Copyright 1999 Michael Fogler. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission of the author. Reprinted from The Simple Living Network On-Line Newsletter, October-December, 1999.

Michael Fogler is the author of the book Un-Jobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook, now in its second edition. His former life and identity was that of a faculty member at several college music departments in the Central Kentucky area. Fogler now calls himself a “semi-retired stay-at-home dad, freelance musician, writer, and peace activist.” He is the Editor/Producer of a monthly newsletter for a local non-profit peace and justice organization. He lives with his wife Suzanne McIntosh and son Benjamin in Lexington, Kentucky.

We want to be successful in life, right? We want our children to be successful in life, right?

Well, maybe not. By successful, we usually mean that a person can take his or her place in our society and be able to make a “decent living.” Of course, no one wants to be homeless or in abject poverty. But the life of preparing for and then making a “decent living” may well be perpetuating what those of us attracted to the notions of voluntary simplicity are trying to go away from.

We live in a society of greed, materialism, fear of scarcity, and competitiveness. Do we really want to be successful? Isn’t being successful succeeding at the way of this society of greed, materialism, fear of scarcity, and competitiveness?

It’s difficult for us adults to stop this. It’s a vicious circle. Society is the way it is. In order to survive, we must play the game of the society as it is, or we will be succumbing to it. So, we sigh and say, oh well, I have to survive.

Children are prepared for the day when they will successfully take their place among our society of greed, materialism, fear of scarcity, and competitiveness. This preparation is called schooling and education.

There is a difference between those two terms. School as we know it began with the Prussians who once dominated part of the world with military might. They invented the idea of school for two reasons: 1) they needed trained people to be in the military and 2) to make military goods in factories. They needed these people to be pretty much all alike, cogs in the wheel, so to speak. This is why school attempts to homogenize hordes of unique human beings along unnatural train schedules of learning. (You know, the what every fifth grader should know kind of books and mentality.) At the same time, while adults were in the factories, they needed some place for their children to be safe and supervised.

So, to put it bluntly, schooling is about babysitting and career ticketing! This is also a chicken and the egg syndrome. It’s hard to know which purpose comes first anymore — is it the babysitting purpose or the career ticketing purpose? All we can say now is that we’re in a vicious circle that we can’t seem to get out of.

Now—to make babysitting and (factory mentality) career ticketing more palatable, the concept of “education” came along. We’re getting the children to learn things. That’s important, right? First, this noble idea of learning beautifully hides that what we really need are a safe and supervised place for children to go while we adults are “making a living,” and we need our children to become adults carrying on the same tradition when they grow up.

Never mind that for eons, children have learned what they needed to learn and grew up just fine without the concept of schooling. Learning is a natural human process. It’s just as difficult to stop it as it is to force it to happen. Never mind that all children learn their native language (and sometimes more than one) plus lots of other complex things without formal schooling, and without certified experts delivering a product we call education.

People who have grown up completely without schooling are typically highly competent people. In fact, the track record of such people is exemplary. More than that, there is zero correlation between the “educational background” of the parents and the learning accomplishments of the non-schooled children. Zero! In the homeschooling world, children of parents who never finished high school do just as well as children of parents with Ph.D.s!

I have chosen homeschooling (a term I dislike, but it’s a well-known term) for my son. I prefer to call it unschooling and uneducating. I see this as intimately connected with my desire for a world of less greed, materialism, fear of scarcity, and competitiveness. Yet, it is highly ironic that many folks trumpeting the virtues of voluntary simplicity are not seeing that what we’re doing to children is perpetuating the world we don’t want.

I hasten to add here that “education reform” won’t work. We can tweak this or modify that, but it still will be an inherently flawed concept. If we don’t want to eat soup, changing the spices in the soup to make it taste better won’t change the fact that it’s still soup. In Ishmael, author Daniel Quinn’s words, this amounts to improving prison conditions. Enough improving prison conditions. It’s time to talk about leaving the prison!

What kind of world do we want? What are we preparing our children to do and to be when they grow up?

To me, there is no truer statement than: What we prepare for is what we get. Look around at the world we live in. What you see is no accident. What you see is what we’ve prepared for. To change what we have, we must go back to what we do with children and prepare them for something different. This can seem scary and risky, but how else will we change our society if we don’t change what we prepare for?

The truth is — if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always gotten.