No Formal Education? No Problem.
“80 percent of my time was unstructured,” says Lidya Foxglove, a professional writer who was unschooled as a child. Her recent video, “I don’t have a diploma and I never went to college—the unconventional path to fantasy writer,” makes a strong case for how children can learn and grow into responsible adults without attending conventional schooling. I particularly enjoy her honesty about being an introverted, nerdy child and how attending second grade was like going to a foreign country for her. She was able to go back to unschooling after that, and her love for reading, playing pretend games with her sisters, and “being weird” gave her an amazing childhood (her own words). Lidya tackles all the questions about socialization, learning math and reading, and how her parents helped them learn at home. She notes how she hated algebra and how her parents tried to make her learn it, and this struggle made her feel she was bad at math. However, she eventually realized that she was using math in her writing and life with complete ease and now states: “I’m sure that if I had a reason to apply algebra to my daily life tomorrow I can probably pick it up really quickly. But as long as I can’t see how I can apply it, it doesn’t stick.”
Lidya notes how her natural curiosity led her to learn about science through her interest in history. “But I can’t say that I really learned the things about science that I would have learned in school. However, the things I have studied I remember very well because I cared about them and they had some kind of relevance to my story or what was going on in the world. There was some particular reason why I was following that subject.”
Now in her thirties, Lidya notes how unschooling made her confident in her choices and gave her the discipline to work independently, particularly as a professional writer. I also enjoy her openness about how unschooling isn’t for everyone, but it’s always there for those who want to live more intentionally than consumer culture allows.
I hope there will be more adults who were unschooled who are willing to share their stories about how their experiences helped them mature and function well in conventional society. Growing Without Schooling magazine featured grown homeschoolers in its pages and conferences during its 21 years of publication, and now the internet and social media are serving this function. Please send me any such stories you may have or know about.
