An Account of My Early Education

G. Marie origin story

At the end of a visit to my grandparents, mom trooped us into the car for an educational trip to the Gettysburg battlefields. For my mom, who homeschooled all six of us, the ideal educational trip was to go to Devil’s Den, a craggy pile of boulders where some of the fiercest fighting happened, and let us run feral.

Do you know who was the one jumping over ten-foot drops and stepping to the edge of cliffs? My mother.

Another time, mom told my grandmother that she was trying to find a book on Gettysburg for my brother, a second grader. Grandma, a staid retired teacher married to a retired principal, responded dolefully, “Oh, but Gettysburg is for fourth graders.”

Mom tends to describe her own education as a series of pointless exercises. She sees her realization that she could allow herself to get a B (horror) in calculus, and therefore sacrifice becoming valedictorian, as a moment of liberation. When asked about the decision, she’ll shrug it off and say, “Somebody else wanted valedictorian more.”

Her educational philosophy is one of rebellion.¹ On the one hand, she is a strict rule-follower, a person who loves order. However, when it comes to education, she eschews anything with even a whiff of the arbitrary. Then the rule-follower turns anarchist.

In Pennsylvania, homeschoolers have to prepare a portfolio of their work each year and, after getting it evaluated by a certified teacher, submit it to their school district. The evaluator we always went to, Linda, shared mom’s anarchistic pedagogical leanings, but I think mom mostly chose her because she was a character. Linda would hold days where homeschoolers could come to IKEA or someone’s house and get evaluated en masse. It couldn’t have taken that long to go over our portfolios, but she would talk and talk, updating mom on the last year of her life and how her daughters were doing. Meanwhile we would run around with the other kids until we were called over to answer a couple questions. They were usually about what had been our favorite activities and books that year.

Mom was, I think, most proud of our booklists. We always lived within walking distance of a library, which I’m very grateful for, and when we were really young we were allowed to check out the same number of books as our age. I can remember standing in the children’s section of the library dreaming of being six—that seemed like an enormous amount of books.

Once our portfolios had been evaluated, mom would turn them over to the school district. One or two years they asked for more information, and a battle ensued, one that mom relished. The school would say that there wasn’t enough math included, so she would send them exactly one more worksheet. Then they would say that they wanted a little more than that, so she’d send two. Then they’d say that what they were actually looking for was “evidence of learning new skills over time,” and mom would send them one more sheet detailing a different skill. Eventually the school would give up and say, whatever, we were fine.

I don’t actually remember anyone teaching me how to use an online library catalogue, but Pittsburgh has an excellent public library system,² and I would log on and type in an author or topic and order as many books as I could find. I read pretty much whatever I wanted.

When I was around thirteen, I really wanted a dog. To make my case and preempt parental objections, I read essentially all the dog-training books in the library system. I have this clear memory of realizing I had compared so much evidence that I now had intense opinions about diverse parts of dog training, opinions that I could back up with sources but that could not be reduced to any one author or book. It was a startling but good feeling, the way I could turn all this information over in my mind. Not everyone can trace their intellectual journey back to Dogs for Dummies, but, what can I say, I’m elite.

Once I had to write a short reflection on dance for my portfolio, and I goofed off and wrote some word salad, so mom told me to take it to dad for editing. He, not unkindly, told me that you shouldn’t write crap on purpose and that the best way to write is to say what you actually think, rather than just mimicking the appearance of it. I’ve never forgotten that.

My dad’s educational approach was complementary to my mother’s. If mom was in rebellion against the middle-class status quo she was raised in, dad had grandchild-of-immigrants vibes. There were very specific things we were supposed to learn because someone had worked hard for him to learn them. For example, his older siblings had made sure he knew how to swim, so he took us to the YMCA every summer for lessons, which we loved, even though we didn’t really swim outside of that week.

While mom encouraged independent learning, dad liked to answer questions, and if you asked him something, you were often answered with three or four books waiting for you the next day. When I was “in high school,” Dad had me reading Percy Lubbock and John Gardner, along with various introductions to metaphysics, and he bought me a copy of his favorite college writing textbook.

My early school years were light and easy—mom would assign a few things for me to do each week: a writing exercise, a geography worksheet, and some chapters of historical fiction to read. I did math once a month (more on my relationship with math in a later essay).

At some point in middle school, when the assigned reading picked up, I stopped being able to complete the schedule on my own, and the more behind I got, the more useless catching up seemed. I felt bad about it, and I wasn’t really sure why I had so much trouble keeping up, especially as no one else seemed to be struggling, but there were always plenty of other things to be doing. When mom realized how behind I was, she took it in exactly the way one would expect. She made me catch up on my reading, foregoing outings and theater rehearsals to spend time on it, and once I had done that, she said, OK, if you don’t want structure, that’s fine, no more structure for you. I became what they call “unschooled,” if I wasn’t already.

She suggested things for me to do—the next year she had me design a unit study on ballet—but beyond that I just kind of vibed as I wanted for the rest of my pre-college education. I made miniatures and read lots of Brit lit and American humorists. I would hunker down on the couch and become completely absorbed, nothing else to do except take care of the dogs, snack, set the table. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I started in the morning and finished in the evening, and that was essentially all I did that day.

I think you could sum it all up by saying that mom believed that kids will learn what they want to learn. She tried to give us tools and time, and she left the rest up to us. When we made strides, even though we were kids, they were our own, and when we made mistakes, they were ours, too. It was a trial-by-error way of learning, both intensely high pressure and intensely low pressure, if that makes sense.

Once, when I was getting into feminist philosophy and history, I asked her, “Mom, is it OK if I burn a bra?”

“Why?”

“I dunno. I’d just like to have done it.”

“Make sure you burn it on the concrete, far away from the plants.”

I chose an old favorite that had lost all its stretch. For some reason I neatly folded it first. Then I set it alight and stepped back. It smelled horrible, especially once the fabric layer burned off, and the foam cups sizzled a bit.

I know better now. If I ever do that again, I’ll choose something 100% cotton.

Shoutout to Tini, who photographed this moment and made sure I never forgot it.

1. My mom has read and provided comments on this essay, but if you would like to read about her educational philosophy in her own words, see her chapter in A Little Way of Unschooling (Hillside Education, 2011).

2. Shoutout to Andrew Carnegie, I guess?