A tip o’ the hat to Daryl Cobranchi for alerting me to this wonderful article about an unschooled young man in Texas:
About 6-foot-3 and lean, Quinn has a hairless but muscular chest revealed by a laced-up white linen shirt. (Which he made.) Around his neck is a leather strap with a long silver pendant. (His design.) His feet are wrapped in shoes sewn of scraps of black leather with a bit of bone to hold them on. (Made two pairs of these, one black and one brown.)
The effect is of a handsome young man who has been raised by nice, middle-class wolves.
Animated, articulate and charming, with a vocabulary bent toward the metaphysical, Quinn describes his idyllic childhood spent at a rambling ranch house at the end of a dirt road. He and his two younger siblings had a pool and two wooded acres where they could frolic, build forts, romp with dogs and other pets, doing whatever they liked all day while the rest of their friends suffered in school.
“My mother taught us everything without teaching us anything,” Quinn says. “Everything I know I’ve experienced myself, I’ve taught myself, I’ve learned myself. The whole childhood was magical.”
Be sure to click on the Dallas Observer link above to read this entire marvelously affirming article – and check out the great photos! And I’m proud to note that Quinn’s mother, Barb Lundgren, has been HEM’s advertising manager for many years!
Articles like this one help me keep on the unschooling path I have chosen as my guide in raising my children. To be outside of the main stream in how we respond to and what we expect from children is a tretcherous and lonely journey most of the time. We are constantly being asked as parents to betray a child’s natural curiosity and natural rhythms, and true needs in order to please this or that system or institution or theoretical goal. I am refreshed my articles of this mother who put the blinders on to the world and opened up her eyes to the freedom her children could, and would have. Let’s hear it for freedom—freedom to choose what is valuable, interesting, worthwhile. Freedom to reject that which is based on fear and control and factory farm learning. Thank you for the article!