This great headline is brought to you via Zev Singer of the The Ottawa Citizen and was found in a story about 19 year old Emily Witts. In a nut shell:

From ‘unschool’ to head of the class

When Emily Witts was homeschooled, the curriculum was pretty simple: her parents got her a library card. Read what you want, they said.

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For the next decade, there were no tests or exams, no science projects, no report cards.

So it was a bit of a culture shock for her last year, when Witts, now 19, finally went to school…

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The academic achievement, and the determination that went into her transition from the Pippi Longstockingesque curriculum to the more usual scholastic world, has landed Witts a Spirit of the Capital Youth Award in the category of academic perseverance.

And how is it working out so far?

So far, Witts has scored one B+, one A, and in each of the other seven courses an A+.

Soon, she will graduate.

While this piece quotes Emily’s defense of unschooling:

The wide-open educational model is sometimes referred to as “unschooling” and Witts defends it, saying a lot of people can’t see how it would work. She says it has huge advantages, like not burning kids out and souring them on learning.

The fact that this is a story of a girl who learned to assume the responsibility for her own education, and, with that, was able to put an entire elementary and secondary school ‘career’ into a single year is left to the reader to pick up on. And that story is not as unusual as Emily’s award might suggest.

Headlines do grab the eye and this one was no exception:

The Trouble with Motherhood by Christine Carter, PhD

Since my book Raising Happiness was published, I’ve met so many unhappy mothers I’ve come to believe there might just be an epidemic of unhappiness in mothers. Studies have long showed that parents tend to be unhappier than their childless counterparts. (Seven percent unhappier, on average.) Parents tend to feel happier grocery shopping and sleeping than they do when they are with their kids.

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One significant cause of increased unhappiness among mothers is that we are so damn busy.

Sounds like one of the reasons so many of those I knew in the late 70′s and early 80′s turned to homeschooling in the first place – slow down, get out of the insane rat race and reconnect the family.

This trouble with the busy-ness of motherhood is that most of the work is instrumental. And the trouble with instrumental work is best illuminated by a famous study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow. Csikszentmihalyi unintentionally induced what looked like text-book cases of generalized anxiety disorder in his subjects simply by instructing his subjects as follows: from the time you wake up until 9:00 PM, “we would like you to act in a normal way, doing all the things you have to do, but not doing anything that is ‘play’ or ‘non-instrumental.’”

This sounds like the language surrounding “burnout” that grew up in the wake of a crazy push encouraging homeschoolers to reinvent school in their homes.

Yet, every generation appears to need to rediscover the ‘secrets’ for themselves.

When we strip motherhood of play and flow—as we so often do, just to get everything done—our mood deteriorates. It isn’t just worry about our children and endless housework that make us anxious and unhappy; it’s that we aren’t actually having fun anymore.

Hey, have some fun!