“But how will they be prepared for…?”
Recently, I read that in our culture, dreams about school are in the top five recurring dreams. And in an informal online survey on dreams about school, out of 128 respondents, zero rated their dreams as pleasant. They described being deeply stressed or panicked by a feeling of excessive stupidity, lostness, and lack of preparation.
So, I used to try to answer that question as if people are asking what it sounds like they’re asking. Now, instead, my answer (at least for myself) is: “I and my children don’t live that dream.”
I’ve come to suspect that adults ask those questions for the same internal reasons that children ask for a light on at night. I suspect that they (and we, when we unschooling parents feel this fear) are not asking about life preparation. We’re asking about that feeling of having missed the class for the entire semester and then having to take the exam anyway. In undershorts! Because we all know homeschoolers don’t wear pants! Ha.
But the world of academic schooling is a bubble on the head of a pin that’s stuck in a map the size of the globe. People usually make one of two choices. We can choose to buy in, and live forever in the bubble. We can choose to live our whole subsequent life with that pin as the reference point for all our journeys, never able to let it out of sight, simply by not choosing anything else.
Neither one is how I choose to travel. My children and I are after better dreams.
