I’m sitting on my friend’s couch, knowing it’s time to move on. I’m drinking coffee; it’s early morning. The whole house—which consists of two families and a friend who also lives here—is still asleep. Even the dogs are sleeping. Only my husband and I are awake. It’s completely still outside, the sun is shining through the window and awakening my brain. Morning light is just as necessary as coffee.
The car is half-packed, and we leave in three hours. Then the late summer in Denmark ends, and ahead of us lies the big project: Worldschool Village in Tarragona.
This time, Denmark has been less of an epic adventure and much more about adulting. Nomadic life comes in phases, and sometimes there’s just a lot of practical stuff to handle. The big project this time has been to get the two middle children started on their education. There have been countless tests and conversations, and it’s taken up a lot of emotional space.
Two children who have never attended school and have been fully unschooled—who have basically never done any organized schoolwork, but instead have beautifully woven a tapestry of information, knowledge, talents, connections, nuances, questions, methods, and ideas in a journey from sweet little hippie-home kids to powerful young adults—are suddenly confronted with the rigidity of the system and are now to be measured and weighed by tools that only make sense inside a system they’ve never been part of.
Einstein is often quoted for having said that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. Something like that. For my two unschooled middle kids, it’s something similar that’s at play.
Both the format—which is very specific—and the scope—what the system calls core curriculum—
The format is unfamiliar to them, so whether they succeed is not a question of knowledge level, but of presentation style and discourse. And the scope, the so-called core curriculum, feels arbitrary to them. What’s considered “important” within the school system is presented as if it’s the only thing that matters, and as if the decision that this is important is objectively correct—to such an extent that everything else seems irrelevant, inadequate. Because everyone studies for the test, and everyone sees success as top grades on the exam: teachers, school boards, students, and parents alike. And we forget that there is an enormous mosaic of things to know about, many ways to know them, many ways to use that knowledge—and what we’ve chosen to teach in schools is only a part of it. Like cutting out a single patch from a large quilt.
Well. We know that. We knew that. That’s what we signed up for. And it’s been a wild ride.
Often, when something doesn’t succeed, it’s because it’s not ready to succeed. I know that. When you struggle to make a decision and it simply doesn’t work, it’s often because the decision isn’t ready to be made. If you want to be practical and rational, you can think that it’s because some information is missing—or hasn’t been processed yet. If you’re more spiritually inclined, you might believe that, in the vast and complex web of energies that make up our existence and the cosmos, the processes aren’t complete yet and the conditions aren’t fully aligned. So you simply have to wait.
Our journey toward getting two children started on an education that prepares them for university has lasted more than two years. Countless phone calls to schools and academic advisors, countless conversations with other parents in the traveling community, and countless explorations of paths and dead ends in credit systems, online education, and exam possibilities across several countries have been one wall after another to crash into.
I won’t bore you with the details—just emphasize that we’re talking many, many hours, many, many conversations, high levels of frustration, phases of complete hopelessness—and then starting over again with lifted heads.
As with so many things in life, it became a matter of the good old: Intention – Attention – No Tension. This trio of strategy never fails. The intention is set—and in this case, it’s been set for a long time—which means the attention is focused: when you know what you're looking for or trying to figure out, your brain is ready and can spot opportunities when they appear. And finally: no stress, no tension. This last part is always the hardest. I’ve failed at it many times and have likely disrupted a lot of the process energetically. I know that.
Well. This time the solution came through my adult daughter, who suddenly came to tell us that she had started a similar program online. She already has a degree in writing from a university-level writer’s school and is pursuing a beautiful career as an artist, so we hadn’t considered her in this context. Now she’s enrolled in a university preparatory program and, during her application process, she asked about the options for her siblings.
Boom.
Suddenly, all the obstacles turned into a simple entrance exam—a placement test—that’s actually fair game. Until that day, all we had heard from the Danish system were the impossibilities of not having attended state school and not having the state’s final exams, which had led us to explore all the international options. Not that there’s anything wrong with international options—many are, in several ways, better than the Danish ones—but since both children want to attend university in Copenhagen, the Danish preparatory education is simply the most straightforward path.
What if it was easy?
That’s something we often say when something feels impossibly difficult. When you’ve stared yourself blind at how hard something is, and start feeling stressed, agitated, sad, angry, exhausted, when everything feels tight and strained—it can be a real game changer to ask: What if it were easy? How would this look if it were easy?
In this case, the path suddenly became easy. It took some time to attend academic counseling and take the three tests—especially since one of them had to take them twice. Both kids took the tests with only a few days’ notice, completely unprepared, and without knowing the format—and both tested at the exact level they would have been at, had they been in the school system.
Let’s just sit with that for a moment.
And let me write a whole rant about just that. Somewhere else.
One is seventeen, the other nineteen. They’ve never been to school. Not a single packed lunch, not a single test, not a single day with a school bag and a timetable. They’ve never sat listening to something they did or didn’t want to learn, chosen by someone else. They’ve never been bullied. They’ve never had a PE class where even their physical expression had to be measured and weighed. They’ve never dealt with tests and grades. They’ve been nomads for more than half of the time they would otherwise have been in school. They’ve seen the world, met people, handled an endless string of strange, fun, new, surprising, difficult, easy, exciting, wild, complex, and simple situations. They speak several languages. They’re worldswise, as we say—not just streetwise in one city, but ready to navigate life on almost any terms. They’ve read and drawn and run and hiked and photographed and partied and played and talked and thought and swum and sung and laughed and pondered and loved and slept—unfolding themselves into exactly the me that made sense for them, at exactly the pace they wanted and were able to—during the ten years when other children had most of their waking hours directed by others.
And afterwards, they’re at the exact same level as everyone else. If there’s a slightly steep curve in adjusting to the format, the motivation more than makes up for it. This is something they’re doing because they want to—because it’s a challenge that excites them and makes sense. And so it suddenly becomes easy to fill in what the school systems call “gaps,” while they think: Well, well, that sounds fun—I haven’t tried that before. Let’s see how it works.
It’s confronting, as an unschooling family, to go head-to-head with school systems—even when this system ends up judging them on par with those who’ve lived inside it. It’s taken up a lot of our energy during our time in Denmark this late summer. And it still does.
In two hours, the car will be rolling, and we’ll go on a road trip before hosting a month-long experience for more than thirty families. Meanwhile, the kids will be studying a couple of hours a day, and we’ll have to adapt to this new reality. A reality with formal demands and tests. It’s going to be an exciting journey.
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