#180： Establishing a Modern Day Homestead and Unschooling
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
196.35355
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss unschooling his two boys and letting them run wild in the wilderness of Vermont. We also discuss why he and his wife decided to build a homestead in Vermont and why they decided to let their kids run wild.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so
00:00:18.620
i know there's probably several of you out there who are listening who homeschool their kids
00:00:22.200
keep your kids out from public or private schools but you follow a curriculum at home
00:00:27.320
that you bought online or maybe you developed yourself well there's another type of at-home
00:00:31.860
schooling that has no curriculum it's called unschooling completely fascinated by this
00:00:36.500
concept basically uh you keep your kids home and you put themselves put them in situations where
00:00:41.060
they have to learn math in order to complete the task and surprisingly they learn math well my guest
00:00:46.700
today he's homeschooled or unschooled his two boys his name's ben hewitt he's a writer lives in
00:00:51.880
northern vermont and today on the show we're going to discuss his experience unschooling his
00:00:57.620
two boys and letting them run wild in the wilderness of vermont and the things they've learned because
00:01:03.060
of that but we also talk about ben's decision when him and his wife decided to build a homestead
00:01:08.620
in vermont a house they built together from scratch on their own how they did that why they did that
00:01:16.280
uh why they decided to very live a very simple lifestyle and then we'll get into the book that
00:01:21.580
ben wrote about his uh unschooling his two boys called homegrown a really fascinating discussion
00:01:26.760
uh made after i after i did the interview made me want to run off to vermont sell everything and
00:01:32.200
unschool my my two kids and let them run wild in vermont uh but i'm still here in tulsa so without
00:01:38.340
further ado we've got ben hewitt and we're gonna talk about unschooling and homegrown
00:01:42.860
ben hewitt welcome to the show thanks for having me uh so i don't know how i came across i think i
00:01:57.000
read an article that you may have you know published and i saw it online um but i had to have you on
00:02:03.140
because you live in vermont and you have a you live like the the quintessential like vermont life
00:02:09.020
i think what like every american imagines like that that's the it's like a it's a postcard like
00:02:14.200
i mean we that's you live on a farm with your family a postcard with black flies right postcard
00:02:18.900
with black flies maybe we could talk about some of uncovered you know take off the cover of the
00:02:23.180
romanticism of of rural living a bit um but you you published this book and it was really great it's
00:02:29.080
called homegrown adventures and parenting off the beaten path unschooling and reconnecting with the
00:02:33.880
natural world and it's about the uh the conscious decision you and your wife have made to uh not put
00:02:39.600
your sons uh in public schooling you don't even homeschool him and we're gonna talk a little bit
00:02:44.180
about that in a in a bit uh because it's interesting but before let's talk about um how you got to where
00:02:50.560
you are today you um started off you and your wife uh you live on a homestead in a in a home you
00:02:58.160
built yourself uh how did and you you live you you farm and you write uh to supplement your income
00:03:04.960
but you you primarily farm how did you make that decision i mean was that something when you were
00:03:09.320
13 years old uh you decided that's what i'm gonna do like i'm gonna go live on a farm i'm gonna
00:03:14.220
grow my own food yeah when i was 13 i think i was gonna be um a speed metal guitarist
00:03:21.480
um so it definitely and uh and and i would say there never was sort of that inflection point
00:03:30.500
where i was just like this is what i'm going to do with my life um the so the growth or the the
00:03:37.180
evolution i guess of of our homestead and the way we inhabit it um has been sort of it's been much
00:03:44.020
more uh of a process over a long period of time um i think the only thing the only aspect of what
00:03:51.460
i do and how i feel my days now that that really did have perhaps a little more foresight to it was
00:03:56.380
that i did realize at some point um quite some time ago now that i wanted to write for um and
00:04:03.560
hopefully for a living so there that there was definitely a point where there was a light bulb
00:04:07.880
moment with with my writing for sure where i was like wow i could actually like make a living writing
00:04:14.000
um and as anyone who has you know frustratingly in some cases written uh for free or tried to find
00:04:20.980
the time to write uh under any circumstances you know that's that's the realization of that has
00:04:26.500
been has been a real blessing and something that i'm i'm i'm really try to remain grateful for um
00:04:33.080
yeah i like most people i'm i'm uh susceptible to becoming rather jaded um with my circumstances
00:04:40.040
but i try to really be grateful about that and so that was something i did i did really think a lot
00:04:44.160
about and plan definitely not as early as 13 but but a little bit later in my life and so the
00:04:49.200
were a lot of the decisions you made afterwards about basically you've just you know at a very
00:04:55.480
early age i mean when you were 16 you dropped out of public school dropped out of high school
00:04:58.980
um i did and i mean was that a part of you was there like an underlying ethos you just you didn't
00:05:04.060
want to go that conventional path i mean what did you find in the conventional path that didn't
00:05:07.440
appeal to you was it like the the constraints the lack of freedom what was going on there
00:05:11.180
yeah i think i felt very um i mean i was very bored uh as a student and i think a lot of uh
00:05:18.140
probably most of your listeners are are out of their high school years but i'm sure a lot of
00:05:21.800
them can can relate to that um and so i felt i felt very very bored it felt tedious to me i felt
00:05:28.720
i remember really strongly this feeling of um a lack of respect for my time as a as an individual
00:05:36.640
and uh and it just wasn't a great fit for me i i'm really keen to point out that you know i was not
00:05:42.780
um it's not like i dropped out of school so i could pursue like a self-designed study in
00:05:48.160
you know uh nuclear thermodynamics or something like that i mean i was i was i was not a great
00:05:54.620
student and i was a little bit of a hoodlum i guess at that point in my life not in the sense of
00:06:00.220
like actually doing harm to others but i was definitely you know partying too much and just
00:06:04.500
sort of being a general uh you know teenage ne'er-do-well i guess in a lot of ways um which
00:06:10.860
you know in and of itself i think was a reflection of that boredom that i was feeling and that that
00:06:14.680
sort of level of disrespecting and trying to find my own way in the world particularly when it was
00:06:20.040
really obvious that i didn't really fit very well within the prescribed circumstances of the public
00:06:27.460
education system so um i was super fortunate that i had a really supportive parents like that was that
00:06:33.940
was a real saving grace for me um and they were they were super supportive they um really facilitated
00:06:40.540
my leaving school when it became really obvious that it wasn't the right thing for me um and they
00:06:46.500
offered you know unconditional love and support even though i was you know taking a path that i'm sure
00:06:51.780
was was terrifying to them at the time um but you know i really look back at that as as that that
00:06:59.840
decision as uh really it was a blessing in disguise in a lot of ways i think um in a lot of ways my
00:07:06.640
the life that i've created now um may not have happened um or would have been more difficult to
00:07:14.520
make happen i think if i had gone a more conventional route uh i came from a family of a lot of that that
00:07:20.260
had a lot of higher education in its background my both of my parents went to school my dad had
00:07:24.700
masters uh ironically enough when i left high school my dad worked for the vermont department of
00:07:30.680
education believe it or not um so i think there was there was this presumption that i would probably
00:07:36.340
be you know follow that path um and um because we were a family of modest means it would have meant
00:07:42.640
accruing a not insignificant amount of debt and so sometimes i wonder and you know of course there's
00:07:47.300
no way to know i mean it's like um um i can't i can't back up and do it all over again a different
00:07:52.420
version of it but i do wonder that if i had gone on to school uh and by school i mean college
00:07:57.660
university um if i would have just had the financial um independence since i would have had
00:08:03.900
to assume a lot of um a lot of loans uh to pursue writing as a career path i mean who knows you know
00:08:09.720
it also occurs to me that just as likely that i would have gone on to school and i would have loved
00:08:13.460
it and i would have ended up ended up in some amazing job that would have been dependent on
00:08:17.820
that education so i can't you know i'm not here to say that i i know for certain but um
00:08:23.000
whatever the case may be i i have no regrets about making that choice and i think um that for me it
00:08:30.060
was at the time um the right choice to make and and i still feel that way and so what did you do
00:08:35.800
uh after you dropped out i mean did you so yeah it sounds like you didn't set yourself some sort of
00:08:41.220
like curriculum but i'm sure there was something you learned like there was you went through like
00:08:46.020
the school of heart like you learned you probably learned something during this period where
00:08:49.460
immediately after yeah right so that's a great that's a great way to phrase it i mean i think
00:08:54.860
i think um i learned what i didn't want to do which was to continue sort of down that path of you know
00:09:01.680
smoking too much pot and drinking too much beer and just not really um you know doing much productive
00:09:07.320
with my life because i had a lot of i was sort of hanging out with a crowd that did a lot of that
00:09:10.780
and um that didn't last that long for me actually um and then um i also was at the time
00:09:17.880
uh i picked up some jobs on construction crews and you know interestingly enough you know here's
00:09:23.520
another sort of aspect of this atypical education that i had and and when i say education i i mean
00:09:29.100
i really feel strongly that my education um did not end when i left school and in many ways only
00:09:34.600
sort of just began when i left school um but um you know i was i was i had the luxury i guess during
00:09:41.500
that period of my life to learn a lot of skills uh or at least the basis for a lot of skills that
00:09:46.820
i've been able to rely on and do rely on to this day and so um you know when people sort of
00:09:52.960
uh wonder you know how we do the things some of the things we do um nowadays which is you know uh
00:09:59.260
build our own house um and and utilize a lot of these skills i mean i feel really blessed to have
00:10:05.000
had that opportunity to develop some of those so a lot of those skills i think actually um liberated me
00:10:10.020
later in life right but the thing is you probably didn't know at the time that this was going to come
00:10:14.720
in handy later on right no it was not a plant right yeah right right right i was not i would
00:10:19.920
absolutely not i mean i think i i i had a friend at the time one of my best friends was um himself
00:10:27.600
having a rather atypical teenage um upbringing um and he was actually homeschooled um and he was
00:10:36.620
building his own place at the age of 17 on his parents land um and that actually had a real
00:10:41.540
influence on me so um i think watching that the progress of that place and and seeing that you
00:10:49.500
know this was something that was like possible for a young person to do um you know i i'm sure that
00:10:55.520
that got tucked away somewhere perhaps unconsciously you know but i was i was but but yeah i wasn't
00:11:02.040
thinking to myself okay i'm gonna go learn the trade so that you know you know 15 or 20 or 30 years
00:11:07.480
from now um i can build my own house that wasn't that wasn't the thought process right and i love
00:11:12.360
that because i mean i get i get a lot of emails and letters from young men right they're like 18
00:11:17.020
20s and like there's a lot of anxiety they feel like they have to have a plan they have everything
00:11:21.160
planned out till like they're 50 right or till they retire and uh they you know they tell me like
00:11:26.720
well here's the options i could do and i just tell them like just do something right you never you're
00:11:31.620
going to pick up stuff along the way you don't know at the time is going to be useful later on but
00:11:36.040
like just get started with life and move in some direction and then new directions will open up
00:11:40.980
and you can follow that because you've acquired skills along the way that are useful for that
00:11:44.840
new direction yes so i mean one of the things i've noticed in my life now we're now we're sort of
00:11:50.120
i'm going to back up and take sort of more like the 30,000 foot view but um i really believe strongly
00:11:55.460
that if you structure your life in such a way that you can leave yourself open to serendipity
00:12:00.460
um you will in the long run be be better off and and things will open up for you and happen for you
00:12:06.980
that you might never have imagined so for me you know a lot of the things that have been
00:12:10.940
uh most meaningful and impactful in my life are things that you couldn't you know i could never
00:12:15.520
have planned for um and so i think your advice actually is is really really sound um yeah i think
00:12:21.660
culturally we place way too much emphasis on creating this sort of roadmap for our lives um
00:12:28.460
and um in a way that roadmap becomes and in some ways i think it becomes its own prison
00:12:34.440
yeah i agree because you get like uh goal goal focus right it's like only it's only focus or
00:12:40.540
goal blindness i guess what you call behind right yeah that's a great term yeah actually comes from uh
00:12:46.080
like the military air force pilots or fighter pilots aren't supposed to like focus on one target
00:12:50.960
because it closes their perception to other possible threats right yeah yeah okay um okay so
00:12:58.020
uh so you dropped out of high school you did construction work did all sorts of different
00:13:01.940
types of odd jobs over a few years then you met your your future wife or now wife uh you guys were
00:13:08.240
dating uh boyfriend girlfriend uh and then you the two of you decide to buy 40 acres in northern vermont
00:13:17.420
um and and build a homestead and i think when a lot of people hear that they think oh boy that must be
00:13:22.640
really nice it's like the the quintessential courier and ive's dream i would do that if i had the money
00:13:28.720
sure but you and your wife didn't have much money so can you talk about the process of how you
00:13:35.300
made this happen for you for you too yeah absolutely absolutely and and you know i think it is important
00:13:41.460
to acknowledge that it is true that we didn't have a lot of money and we we didn't come from what
00:13:46.060
most of us would consider money in this day and age we're both from you know middle-class families
00:13:50.380
um so that you know it was us sort of making our way in the world but of course we were benefiting
00:13:55.900
from all sorts of other sort of entrenched privileges so i think that's that there is you know we'd that
00:14:01.700
is important to acknowledge that um but um yeah at the same time you know we definitely um it was it
00:14:08.420
was a struggle uh i was at the time you know uh flipping between construction and um working in a
00:14:16.880
bike and ski shop i was a really avid backcountry skier and cyclist um and so that was kind of my
00:14:22.640
my uh off-season job if there if if i did or whenever it got things got slow in the construction
00:14:28.760
and the trades and she was um actually working on a vegetable farm of all things so i think between
00:14:34.240
two of us we made like 20 bucks an hour you know it was it was these were not it's not a king's
00:14:39.740
ransom at all um and so the way we did it basically was inhabit a series of um pretty deplorable little
00:14:48.640
hovels uh um that we were able to rent either for you know i think the most there was a period there
00:14:54.440
of like two or three years when we were pretty intensely saving um and i think during that entire
00:14:59.800
period we never paid more than like 150 a month for rent um and then during one long period in the
00:15:05.680
sort of final push to saving money um we actually lived in a tent on our friend's land um into
00:15:11.720
december in vermont and and i do i remember you know very very clearly uh living in the tent or
00:15:18.540
sleeping in the tent and we had this stick that we had propped up next to this mattress and the
00:15:22.940
stick was so that we could push the snow off the roof of the tent without getting out so the tent
00:15:27.080
didn't collapse on us you know um so there was a long period of living in what most people these
00:15:33.620
days would consider really substandard conditions um and we were able uh i don't do you want the
00:15:39.200
whole like people ask this question a lot and i think it's a great question because um and i'm happy
00:15:44.080
to talk about the finances because because i think too often this stuff gets glossed over um and i don't
00:15:48.640
want to talk about money and all this stuff and and i'm i'm totally fine no let's go i'll give you
00:15:53.060
the whole like financial yeah i mean like i mean you also mentioned like you like you guys bathed
00:15:56.820
in a river right yeah oh yeah yeah yeah we still do that quite a bit i mean the other benefit of all
00:16:03.900
this you know it's like it set our standards and expectations to a point where that later in our
00:16:09.240
lives it's been it's been really easy to sort of satisfy our material needs if that makes any sense
00:16:15.380
right so it's always easier you know it's easier if you if you're standard living and your material
00:16:22.480
expectations are set um high it's it's difficult to walk those back down if you know what i'm saying
00:16:27.580
so uh it's loss aversion yeah a lot thank you that's the term i was looking for um so um anyway
00:16:35.180
we managed to say we could say $15,000 um on this sort of you know uh olympic level frugality uh measures
00:16:44.140
um and with that we were able to get a loan from the bank um for another $15,000 uh and we bought
00:16:52.720
a piece of land that cost $30,000 the banks at least around here they'll if you want to buy bear
00:16:57.580
land you've got to have um 50 so our budget was with $30,000 and we actually found a piece of land
00:17:03.440
that we really liked after a year of relatively fruitless searching we found the piece of land that
00:17:08.060
we bought uh for $30,000 so once we once we bought that um we borrowed $10,000 from a friend uh who
00:17:17.880
had some resources and we built what i call sort of the prototypical hippie shack um which was just
00:17:23.640
like a two-room cabin you know up on piers um and really really simple little wood stove uh and we
00:17:30.860
built that and we lived there until we had paid off and this is sort of this for me is sort of a key
00:17:36.500
point um we're really debt averse um and sometimes i i joke that there you know the really the the
00:17:43.400
real reason we live this way is essentially because uh i'm lazy which is to say i don't really ever
00:17:48.880
i i really hope to never be in a spot in my life where i have to take a job i don't want or like
00:17:59.080
simply because i'm trying to serve as debt um so a lot of my you know life choices um are really
00:18:05.960
sort of structured around the idea that not having debt um affords me a level of autonomy that a more
00:18:15.060
indebted lifestyle does not um so we all the way along even though we did take debt from time to
00:18:20.000
time we were really really careful to pay it down before we took on more debt or and we were also
00:18:25.320
really certain that it never became something that we couldn't handle pretty easily um so anyway we
00:18:30.760
built this little cabin we paid back our friend we paid back the bank and then we did actually take
00:18:34.840
another loan from the bank a construction loan we added on and built um what most people consider
00:18:40.760
a more appropriate uh uh sized and and um a more commodious uh house in 21st century america so that
00:18:50.040
was kind of the progression um we've actually since sold that actually just last year we sold that
00:18:56.500
property um and we we had so much fun spending 20 years creating our perfect homestead that we decided
00:19:02.840
we wanted to do it again so um i'm speaking to you right now from um the inside of a house that's
00:19:10.340
about 90 percent finished that we've been building over the last six months or so wow that's great and
00:19:14.680
i imagine was the first go around was it like pretty rough like i know you had you had construction
00:19:19.400
experience but uh building an entire house i mean that just seems like daunting i'm sure there's a lot of
00:19:24.360
i mean i i should point out that we've had we have help have had help along the way so it wasn't like we
00:19:30.040
did you know a hundred percent of the work but we were definitely the primary the primary labor force
00:19:35.900
um so this is a good example of communitarianism right yeah exactly exactly and we're really
00:19:42.120
fortunate to have a lot of friends um in the trades uh you know have skills that we can rely on and when
00:19:48.380
we get when we sort of you know run into uh the the um upper end of our own experience knowledge and
00:19:55.700
skill level um which which happens more frequently than i really care to admit on your show but um
00:20:00.720
uh yeah so so it didn't you know the second go around um uh you know we did have a lot more
00:20:08.000
experience building this place we also had a much better sense of what we wanted um and having lived
00:20:14.020
in a place for 20 years having seen our sort of lives evolve um and you know we had it was sort of
00:20:19.440
like felt like this opportunity to do this amazing thing and like wow we can we could do this
00:20:23.600
it uh over again and make all these little tweaks that we've always talked about making so
00:20:27.580
um you know here we are and um it's yeah it's been it's been actually just an amazing process really
00:20:34.440
really i've just had a ton of fun that's awesome i think all of us have actually yeah well i'm curious
00:20:40.020
i mean what was it that was driving you during those like when you were you know using the stick to
00:20:46.780
push snow off the tent and right there was you know you had a battle you know big black flies uh
00:20:52.940
little what was it that was like okay this i'm we're doing it for this reason what was the underlying
00:20:57.520
ethos behind this madness oh that's such a great question i and because i haven't i i don't i've never
00:21:04.280
really sat down and like thought about it and and i don't know that there was an underlying ethos
00:21:10.800
um or or a singular underlying ethos um you know i think we both i know we both felt really compelled
00:21:18.440
to inhabit a piece of land where we could do a lot of the things we do now which is you know we
00:21:24.340
we raise animals we have cows we have pigs we have chickens um we do a lot of foraging uh we have
00:21:31.760
gardens um we have an orchard i mean these are all things that were really important to us even going
00:21:38.580
back as far as you know our early 20s when we first met so there was definitely this sort of
00:21:42.740
shared vision we had it was a little hazy we didn't know exactly what it was going to look like but
00:21:47.320
um you know from not long after my then girlfriend now wife penny and i met there was this sort of
00:21:54.780
shared vision that we were going to have this small farmstead homestead farm whatever you want
00:22:00.540
to call it so that that was definitely a motivating factor there was no sort of at that point anyway
00:22:05.680
sort of more like you know larger larger picture philosophical underpinnings um no thorough s type
00:22:13.360
yeah exactly right right that wasn't what it was about it was like this is what we want to do and
00:22:17.320
i would say that that's somewhat true even to this day i don't you know i don't wake up in the morning
00:22:23.060
you know thinking about um you know how i'm going to do my little part to change the world although
00:22:30.260
i think it's important that we all reflect on that in some period point in our lives but mostly
00:22:35.200
i wake up in the morning you know genuinely pretty excited about the opportunity to do the things that
00:22:40.580
we are able to do around here every day so you know i actually enjoy getting up in the morning and
00:22:45.200
having chores to do it uh it gives me a feeling of purpose and i like you know i really um um uh
00:22:53.260
grateful for the relationships with our animals and with the land um i like the physical labor that's
00:22:58.660
involved in this life um i think we really have come to a place where we shortchange uh the the
00:23:06.120
benefits and the enjoyment that comes of manual labor in this culture um and and so a lot of it is
00:23:13.940
is you know a little bit of just sort of like this is what our version of a fulfilling life is and
00:23:20.300
and i totally understand that it's not everyone's version i get that 100 but for us this is you know
00:23:26.140
this is what feels meaningful to um to have these have this work to do on a day-in day-out basis
00:23:33.140
it seems like also like a sense of place is really important to you and your wife that's what i got
00:23:38.720
from the book like you wanted to be really connected to a physical place and all that's involved with
00:23:44.280
that it's totally true although it feels weird saying that now having just sort of made this move
00:23:49.580
right um you know we probably didn't move that far right no we didn't we didn't and uh but but
00:23:55.500
you're you're totally right and and um a sense of place and having that you know feeling embedded
00:24:01.460
and actually where we move to is essentially in uh on the periphery of the same community so
00:24:06.940
community-wise it's really actually hardly different at all um but being embedded in a community having
00:24:12.580
an awareness of place and region um is really really important to us um and and also having our
00:24:20.060
you know the ways that your lives become shaped um by your by community and region i mean really we
00:24:26.260
inhabit a very transient um society at this point and as any uh first world society is in the 21st century
00:24:35.400
and there's some amazing benefits that go along with that but um there is i think uh of a wider
00:24:43.100
spread sort of sense of placelessness that comes of that um and i think a lot of people feel that and
00:24:49.760
and uh feel that a loss of of having that connection uh whether it's to a particular piece of land or to a
00:24:57.280
community or even just to a region um and that is one thing that is really really important to us and
00:25:03.800
um and really um you know this life is all about trade-offs you know it's like i i think um it is
00:25:11.240
really easy to sort of look at it uh from the outside looking in and it seems really idyllic um and there
00:25:17.380
are aspects of it of course that are really idyllic um but there are trade-offs i mean we don't really
00:25:21.760
get to travel we don't have that luxury um in part for finances um in part because we have animals
00:25:28.920
that depend on our care um in part you know in the winter we rely only on wood for heating so there's
00:25:35.380
there's a lot of aspects that make you know that that really do ensure that we don't really um have
00:25:41.180
those opportunities we do we can't just sort of you know close the door behind us um and be gone so
00:25:46.980
um but for us you know and and there are times absolutely when we wish we we could do that more
00:25:53.620
readily uh but the opportunity to sort of really embed ourselves here is more important to us than
00:25:59.920
than that flexibility so you can't have it all you can't have it all right but who can who can
00:26:06.820
no one i don't know i guess donald trump i mean maybe donald trump can have it so
00:26:10.380
maybe donald will buy a piece of property next to you yeah i don't even want to go there all right
00:26:17.540
let's talk about this so you you and wife established your little homestead
00:26:22.120
and then uh you'll have your first son right in the home that was pretty cool like you actually
00:26:28.420
like your son that's right right on our living room floor right both our boys were right and you
00:26:33.640
describe how you were able to point in the specific spots like where they were born yeah
00:26:37.340
yeah it's totally true and that's that's really cool um but uh so it was the came into the i'm sure
00:26:44.180
they reached an age where you were all like any parent you start thinking about their schooling
00:26:48.500
right i remember when my wife and i had started having these conversations probably two years ago
00:26:53.620
like my son was getting to be about three it's like hey what are we gonna do about school you all
00:26:58.480
decided instead of going uh through public schools and not even traditional homeschooling you decided
00:27:03.840
to keep them home and do what's called unschooling i know you don't like that word um you talk about
00:27:08.920
that in the book but uh can you describe what unschooling is and how it's different from
00:27:13.100
traditional homeschooling yeah i mean so the simplest way um to put it maybe which still
00:27:21.360
doesn't really explain anything but to help to understand that the that there are there is a
00:27:24.560
difference there um which is that all unschooling is homeschooling but not all homeschooling is
00:27:29.580
unschooling um so a lot of a lot of homeschool in fact the majority of families that choose to
00:27:35.080
homeschool generally follow um a pretty set standardized curriculum um and that is not what we do um and
00:27:44.540
so the other way i like to talk about it and that that's relatively concise because i think
00:27:50.480
you know one of the things about our style of education and the way our kids learn is that it is
00:27:56.500
it is really hard to sort of talk about in in really bite-sized pieces it becomes um it's a really
00:28:02.380
sort of nuanced big picture thing but um the other the other the other term i've come to really like
00:28:08.600
like that i that i think begins to sort of express what um some of our philosophy that um while the
00:28:16.400
public education system is standardized curriculum-based education um tries to make learning happen
00:28:22.460
our style is to try to make room for learning to happen um and so by that what i mean is that like
00:28:29.640
you know we try to ensure um and we do i think um ensure that our kids have uh a lot of uh flexibility
00:28:38.100
um and freedom in their day in day out schedules so that they are able to follow those pursuits that
00:28:46.240
are of most interest to them um so yeah and i did it's true that i don't really love the term
00:28:52.360
unschooling it's kind of the one that's that's um caught on in in the national consciousness to the
00:28:58.280
extent that any of them have um and i guess that you know the problem i see with it is that it sort
00:29:02.940
of describes what we don't do it doesn't really describe what we do do um and uh and also you
00:29:10.360
know it's like a lot of my kids need to be unschooled they've never been to school if anyone needs to be
00:29:14.760
unschooled it's it's me you know it's my wife right we are the ones who who sort of you know myself
00:29:21.460
less than her because i i left the public education system at a pretty young age but we're the ones who
00:29:27.200
went went to school and had that you know sort of in some case in some ways suffered for that
00:29:31.140
experience and and really need to sort of try to undo it um i think in some in some regards so is
00:29:36.320
that must be hard though because you you two had this experience of what education's like so is there
00:29:40.740
that temptation or that tendency to be like sit down with your sons and like make every moment a
00:29:45.660
learning moment right like son you know you're making this bow here um you know this no i'd say i mean
00:29:51.720
we don't do a lot of that um i i mean it it happens for sure i mean look you know this this
00:29:58.900
summer we spent the summer building a barn in the house with them and there's there's almost no way
00:30:04.020
for that not to be a learning moment whether you're actually you know sitting down and and explaining
00:30:09.700
you know the particulars of roof pitches and how you arrive at a particular roof angle or whatever
00:30:15.740
the case is um it just it it's it's much more sort of happening by osmosis than than really sitting
00:30:22.440
down we did you know i don't i should say that we there is a certain amount of and this has been
00:30:27.440
particularly true we found with math which is one of those things that we at least um have had a hard
00:30:33.480
time incorporating without actually sitting down so we do spend a little bit of time sitting down
00:30:38.520
um so that they at least have the benefit of learning um some some basic and even mid-level mathematics
00:30:45.220
uh because it's just really i think essential to their ability to to thrive in the world that
00:30:51.180
they have those skills um and i i know having talked to other parents who are on a similar
00:30:55.640
educational trajectory you know so much does have to do with the particular child and their temperament
00:31:01.060
um and and their proclivities and some kids you know they love math and you know that that's not
00:31:06.720
necessary we have found that it is necessary for us um and that's actually another point that i would
00:31:11.240
you know i'd like to make when i talk about this is that you know the public education system and a
00:31:16.340
standardized curriculum in general um is basically one thing to a million different families um what
00:31:22.680
we're what this is is a million different things to a million different families you know it can be
00:31:27.320
whatever you want it to be um and that's another reason i think it's so hard to really define in any
00:31:32.720
kind of concise way um it just means different things to different people yeah and i think a lot of
00:31:37.740
people are listening to this or hear that you know they hear this concept of unschooling uh they
00:31:42.780
think well how how do you how do your kids learn to read or like how do they learn to write but it
00:31:47.280
sounds like yeah they they've done that right oh yeah yeah yeah i mean i think a lot of that
00:31:57.740
we have lost culturally my belief um we have lost culturally uh a lot of confidence in a child's
00:32:11.060
ability to our children's ability to learn without formalized instruction so i in my experience um
00:32:20.380
and and of course there are going to be exceptions because there are children who struggle with very
00:32:26.340
specific learning challenges um but the majority majority of children you're not going to be if
00:32:32.480
you if you put them in a home where there are books uh and you give them access to books and you read to
00:32:37.620
them you're not going to be able to stop them from learning how to read um and so i know yeah you're
00:32:43.760
you're exactly right neither one of our children words was formally taught to read excuse me they
00:32:47.980
they simply learned because we we exposed them to books um almost constantly this actually brings me to
00:32:54.640
another point and that i want to make sure to make before we're through this conversation which is
00:33:00.640
that i think it would be very possible to do um some version of this of what we're doing very very
00:33:06.840
poorly right so a lot of this style of learning and i think is really really dependent on a healthy
00:33:16.200
supportive uh environment where the parents are really engaged in facilitating their children's
00:33:22.700
learning so i think when a lot of people hear unschooling they think oh it must be this like
00:33:26.680
totally hands-off things your kids just do you know whatever they want all the time um they you
00:33:33.020
know they probably are just sitting around doing nothing etc etc um that may be true in some families
00:33:39.380
who unschool or whatever you want to call it um but i can assure you that in our family um you know
00:33:46.360
the level of facilitation that we do in order you know to sort of help them find uh mentors um and
00:33:52.600
other people who can who can further their learning and their skills um it would be a heck of a lot
00:33:58.540
easier to just send our kids to school a lot easier so we are you know this is this is our choice and we
00:34:04.440
have actually structured in many ways structure our life around making sure that we are able to create
00:34:10.360
these opportunities and facilitate these opportunities for our children so you know you mentioned earlier
00:34:14.560
about trade-offs right yeah so i mean i imagine there's there's trade-offs with this i mean what
00:34:19.380
is it let's talk about we let's not talk about the negative trends like what is something that
00:34:23.120
your kids are learning that they wouldn't be able to learn if they were in public schools
00:34:27.460
well oh boy yeah so they they have a whole range i mean i don't know so i think it's hard to say you
00:34:35.920
know could they it would it be impossible for them to learn some of these skills um outside of the
00:34:41.800
public school system no it wouldn't be impossible but of course the reality is the public school
00:34:46.620
uh you know if you're if your child's in school um they're in school for somewhere around 40 hours a
00:34:53.540
week uh maybe more maybe a little less depending on their commute and whatnot um then of course there's
00:34:58.880
homework and then of course there's the fact that you know the average uh teen in this day and age is
00:35:03.500
in front of a screen more than 50 hours a week um so you end up with a situation where there simply
00:35:08.480
isn't any time to learn anything but what that curriculum lays out for you so you know um
00:35:15.140
if you're talking about sort of like hard tangible things that my children have learned i mean they're
00:35:20.420
both um really really proficient with with hand tools they're both um extremely proficient in the
00:35:28.240
wild um they spend a lot of time out in the woods they do a lot of uh hunting and foraging
00:35:34.300
um either one of them called a shelter um they are proficient with most domestic tasks either one
00:35:43.020
if they if they uh if there's a tear in their pants either one of them can sew it up themselves
00:35:47.760
um you know they're they're proficient in most of the skills that you actually need in order to make
00:35:54.840
your way in the world outside of the sort of moneyed economic system um now i realize that this
00:36:01.940
starts to sound a little bit like we're just raising like a couple of survivalists and that's
00:36:05.420
the only goal and that's not the case at all uh... it the other thing so it would bring me to my of my
00:36:10.760
other point which is that uh... it's not so much that these are the skills that we think that our
00:36:16.360
children have to have these are skills that are outgrowth of their interests and their environment for
00:36:22.080
sure uh... it's much more that we feel really strongly that um... they are learning a base level of
00:36:31.400
resourcefulness uh... and sort of self reliance and ability uh... to learn outside a structured
00:36:39.340
system without that curriculum uh... that we believe are going to serve them well no matter what it is
00:36:45.240
they decide to learn right so if they decide it's possible it's entirely possible that one of them
00:36:50.580
or both of them are going to decide they want to go to college and they want to do something that
00:36:54.620
you know it looks a lot more like uh... what many people would consider a traditional
00:36:59.160
uh... sort of you know first world career path that may still happen um... and
00:37:05.480
uh... it's our belief that the resourcefulness that they're learning and the self reliance that they're
00:37:10.440
learning in the context of the skills they're learning um... are going to carry them through that path
00:37:15.120
also and confidence you know a tremendous i i really what i see and what i feel
00:37:20.880
uh... and what i think it's somewhat inherent to the the you know our cultural assumptions
00:37:26.700
that children can't learn unless they're put into this specific environment
00:37:31.960
uh... is a lack of confidence and i think it's our own schooling as adults that has eroded that confidence
00:37:39.180
you know but if you're told that this is how you learn and this is how you have to learn
00:37:44.760
uh... you start start to believe that that's the only way you learn
00:37:49.420
uh... so some people you know they use the term life learning to describe what we're doing
00:37:53.100
that's that's a pretty good term i mean you know so it's like
00:37:59.340
uh... and we forget i think as parents that our children
00:38:03.140
you know are watching and learning from us all the time
00:38:06.540
um... and i think one of the way the reasons and maybe the primary reason we
00:38:10.740
we have forgotten these things is because we've come to understand and we've come to associate
00:38:15.940
learning with a very particular style of standardized instruction
00:38:22.780
i think this uh... segues nicely to this another point you make in your book
00:38:27.060
about how um... you talk about how we we want children to be responsible
00:38:45.180
that a lot of you know suburban american parents would be like
00:38:56.920
and adapt and to take on those responsibilities
00:38:59.260
yeah sure i mean i i guess maybe the most obvious
00:39:07.560
you know before they were done with their fourth year
00:39:21.980
which they should be granted with these responsibilities
00:39:44.300
i don't have the luxury of spending as much time with their kids
00:39:54.500
and that was really an outgrowth of the fact that
00:39:58.580
have a knife on our belt and it's something that we use
00:40:03.500
you know the other thing we taught them to do really early on was
00:40:10.280
like you know yes they've cut themselves many many times
00:40:14.080
uh... between the two of them fortunately never seriously
00:40:18.280
you know the majority of the time that it happens
00:40:20.560
um... we hardly know about it because they'll just sort of come into the house
00:40:23.860
and quietly go about getting themselves a bandage
00:40:25.980
uh... it actually doesn't happen that much anymore but
00:40:28.740
you know five four five years ago it wasn't uncommon uh...
00:40:32.740
and so uh... but you know one thing that's really interesting is that if you do
00:40:39.840
uh... you know uh... more from a more anthropological basis and look at how other
00:40:44.880
other groups of people other cultures raise their children it's very very
00:40:49.880
um... in other cultures for children to have much greater exposure to what we
00:40:55.140
here in the u.s. would be considered would consider you know sort of heart
00:40:59.320
wrenchingly dangerous so you know it's like i i do believe that we have
00:41:04.380
um... you know we overreact uh... to the the tangible risk in our children's lives and we
00:41:11.480
generally tend to i think to not react nearly strongly enough to those risks that
00:41:16.340
aren't so tangible you know the risks of our children being sedentary the risk of
00:41:20.600
our children spending all of these incredible quantity of hours in front of
00:41:25.100
digital devices without really thinking about that impact on not just their bodies
00:41:30.100
but their intellect their psyche their spirits i mean that that's a
00:41:33.560
conversation that just doesn't happen at all and yet we worry you know we fret
00:41:37.000
endlessly about the fact that they might cut themselves with a knife right um...
00:41:41.340
or get abducted right from their front yard or something like that
00:41:44.860
yeah i mean you know these are all things that you know they they tragically do
00:41:48.960
happen in a very very very infrequently and unfortunately you know we have a media
00:41:54.800
cycle um... and we have uh... an ad based um... media that depends on on ratings in
00:42:02.560
order to to make profits and so these are the types of events that garner the most
00:42:07.960
coverage these are the type of events that we hear about um... and so uh... we fear
00:42:13.020
things that by and large don't happen um... and in the process uh... we really i think do a
00:42:19.160
lot of damage to our kids so i i believe and and and so that does my wife you know
00:42:24.620
unfortunately on the same page this would be really tough if we weren't um... you
00:42:28.040
know that it's really really critical to a child uh... a human being development
00:42:33.220
um... that they have an opportunity to take appropriate risk um... because i think
00:42:39.300
that lack of appropriate risk uh... and during the earlier stages of a child's life
00:42:44.460
um... leads to inappropriate risk taking later in life
00:42:49.220
i think you mentioned this like that opportunity to as you said you know to be
00:42:53.740
responsible to know and to feel trusted sorry go ahead
00:42:56.820
well i know i was gonna say i think you mentioned studies where they said that if
00:43:00.060
you when we make things safer like we actually make things unsafe
00:43:06.140
yeah i think there have been studies where it's like as soon as you plant that that
00:43:10.780
notion you know that you plant that seed that something is unsafe um that in fact is
00:43:16.300
when it becomes unsafe you know because that awareness arrives to the front um... and
00:43:21.020
actually uh... can kick and actually cause people you know through uh... just i think
00:43:26.020
that fear of that to actually uh... attracted that outcome in some way
00:43:30.700
i have to go back and look at it it's been a long time i've read i've read those studies
00:43:33.620
it's been a long time since i've looked at what they actually found that that was
00:43:36.700
the upshot with that that that sort of expectation of something being unsafe was
00:43:40.580
actually in many ways in many times was what made it unsafe
00:43:43.940
interesting so i'm curious um have you and your wife maybe had some
00:43:51.220
are we doing the right thing do you ever have those conversations at night and
00:43:55.940
this is this the right thing are we actually doing the right thing for our
00:43:58.900
sons or are you guys pretty like yeah no this is it we're we're there we're doing
00:44:03.900
i think if we didn't have some doubts we probably wouldn't be very good parents
00:44:08.660
to be totally honest um and uh... so yeah i mean that's that's sort of a uh... you
00:44:14.500
know um... a short way of saying that uh... yes we do have doubts from time to
00:44:20.940
time um... i don't think we have um... we don't have like big picture doubts like we
00:44:27.900
don't we don't think to ourselves you know um... oh my god is did we make the right
00:44:33.620
choice to not send them to school that that is that we don't doubt that but
00:44:38.860
within the context of what we're doing and how we're doing it
00:44:44.260
those doubts are that are what led us to deciding that we did need to institute
00:44:48.580
some sit down math with the kids because we sort of realized that
00:44:56.500
on their own that it wasn't happening um and so we realized that you know we
00:45:00.420
needed to we needed to ensure that a certain amount of that happened um i
00:45:05.020
don't worry about uh... you know sort of goes back to what we were talking about
00:45:09.640
like you know almost first first thing um it which is you know the sort of the
00:45:14.840
plan and like and like their future and i do not for an instant worry about their
00:45:21.380
ability to make their way in this world um and i'm very very confident uh...
00:45:26.420
that they'll figure out what it is is right for them and they'll figure out a
00:45:30.900
way to make it work um and a lot of my confidence in that
00:45:34.400
comes from seeing the ways in which they're able to sort of work through
00:45:38.980
you know their problems and challenges at this stage in their life so um
00:45:47.760
but yeah you know specifically sometimes we think you know
00:45:50.460
and and i think i think again it's like i think any parent who doesn't
00:45:54.420
on some level stop once in a while and question you know what it is they're
00:45:58.540
doing um i i think actually you can really benefit from from questioning
00:46:02.860
the the process whether you're sending your kid to school or whether you're not
00:46:07.040
or whatever your circumstances are um so um you know we question sometimes like
00:46:13.200
have we have we given them short trip because we've decided to live
00:46:18.200
you know in a lily white state where they simply just don't have that much
00:46:22.180
exposure to other other cultures and ethnicities i mean that's that's a real
00:46:26.940
sort of trade-off that that um our kids live in um and so there's there's stuff
00:46:32.540
like that you know um and again it goes back to like well what
00:46:35.720
you know this brings me to another point i really want to make which is
00:46:39.800
i hear a lot from people like well what about all the opportunities
00:46:43.500
they're missing out on because they're not in school
00:46:45.740
um and and the only like sort of honest response to that before you know of
00:46:50.560
course they're missing out on opportunities just like every child
00:46:53.120
in school is missing out on opportunities that my children have
00:46:57.220
just like any child in any situation is missing out on opportunities we can't
00:47:03.040
you know this is the world is just like this incredibly rich and diverse place
00:47:06.560
it would be totally impossible for us to expose our children to every possible
00:47:14.400
and i think in some ways um you know the irony is that in some ways by
00:47:19.160
trying to do that uh which i think a lot of parents do we get caught up in this
00:47:24.000
sort of like rat race of like trying to create as much opportunity for our kids
00:47:30.560
schedule them to the hilt to the point at which
00:47:33.580
whatever that is they're they're experiencing whatever opportunity we're
00:47:37.160
trying to expose them to they're they're really almost unable to absorb any
00:47:40.780
any of it because they're so over scheduled and over you know overworked
00:47:45.660
i mean i hear a lot from parents whose kids are in a more conventional educational
00:47:49.560
on a more conventional educational path you know how just how exhausted their
00:47:53.720
kids are all the time um and i think that's a really tragic outgrowth
00:47:57.900
of what has become i think the contemporary expectation
00:48:02.340
for our children's education which is that it's going to turn them into
00:48:06.620
productive economic units i mean that's the primary goal now of our public school
00:48:12.080
system um and i think that's a really tragic outcome
00:48:15.440
well ben this has been a great conversation uh where can people learn more about uh your
00:48:21.040
books and as well as uh your work um if they want to read more uh and learn more
00:48:27.160
they can uh check out my website which is ben hewitt.net
00:48:30.580
well ben hewitt thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:48:33.760
thank you brett i appreciate it my guest today was ben hewitt he's the author of several books
00:48:37.780
but today we talked about homegrown and find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere
00:48:41.700
you can find out more information about ben's work at ben hewitt.net
00:48:45.300
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:48:52.480
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:48:55.920
the podcast i'd really appreciate if you go give us a review on itunes or stitcher
00:48:59.200
to help get the word about the show and give us some feedback on how we can improve the show
00:49:02.920
as always i appreciate the continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to