My smart, motivated, academically capable daughter just quit school -- and we're celebrating! Yep. Last year I wrote about our son, who, after a lifetime of eclectic and meandering unschooling, decided to graduate and pulled a high school grad with honours out of a hat in just two months at the end of his grade eleven year. You can do that. He did. Now I'm writing to tell you that our fifteen-year-old daughter Rhiannon, who has been mastering the distributed learning system towards what we thought was going to be a much more straightforward high school grad, has quit. She's decided to register as a homeschooler, not attempt high school graduation, and work on her own pursuits, instead. And I think it's the best decision of her academic career so far.
For those not familiar with the basic options available to kids in our province (British Columbia), let me briefly explain. We have five legal options:
- Public School: (mainstream "brick and mortar" school run by a school district)
- terminology: child is "enrolled"
- attend in-person, generally 5 days/week
- complete provincial curriculum
- graduation diploma is expected outcome
- publicly-funded
- Independent School: (private school - non-district-affiliated)
- terminology: child is "enrolled"
- attend in-person (usually), generally 5 days/week
- complete provincial curriculum, sometimes with a little more flexibility
- graduation diploma is expected outcome
- partially publicly-funded
- Public OL: (public online learning school run by a school district)
- formerly called DL, the new name OL is an absolute misnomer, because a number of the now "online learning" options are in fact in-person.
- terminology: child is "enrolled"
- attend in-person 2.5 days/week, OR partially or completely online
- some PDL schools facilitate home-learning for enrolled students through year-plans and regular reporting by parents or advisor teachers
- unschooling, diverse curricula or an outside curriculum also sometimes supported
- complete provincial curriculum, possibly completed independently
- graduation usually expected outcome
- publicly funded
- Independent OL: (independent online learning school, not district-affiliated)
- formerly called DL, the new name OL is an absolute misnomer, because components of many of programs are in fact in-person.
- terminology: child is "enrolled"
- attend in-person 2.5 days/week OR partially or completely online
- some IDL schools facilitate home-learning for enrolled students through year-plans and regular reporting by parents or advisor teachers
- unschooling, diverse curricula or an outside curriculum also sometimes supported
- complete provincial curriculum, possibly completed independently
- graduation usually expected outcome
- partially publicly-funded
- Registered homeschooling:
- terminology: child is "registered" as a "homeschooler" under section 12 or 13 of the provincial education act
- no official teacher oversight or support, although some families hire teachers, tutors, or mentors, and children may attend supervised programs outside of the public system
- this is the most freedom available in our province, legally, and allows families to live, grow and educate in near-complete freedom
- no curriculum is provided, but many families purchase or create their own curricula
- no graduation diploma
- registered homeschoolers in grades 10, 11 or 12 may enroll in distributed learning courses
- Unschooling: Unschooling is not a registration/enrollment option. It's a lifestyle and learning-style choice, which can be accomplished in any setting to larger or smaller degrees. Generally, unschooling means following one's interests in life and learning from all experiences. For parents of unschoolers, it means also following personal interests, while supporting and nurturing children who are busy following their own. Registering as a homeschooler gives BC residents the freedom to be unencumbered by regulations and expectations, therefore allowing more time for exploration of personal interests, and it's therefore the easiest way to follow an unschooling pedagogy.
Now back to our family...
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| Rhiannon hand-binding the children's book she wrote in 2018. |
When she had free time in her earlier years, she edited and published two magazines for children, wrote a few short books, played endlessly with her dolls and pets and imagined worlds, taught herself to play guitar, created a few complex board games, researched, wrote reports on, and attended online university courses on subjects she was interested in (usually relating to early childhood education), and developed her singing and acting skills. Then through her teens, as she attended public and distributed learning schools to be with her peers, she ran out of time for most of those things. She's been keeping up as well as she can, managing to write a few stories and papers over the years, attending various theatre programs, and usually writing a book or taking an online course in her free time from school. She's developed a children's and YA book review website, written a middle grade novel, and is currently working on a second novel. But her time is always broken by the demands of school, and often those demands have felt like aimless make-work projects just to get through specific hoops to somebody else's goal. Somebody else's goal is graduation. Hers is "to have a nice life", and highschool graduation doesn't seem to be necessary for that.
She does find it important to attend the Reggio Emilia early childhood education program at Capilano University. Not some other school. Not some other pedagogy, because she's known since she researched these things in her own childhood that Reggio is the philosophy best suited to her beliefs. She's been researching careers and schools and entrance requirements for years, and now at fifteen she's in conversation with staff at the university she wants to attend about how to prepare a homeschooler's application. She figures she's got a couple of years to accomplish her pre-university goals, and she'd like to be unencumbered by school, in the meantime.
This morning she told me, "I feel like everybody thinks that graduating from high school is the big teenage achievement, but if I don’t go to school then I can have other achievements that are even better, like getting a book published."
Knowing that she has managed to write a book and send it to publishers during her otherwise busy grade ten year, I asked her what she expects will be so different about homeschooling.
She leaned against my feet where I sat, and mused, "It used to be stressful because I had so much work to do and it’s now it's stressful because I don’t know how it will all work. It used to be a relief to know what I had to do, and now it’s a relief to know that I can do what I want. Now I can focus on writing books, managing my youTube channel and website, making music, and getting a job, which I find much more exciting than school."
And that, I think, is the key. It's why we've been unschooling all along: Because life should be exciting! Why would we drag through school just to get a diploma, only to get into university, if we can live an exciting life, and then still go to university... arriving full of passion and experience? Or, as my son seems to be leaning towards, potentially unschooling ourselves right through university and into the rest of our lives, dispensing entirely of the education system, and building our lives, piecemeal, according to our passions and opportunities?
This isn't so crazy as it sounds. Most of us are trying to follow our passions and opportunities, often at the same time or combined with our trek through the prescribed journey of life and education. With increasing instability in our economy, climate, and social structure, the gig economy is increasingly accepted as normal, and people of all ages are necessarily becoming more flexible. We're learning that not every year will be the same in our gardens; not every job will be long-term; not every passion needs to remain our focal point. Personally, I've begun blending and re-mixing my diverse careers of parent, explorative learning facilitator and artist, and finding that a whole plethora of new potential titles come out of the mix. Through this pandemic I find myself to be a learning consultant, an artist, a farmer and a YouTuber! Last year that would have sounded ridiculous. My daughter's choice to buck the norm and head to university without a high school graduation looks to me like a very good strategic plan for her, but also a great way to keep herself open and flexible in this constantly-changing world we inhabit.
We were recently celebrating the fact that our son graduated with honours... feeling weird but proud to wear this badge sported by so many conventional parents. And now I wonder if my daughter will feel let down by not having her family celebrate a graduation. Can we celebrate something else, instead? Hell, yes! I'm celebrating her embarking on the path she desires! I'm celebrating the very thoughtful human who is looking critically and creatively at a life in very undesirable pandemic-induced constraints, pulling enormous courage out of a hat and turning her dreams into reality, on her own terms. I encourage all of us to look at our children's accomplishments the same way -- to celebrate their personal choices instead of just the moments they stepped through expected hoops. I can't wait to read my daughter's next book.
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More information for people looking into homeschooling legalities in British Columbia: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/k-12/support/classroom-alternatives/homeschooling
The photo at the top is my daughter Rhiannon's promotional portrait taken by her brother, Taliesin.
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