Prologue
For a long time, I could feel that I had something to contribute to the unschooling community, but I had not yet named the shape of it clearly enough to protect it.
Now I can.
As I am an artist.
As I am a documentarian.
As I am an author.
I am a cognitive scientist, anthropologist, linguist, software engineer, artist, and unschooler. I move through life noticing patterns, meanings, rituals, language, systems, and stories. Again and again, I have noticed how little room our culture makes for vivid representations of unschoolers and worldschoolers living real, expansive, intelligent, unconventional lives outside the cookie-cutter system.
Too often, these lives are flattened into stereotype, fear, debate, or limited explanations.
Life is in the small scenes. The rabbit trails. The deschooling. The humor. The reinvention of time. The return of personhood. The wonder that appears when learning is no longer forced to march in a straight line.
That is the territory I write from.
From within the story.
As a witness.
From the privilege of observing, recording, and creating.
This work is my offering to a global community that is more diverse than ever and still becoming. It is my way of helping through authorship, through entertainment, through documentation, and through the patient rendering of a life lived otherwise.
I am building a body of work.
A body of work that entertains.
A body of work that documents.
A body of work that makes room for unschooling and worldschooling to exist not merely as vague ideas, but as culture, atmosphere, life, and the unfolding of human experiences.
Let this stand, then, as a beginning and a boundary.
What you will not find here is instruction.
What you will not find here is a blueprint.
What you will find here is an authored record of discovery, deschooling, lifelong learning, and the many possible textures of a life lived otherwise.