra Dodd: No judge who went to school for 16, 20 years is going to say, yeah, that seems like a good idea not to send the kids to school. the dad wants 'em to go to school. The mom doesn't want 'em to. So let's go with the mom. Okay? That's not gonna happen. It's never gonna happen. So they can't say, I have the right to unschool or unschooling is legal.

[00:53:22] Sandra Dodd: That doesn't, that's not the point at all. And unschooling is not legal. Unschooling is doable, unschooling is possible, but you have to really know what you're talking about. So if somebody doesn't know what she's talking about enough to persuade her husband, how's she gonna persuade social workers and judges?

[00:53:39] Sandra Dodd: And I've never been trying to be mean about that. I've been trying to help people. I've tried trying to remind them, if you wanna do this, it's a family activity. So the parents have to both understand it. Usually one understands it better. First, I used to count I, it's up to 18 or 20 now. But I used to know the exact number of [00:54:00] families I knew where the husband found it first and tried to persuade the wife.

[00:54:04] Sandra Dodd: Not always successfully, hundreds, thousands of moms find it and then try to persuade the husband. Some of them succeed. Some of them fail. So if the mom decides or is, gets the rhetoric from people around her that she has the right to do it, that it's legal, that she was born with this, right?

[00:54:20] Sandra Dodd: That no one can take her rights away from her. That she has freedom. It's a good way to get divorced. And once you're divorced, unschooling is li very likely to end. And people used to say, you can't say that, but the, examples they were giving where unschooling survived a divorce were the husband allowed it or the wife or whichever parent was leaving for whatever reason, said, okay, yeah, keep unschooling.

[00:54:46] Sandra Dodd: Sometimes that lasted a year or two. I know I knew one family very well and they got divorced and the husband said, no, this is great. Keep doing it. But he got a girlfriend. The girlfriend was a teacher. With [00:55:00] apologies to young viewers if we have any. She was his sole sexual provider. He was gonna let her have her way.

[00:55:06] Sandra Dodd: So she said, this is wrong. This is stupid. I can't believe you agreed to it. What are you people thinking? And he insisted then that the kids go to school and I there, there's nothing to be done at that point. You can't control. So people think, when they, sometimes, especially women, especially younger women, think that if they get divorced, that means like their husband disappears from the earth as though he never existed.

[00:55:31] Sandra Dodd: And the in-laws on that side also are canceled out. She'll never see or hear from them again. It'll be over, oh no, the in-laws used to be nice to you because you were married to their son all of a sudden they don't like you much anymore. And then they don't remember that potentially both of those ex-spouses are going to get new partners.

[00:55:50] Sandra Dodd: And now it used to be that two people needed to agree on what was gonna happen with the kids. Now it's four. They, people don't think about that when they're being [00:56:00] cavalier and reckless with their relationships. So I've been, I've taken a lot of criticism over the years by saying, they're saying, Sandra says single parents can't unschool.

[00:56:09] Sandra Dodd: It's I never said that. I said, if you're in a marriage in a, an intact family that has agreed on unschooling, and you're unschooling, because both those parents agree once that agreement is broken, probably somebody's gonna be mad. Probably two people are gonna be mad. And then, you start on the spite and the arguing and the tussling and the tug of war that's not good for kids.

[00:56:34] Sandra Dodd: So that's, beyond the scope of unschooling, it's just that it can fail. People can lose their rights. And it's, so that's, even without committing a crime, it's not a crime to get divorced, but you can still lose, your right to maybe even have your, have custody of your children.

[00:56:49] Sandra Dodd: I've seen unschooling parents lose custody because they argued too hard, too long, too fast, too unreasonably. The judge gave the kids to the other parent [00:57:00] wholly and required that they go to school. 'cause that can happen even without, custody hearings separate, in the divorce proceeding. It can be Yes, this. And the kids will go to school and once the state says it, both parents have lost their rights. The legality to home, to unschool for that family is gone. And that's real and that, and so there are freedoms that people do not have. They can't just run around and naked or not, they can't run around and go, look how free I am.

[00:57:29] Sandra Dodd: I'm so free. Because there are a whole lot of people around them to go, you're not that free. So that I'm concerned with, people over overreaching and overestimating and over bragging their freedom because they can lose it. That might. And how

[00:57:45] Sue Elvis: about if we go, straight back to not even starting and the mother, which is usually the case.

[00:57:53] Sue Elvis: Unschooling becomes so important to the mother that she's willing to [00:58:00] put her relationship with her partner, her spouse, secondary to the unschooling of her children, and will, end up in that situation that it's unschool or nothing. And then really, if it's going to, the relationship is much more important, as you said, unschooling will, won't be of any benefit to what their children in that situation, as a lot of people say to me tell me about your husband.

[00:58:28] Sue Elvis: He's a school teacher. How did you persuade him to unschool? Why would he unschool? What can I do for my husband? He doesn't, he's not in favor of unschooling and. Again, it's that case of, alright how do I help? But maybe there isn't a choice there in the first place that relationship is more, more important than making the decision to unschool.

[00:58:54] Sue Elvis: And without that, trust between the parents [00:59:00] it's never gonna work anyway. But, and then that made me think about how sometimes when we're talking about unschooling or not met so much as maybe, but unschoolers, that it's so much better than anything else that people can feel they're gonna fail if, they don't unschool that there isn't another choice really that is as good, there's no better choice for their children.

[00:59:25] Sue Elvis: And so it's always second best to put the kids in school or to do some other form of homeschooling. And that may be is a problem as well because. You feel if, we all, if putting say, putting down people who don't unschool that that doesn't, that's not healthy for anybody. Is it that, that the second choice, the choice of not unschooling is seen?

[00:59:57] Sue Elvis: It's not easy to accept for some people [01:00:00] that they don't have that freedom to do it. I don't know, I dunno where I'm going with that one, but I

[01:00:08] Cecilie Conrad: think it's, we are back to the everything is contextual. What, is wrong with my mic here? Is it not? Can you hear me?

[01:00:16] Sandra Dodd: I think you're leaning over on, I think you just covered it up by leaning over.

[01:00:19] Sandra Dodd: Okay.

[01:00:19] Cecilie Conrad: Try again. I think it puts us back to the point that everything is contextual. also the, you make a choice and that is basically like walking through a door into a new hallway with a new set of options, a new set of choices that can be made. And this holds true in on all the levels of this.

[01:00:44] Cecilie Conrad: And, if you insist so much in unschooling that it sacrifices basic other values in your life, maybe you have to stop and think of the format. how important is [01:01:00] this? I also would stop. I understand your feelings, Sue, that you want to help when people ask you for help. That's a basic human nature thing, and it's, a very agreeable first response.

[01:01:15] Cecilie Conrad: But if someone tells me, how do I persuade my husband? I'm actually right. They're stopping like. Do you want to persuade your husband? Really? what happened to his, and now we're back to that lingo and might be, actually we have to work with that. What about his rights? What about he's the, father, he's the other par, your two parents.

[01:01:42] Cecilie Conrad: Here you are the mom. You think you're right. And the idea that you want to unschool your children and you have to unschool them, and that's the best idea. But the other parent disagrees. He's the other parent. He has the right to have opinions on [01:02:00] how to raise his own children. You don't want to persuade.

[01:02:04] Cecilie Conrad: You want to stay within your relationship, stay within the respect and the love. There's a reason you married this guy and there's a cooperation going on. You have these children together and the challenge is to agree upon how do we navigate that? Just like how do we navigate the house that we have?

[01:02:24] Cecilie Conrad: How together, how clean does it have to be? How much money do we put in to maintaining it? It's living as a couple is a lot of navigating cooperation. I'm not persuading, I hope my husband to anything. We have conversations about how we want to live our life and how we can cooperate doing that. So if you want your husband to agree on unschooling, you have to make a good case about it.

[01:02:52] Cecilie Conrad: But maybe also listen to his worries and his ideas about how [01:03:00] his children are supposed to grow up and what he feels is right.

[01:03:04] Sandra Dodd: I don't think persuasion is a bad word. I think pressure force manipulation, those are the bad words. Persuasion is okay. It's not immoral, but if you're just gonna turn away from the kids and work on persuading your husband, that's missing the point.

[01:03:19] Sandra Dodd: Also, one thing that people have asked sometimes is, what can I say to my in-laws? Because they just, they don't understand it. They can't see it. They're not willing to read a book. I used to say, you could say, we're gonna try this for now, and if it doesn't work, we'll put the kids in school. Yeah. Because that gives them hope that you'll fail and the kids will go to school.

[01:03:40] Sandra Dodd: It also gives you the opportunity to make it work. Make it work well. But some people say, oh, it doesn't matter what my husband thinks. It doesn't matter what my in-laws think. I have the right, it's legal. that same sort of clinging to freedom, looking at the world through falsely freedom colored glasses.

[01:03:56] Sandra Dodd: And they're not also [01:04:00] re reminding themselves or. Wagering with themselves that they need to make it work right, or they need to make it put their kids back in school. If they can't do better than school, then the kids should be in a better situation if school is better than what you're providing. So it could be the same with a husband.

[01:04:16] Sandra Dodd: If the husband's going, I don't know what you guys are talking about. I have to go to work now. So he's not there all the time, like the mom is with the kids. So he doesn't see them learning really cool stuff. he comes home, they're tired or whatever, he doesn't, he's not there. It's like missing a child's first steps.

[01:04:34] Sandra Dodd: their first words. So he might miss the first time they read or did math or, understood something scientific that they could explain to the mom. The mom and I didn't know that. That's cool. Which happens all the time in a, in good unschooling situations. So if the parent, if the, mom can even say to the husband, the first few months, the first year, let me try it.

[01:04:56] Sandra Dodd: Let's see how it works. If it doesn't work, we'll do something [01:05:00] different. Then the kids in the situation will be persuasive. Not the mom's noise, not the mom's words, trying to persuade him, but he might be persuaded. He might have his mind changed by seeing it work. So the mom needs to understand it well enough to make it work.

[01:05:15] Sandra Dodd: I

[01:05:16] Sue Elvis: just say that a family doesn't have the choice of unschooling for whatever reason. Do you think that there are certain principles maybe that can be adopted by anyone regardless of whether we say somebody's unschooling or not, so that even if you send your kids to school, or you are a little bit more formal in the homeschooling, you can still.

[01:05:46] Sue Elvis: I build up an atmosphere of learning at home and encourage curiosity and, respect the members of the family and love [01:06:00] unconditionally, all these other things regardless of the method of learning that we can partner our kids even if they go to school. So it's not ideal, maybe not what we as mothers would like if our spouses aren't in agreement.

[01:06:19] Sue Elvis: But are there things that we can bring into the family that will benefit everybody? regardless of the choice that we have to make regardless. Regarding education, I.

[01:06:35] Sandra Dodd: Yes, lots and I just tell people, steal the good parts. Take the parts you like. There's a saying from 12 step groups that's take what you like and need, take what you need and leave the wrist.

[01:06:47] Sandra Dodd: But then the problem for me and for unschooling, which I have defended for so long, is sometimes a family that can't unschool fail to unschool or can't for some other [01:07:00] reason, wasn't really able to give it a good try, will say, if unschooling is, giving your kids choices, then my kids chose school and so we're still unschoolers.

[01:07:10] Sandra Dodd: And it's oh, no, Take what you need. Leave the rest, but you don't get to be unschoolers. And they're like, you don't know an unschooling. yeah, but there isn't such a thing as unschooling. If there's not, how will anybody aim for that? If just anything in the world who says it's unschooling is, then no one can learn to do it better.

[01:07:29] Sandra Dodd: If there's no direction, no parameters, no ideal. No.

[01:07:35] Sandra Dodd: Oh God. What would it be? I don't know, like, the dictionary illustration, like Plato's ideal. Unschooler Plato didn't have one 'cause there was no unschooling 'cause there was no school. But there needs to be a direction. And so the problem is then it comes down to people being competitive about what they think are the rules of unschooling.

[01:07:56] Sandra Dodd: And that's not a healthy way to be, but to say anything is [01:08:00] unschooling, if I say I'm unschooling, seems to be that people think unschooling is so cool that they'll cheat and lie to claim to be an unschooler in a way. from the point of view, if they're gonna still wanna hang around the unschooling discussions and give advice to other unschoolers, even though their kids are in school and they failed to get it.

[01:08:19] Sandra Dodd: maybe they, some failed. Some did fail to get it. Some failed to understand it. Even though there were a lot of people offering them information and ideas. They just said, Nope, I don't have to do that. It's, I, it's, I have the freedom to do what I wanna do. It's confusing because it's very philosophical and maybe a little bit spiritual.

[01:08:36] Sandra Dodd: It's in those, it's in those areas that you don't give a checklist. You don't test. It's like wiggle until you are comfortable with it. Wiggle until you're wiggle toward it, until your kids are calm and at peace and learning all the time. Now. That's it. That's unschooling. Your kids are calm and at peace and learning all the time.

[01:08:54] Sandra Dodd: How did you get there? People got their different ways, but they were still aiming toward that, toward [01:09:00] learning in natural, painless, sweet family ways. It's hard. It's not easy. People who wanna understand unschooling and come around in early discussions, I think it takes at least a year. Very few people get it in less than a year.

[01:09:15] Sandra Dodd: That's not what people are used to. So if somebody went to you, Sue, and said, my husband's not as cool as yours is, so help me, give me the 25 word speech that I can say to my husband that will change his world. You can't, people are more used to joining a church and getting baptized and now you're in, you're as in that church as the people who have been there for five generations because you came, you said, I wanna follow Jesus and you got baptized, or whatever kind of religion it is, but you can join.

[01:09:43] Sandra Dodd: Somebody says, ding, you're in and you're in. They think unschooling iss like that, that if enough unschoolers said, ding, you're in. You're in. You're doing it. That's not how it works. Or they think that you're a vacuum cleaner salesman and they come and say, Sue, you have a vacuum cleaner. I want one just like yours, and that you'll provide that vacuum [01:10:00] cleaner.

[01:10:01] Sandra Dodd: It's not like that. It's something they need to build. That's harder probably to build than a vacuum cleaner because it takes years. It takes years. And a lot of tiny little adjustments to the parents' knowledge and expectation and response time, response rate, response style. So those kind of decisions, what am I gonna say, kid?

[01:10:25] Sandra Dodd: Just ask me an embarrassing question. What do I say? Those kind of decisions. The parents make dozens or hundreds a day. And to become a better unschooler, those decisions need to get incrementally better over the years until the parent is wise and patient. If they don't wanna become wise and patient, then how far will they get toward the ideal unschooling?

[01:10:49] Sandra Dodd: I've been volunteering to help people do this since 1990 and, 1991. 91, I'm thinking about kids ages. [01:11:00] And I was never wanting to help people do a half-ass job or to live a life of chaos or unhappiness or confusion. Why would I spend volunteer time doing that? That I, that would be mean, that would be hateful if I were to spend a lot of time telling people, yeah, whatever you do is as good as what anybody ever did.

[01:11:20] Sandra Dodd: Just, be free. Go be free. It's legal. That would be destructive. And although people have been frustrated with me and criticize me, what I've been trying to do is saying, let's tweak it toward peace and learning. And I even said that one time, if I have a choice and I don't, I can't decide which thing to do with the kids one day.

[01:11:39] Sandra Dodd: Sometimes there's agitation and un unrest. And so I go with something familiar and comforting, something they've done before. Let's just stay home and have comfort food. But sometimes, if all other things are equal and it's not a repair moment, then I go with what, what provides learning? What's new, what's different?

[01:11:57] Sandra Dodd: What? What's something they haven't seen? [01:12:00] And somebody who had been unschooling for quite a while said, what? I've never heard that. I've never heard anybody say that. You should choose things that provide learning. And I've thought, what have you been hearing? But it was a dad. They're not always in on all of the depth of the philosophy, but he had just mostly been hearing it can be a party be free if you're, living your learning, if they're learning.

[01:12:28] Sandra Dodd: And not that the parents could choose a learning experience. So that surprised me that somebody had been doing it for some years and wasn't considering learning as a legitimate option goal. Not a, not the, it is the goal, it's the purpose. But as a factor in decision making,

[01:12:48] Cecilie Conrad: should we go through the deal?

[01:12:49] Cecilie Conrad: It's also the risk of the word freedom. That's the reason you're hesitant and you should be. And we all should be with freedom, is the, leading star and, [01:13:00] the interest this competitive. How free does your family look? on these actually a bit random parameters of bedtime and food, and maybe gaming time and whatever.

[01:13:19] Cecilie Conrad: It can actually go quite wrong and become this weird thing unschooling. And if there's not enough deschooling going on at the same time, you have this very uncomfortable situation of parents who say that their children are free to do whatever they want, but they actually deep down want the kids to make some very specific choices.

[01:13:48] Cecilie Conrad: They're just not sharing what that choice is. And then we're back to that thing I've said before. We have this running joke. My now almost 20-year-old son is, and I, my first unschool [01:14:00] child that, you're free to do whatever you want as long as what you want is what I want you to want. We say that as joke, and because he can sometimes stop and if I ask him a question, what do you want?

[01:14:12] Cecilie Conrad: And he's And I know that hesitation is in his mind, the question, what do you want me to want? And, we are joking about it now because I made my mistakes in the early years and he knows that one, But way back when, I was asking that question, I still had an attachment to what kind of choice he was making.

[01:14:34] Cecilie Conrad: And I think it's just so much better as an unschooling family to be clear about what you want them to want. just say, I think the best choice right now would be to do A, but you have actually option of B and C as well. So what do you really feel? And then actually listen. So if they do choose B and C, you can't give them the option of B and C and not then allow it.

[01:14:59] Cecilie Conrad: And B, cool [01:15:00] with it just because I think it's the better choice to go and do a. But if all the kids are like, no, today B is actually what we find, right? Then I have to also work with that. And that would be my deschooling journey or maybe even a deschooling journey teaching me, oh, I shouldn't have given those three options because two of them suck.

[01:15:23] Cecilie Conrad: So I should have said, today we do this and I get to decide that. And I don't think that is not unschooling. Actually. Sometimes I'm just taking the lead and that's fair. I'm the adult now. My kids are old, but when they were smaller, that was fair enough. So I was just thinking we should wrap it up a little bit, but maybe with the focus on, actually I have two things.

[01:15:50] Cecilie Conrad: The most important being, what are we aiming for? We've talked a lot about what we're not aiming for and what the risks are and what, how not to [01:16:00] think. The other note I have is, why is it so cool and how do we avoid this? aiming for the coolness is not what we're aiming for. If we're trying to unschool.

[01:16:14] Cecilie Conrad: So what are we aiming for? How, do we aim when we start

[01:16:21] Cecilie Conrad: and I'm passing the torch?

[01:16:24] Sandra Dodd: when people first come, sometimes they say, what do we need to do? What? And then they say, how do we do that? And we can give them some ideas, but the real question that will help them more than going out and asking people what and how is why do you wanna do this? And so if it's because I wanna be cool, eh, it might not work well.

[01:16:49] Sandra Dodd: If it's because I think that I could give my children a very peaceful life of learning. That's great. That's great. I bet you could too. If the [01:17:00] focus is on having a peaceful family, having good relationships with your children, kindness, attention, all those positive things, that will lead to a good relationship, which will lead to easy learning.

[01:17:12] Sandra Dodd: But the parents, the mom, one of the parents at least whichever parent is discovering this and taking the lead, taking the responsibility to make it work well, needs to be mindful and aware that the choice that they make can make this succeed or fail, and to always move more toward what. Seems good about why, the move toward the reasons that you wanted to do this.

[01:17:40] Sandra Dodd: And I think it should be about learning, about creating a better environment than the child would've had in your real or imagined school vision, school image, but not to vilify school so much that the kid is afraid, scared to death if something happens and he has to go to school. Some don't do that.

[01:17:58] Sandra Dodd: Some parents have done that to [01:18:00] you. Where they say, even to the children, this is so cool. There's no other thing in the world that I would even consider. I will keep you home no matter what. that's about the parents' wishes and, imagination. It's not about the child's peace and learning.

[01:18:17] Sandra Dodd: So I think if the focus is on peace and learning, then they can be more calm and more acceptance and parents can get along better with each other better, with the kids, better with their other relatives, but the other relatives will be seeing peace and learning if it's really there.

[01:18:33] Cecilie Conrad: I think there is a point to be made about letting go as well, but also letting go of the idea about how unschooling looks. So if we're aiming in the beginning, also be thinking about peace and learning for the parents. So lead a peaceful life. Be in peace with [01:19:00] this. There's a lot in the beginning, a lot of worry and a lot of this feels radical and a lot of mindset change and a lot of awareness around the little child.

[01:19:17] Cecilie Conrad: Is he or she learning to read and is he or she learning the second language and. Is this math or not? And how do I know that they're leveled and all these things and it's all good. It's all, it takes some time for this school mindset to evaporate and try to be peaceful with ourselves. It's okay.

[01:19:44] Cecilie Conrad: It's okay. It doesn't look like cool. It just looks like an everyday life without school, and I'm not. Yeah, maybe an interesting question would be, is there a way to do it wrong in the [01:20:00] beginning? Maybe we are saying in this podcast that it's wrong to have that leading star of freedom and pretend to have no opinions on our children's choices and let go completely, whatever that means.

[01:20:17] Cecilie Conrad: That's the wrong approach in the beginning. Maybe it's a wrong approach, period. Is there any other wrong way to start?

[01:20:29] Sue Elvis: I have a note here that I made, the other day when I was thinking about freedom and I thought that we could look at freedom as the freedom to do whatever we liked we, but we could also look at it at different from a different angle. Wouldn't it be good if we were free from the ideas that hold us back from unschooling or those ideas that we pick up [01:21:00] in our own childhood, our own education, the ones that we have to deschool through so that we need to be free of those.

[01:21:11] Sue Elvis: To be peaceful about what we are doing and also free of the need to please people. I have trouble with that one. And to listen so that people's opinions don't affect what we are doing. And you said, Sandra, that we should be have, like in-laws and husbands and other people like that, we should be very conscious of their opinions and we shouldn't say, Hey, I don't care what you think.

[01:21:45] Sue Elvis: we are free to do what we like, but there are a lot of unimportant people in our lives who make us feel that we are doing the wrong thing maybe, and it dents our confidence. But the other thing I was [01:22:00] thinking about also was, and this is something that has gradually happened over the years, and I think we've also talked about this before.

[01:22:10] Sue Elvis: How we change as people from unschooling so we become free or freer of things like impatience and anger, yelling, all those things that aren't peaceful, but we learn within our own schooling families to let go of those sort of things. And maybe we are more. likely to listen and to accept and to respect instead I just turned that around from a different angle.

[01:22:49] Sue Elvis: I just thought about you were talking about peace and a lot of those things do lead to peace within our families that when we're not worrying too much about what [01:23:00] we're back to competitiveness again, are we keeping up with the other people, whether they're unschoolers or whether they're not. but to do what's right for our own families and what we feel our children need.

[01:23:15] Sandra Dodd: For a long time in the United States, there were some, there was a couple of series of like annual conferences that were very solid, very responsible, and sometimes when people said, how can I persuade my husband, I. We would say, various people would say, get him to a conference where there are teens and parents, and let him see how the dads are interacting with their older kids.

[01:23:40] Sandra Dodd: And sometimes that did help a lot. So Cecilia's coming up with a series of meetups and that will probably help some parents who are undecided. I know that's not all for unschoolers, it's more for traveling families. But among the unschoolers who are wondering if they see some other unschooling families getting along, if they see peace and [01:24:00] learning, that will help them have more confidence to at least try it or not to think.

[01:24:06] Sandra Dodd: It's so weird. And I think, I've seen people bring their, mother-in-law or their mom to a conference and sometimes that person starts off very critical. okay, I'm, I'll listen to the speakers, but I, don't think they're very smart. they're just moms, they're not experts or whatever.

[01:24:21] Sandra Dodd: And some, of them just really soften, not so much from what they heard speakers say, but from what they saw in the interactions. With kids and what they were seeing was peace and learning.

[01:24:36] Cecilie Conrad: I think also the best argument ever that is true, is to see the young adults and meet the teenagers.

[01:24:46] Cecilie Conrad: it's very often that we get the feedback. Now the kids get it themselves that, is it really true? You've never been to school. [01:25:00] I've just had this very intellectual conversation with you for the past two hours and not your first language. how did you get that smart? How did you learn all those things?

[01:25:09] Cecilie Conrad: How did learn to have, hold a conversation like that? it really is, and this is a conflicted point in, I'm doing this podcast not my children, but really. They would be the best advocates, just being who they are. And, you're right, we came up with this World School Village idea to bring the world schoolers, the traveling families with teenagers together regularly, because we've noticed that our teenagers really enjoy being in a larger group of like-minded teenagers for a while, not just for the occasional weekend here and there.

[01:25:54] Cecilie Conrad: So we bring people together on month long basis and to explore [01:26:00] what life can be when you know who you're going to be around for a while. And, over my years of traveling, this has happened coincidentally a few times. And, yes, we have not convinced, but maybe inspired of quite a few families to let go a little bit of.

[01:26:24] Cecilie Conrad: Of the idea of curriculum, lots of traveling families obviously have children who are not in school, but they could be in an umbrella school, an online school. There can be a lot of structure and when they meet someone who just lives a life without those structures and see how the children are, I wanna say perfectly normal, but then we have to discuss what that means.

[01:26:52] Cecilie Conrad: So maybe, I don't wanna say that, but it can be very convincing to just meet someone who, [01:27:00] who lived like that and who is leveled and smart and what smart, what does that mean also? But, just a regular teenager with regular passions and ideas and jokes, and they carry themselves through life in a good way.

[01:27:18] Cecilie Conrad: yeah, that works. It's a where, do you start? What are you aiming for? Maybe try to meet someone, maybe try to meet someone with older children who are on schooled and see where does this lead. that's a, good way to get started. And maybe one of the other, I don't know, affirmation lines that unschoolers keep repeating to each other is question everything.

[01:27:46] Cecilie Conrad: And I think questioning everything could also be questioning, why, do I find this cool? Why do I feel judged by the other unschoolers if I tell my kids to go to bed? Or why do I think I have to let go here [01:28:00] and just keep that why happening in your own mind? Think about why you make the choices you make instead of mindlessly following some leading star that might not even be your own.

[01:28:14] Cecilie Conrad: Unschooling can look in many different ways. I will agree with Sandra. It doesn't look like a child going to school. That wouldn't be unschooling.

[01:28:23] Cecilie Conrad: Are we at a point now where I have to really get up and Sandra has to really go to bed? And what time is it even in Australia? I don't know, Sue.

[01:28:35] Sue Elvis: Five o'clock in the, early evening. Alright, time for dinner preparations and things.

[01:28:42] Cecilie Conrad: Yeah. Here it's nine o'clock and the sun is shining and we have a large group of teenagers in the community we are living in right now where we beautifully go to the beach in the morning to go for a run in a cold dip.

[01:28:57] Cecilie Conrad: A talk and a walk. So we are leaving [01:29:00] in half an hour. That's my diet. Be starting.

[01:29:04] Sandra Dodd: thank you. This was interesting. I, as usual, I feel like I was very negative, but I'm not trying to be negative. I'm trying to show people where the cliffs are. You're very clear. I think you're

[01:29:13] Sue Elvis: very realistic. Whereas, and sometimes it can be good to do, to look at reality and yeah, I, found your stories, your thoughts, very interesting Sandra, and they have helped me enormously.

[01:29:32] Sue Elvis: I'm sure that you help a lot of people, but also you've given me some ideas about how to help other people as well, so thank you for that.

[01:29:43] Cecilie Conrad: Yeah, I think it's been great. I hope I recover even more before the next episode from this annoying infection. I have. Thank you for joining me. I don't feel much better

[01:29:53] Sandra Dodd: soon.

[01:29:53] Cecilie Conrad: Yeah, I'm fighting for it.

[01:29:57] Sandra Dodd: By the time people hear this, you'll be all better.

[01:29:59] Cecilie Conrad: Oh, [01:30:00] yeah. I'll be bouncing. All right. Thank you for today, ladies. Thank you.

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