Unconformed Education: A Personal Deep Dive
Unconformed Education: A Personal Deep Dive
From commitment and "politics" to schedules, books, and the long game
For those of you who prefer to read off paper rather than the screen, we have converted the post into an easily printable pdf file. Remember to come back and share your thoughts and comments! You can access the file here:
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
—John Taylor Gatto
A young man begins independent life by selling fish from his bicycle. He is dyslexic and has no degrees. Any guess who he is now? Ingvar Kamprad - founder of IKEA and worth 31 billion.
A surfer bum and horrible student joins forces with a homeschooled born-again Christian. What was their achievement? Mapping the human genome.
A four-year old learns his first lesson of independence when he gets dropped off in an unfamiliar London neighbourhood by his mother and is told to find his way home. Any guess who this high school drop-out is now? Sir Richard Branson, who recently launched into space on his own Virgin Galactic rocket.
John Taylor Gatto1 offers these real life examples to prompt us to question our assumption that people who are self-educated, or have failed to achieve success in traditional systems, are doomed to failure. Gatto was a teacher for 30 years in some of the worst, and some of the best, schools in Manhattan. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years, yet he received these awards not because he was a star within the school system, but because he was a saboteur. He did not follow any of the standard curricula; he bent the rules wherever he could; he worked around the system to provide students with an education that recognized them as unique individuals, not conformists.
“Unconformed Education” is experiencing a rise in popularity both in the home and the multitude of private schools burgeoning across the continent:
introduces a collection of schools, “which are not only forming their students in theology and/or the liberal arts, but also require either learning a trade or working in one on-campus during their time as part of their core programming.” ’s article Inside the New Wave of Old-School Education for details the new popularity of classical schools:While this time-honored approach to education has fallen out of favor in recent decades—as many American schools have prioritized ideology and equal outcomes over excellence—it is now making a big comeback across the country. This is driven not only by parents’ growing realization of the old system’s academic failures but a sense that contemporary campus culture lacks much in the way of moral vision.
In today’s post we are not going to be arguing about the superiority of one educational system over another. While we do have our leanings and preferences, what we really want to encourage more than anything, based on over fifteen years of home educating experience, is the active involvement of parents in their children’s education, toward discovering and supporting their child’s unique learning potential.
This uniqueness is especially important in an increasingly technological age, where the emphasis on efficiency and utilitarianism can infiltrate the atmosphere of the regular school system, and cause us to overlook or override a child’s originality.
Resisting the Machine can take a myriad of forms, but it must necessarily come from individuals, like you, or me, to inspire hope in our children that they are not mere cogs in the system, but have agency to carve a future.
Please note: While this post will focus on home education, we would love to hear from readers who are pursuing other forms of unconformed education as well! This could include educational choices you are making within your family or in your own life as an adult learner. Please share your comments below!