Unschooling for adults

One of the problems with traditional schooling is that you are so often presented with a single authoritative opinion, the sole 'expert' viewpoint which you fully accept if you want to get good grades. In history class, events which actually have varying interpretations are presented as if there is a big book of Historical Facts someplace and they're simply passing along the data. In English class, you get a standard interpretation of each classical work. In science class, the material is presented as if it's a dead language, fixed and no longer changing, totally devoid of debate. But, to take just one example, Stephen J. Gould thought we should divide living things into three kingdoms, not five, with two devoted to bacteria and the third containing everything else. They aren't likely to mention this when launching into weeks of binomial taxonomy.

You grow up this way, and then you get to college, where ostensibly you have discussions and debates and disagreements. But by then you are trained to hunt down that sole 'expert' opinion, and your classmates are looking for the same thing. I had professors who sought dissenting voices, but in vain. We were students who had done well in school and figured out how to get our A's, and we weren't about to change tactics. We inevitably found ourselves convinced by current academic thought, found ourselves parroting the authoritative opinion on our exams.

One of my favorite movies is Good Will Hunting, partly because of the scene in the bar when Will takes a snooty ivy league undergrad to task, accusing him of lifting his ideas from this or that book or scholar, and predicting what he will think next year and the year after that. A graduate student newspaper I read at the time gave it a horrible review, ranting about how anti-intellectual it was. But it wasn't that at all, it was merely anti-academia and in favor of independent learning and thought. To call it anti-intellectual is to claim that there is no intellect outside the most revered universities.

When I had just finished grad school, I thought there was usually a right answer to any question, and that the liberal academic community probably knew what it was. Since then, I've been getting unschooled, which is to say, I started questioning the expert opinions, and tried to do my own research. Nowadays common wisdom looks to me like it's pretty frequently wrong. A low-fat or no-fat diet is best? Well, not exactly.... Beer and wine are bad for you? For the vast majority of people, that's flat wrong. We had no advance warning of 9/11? Totally false. We have public schools to eliminate the class system and promote egalitarianism? Ha!

A lot of adults will believe an academic researcher or a doctor quite blindly, if they seem to possess the right credentials. No doubt their kids believe their textbooks and teachers just as blindly. They say unschooling becomes a lifestyle, and that may be partly because you get used to cutting out the middle man and finding information on your own, and you can't do that for very long without running into a topic where you disagree with conventional wisdom. And once you find one place where it seems the authorities have tried to pull the wool over your eyes, you can't ever go back to your trusting ways. For my family, one aspect of unschooling is summarized by the old hippie mantra, Question Authority. In that sense, I was an unschooler before I even had kids.