Our Unschooling Lifestyle.
Our Unschooling life and where it has taken us never ceases to amaze me, for us Unschooling is not merely a method of educating children but a lifestyle encompassing the whole being. It becomes a part of who you are, slowly eating away at old beliefs and truths, replacing them with what now seem the more logical perspectives on so many things. One day you wake with the realization that you are no longer a part of mainstream society, and that your views are so at odds with those of most other people. This can be more than a little disconcerting at times, especially in the beginning of your new understanding. You may even begin to question your own sanity, wondering why the majority of your friends and acquaintances can't see things the way you do. So you may occasionally slip back into old habits and beliefs, only to reawaken at a later date and stumble back onto your pathway into Unschooling. Eventually you become so confident in your beliefs that you want to shout out to the whole world “You don't have to send your children to school, they can learn more at home without ever loosing their wonderful curiosity and without you having to play teacher”, but a big problem is that you know that they just wouldn't hear a word that you are saying, so you sadly watch as the school bus takes it's little captives off to what for some is another day of torment and torture.
Unfortunately through necessity, most uschooled children are surrounded by a schooled society; they eagerly wait for the afternoon when the school bus brings their neighboring friends home. An even greater influence on the children is that their home environment is usually a part of that same insane system, Mom and or Dad head off daily to a job that often makes little sense to them and even less to the children, so the main example that is set within the family is of conforming to society's expectations that we live the way most other people do. Not everyone can be self employed or even be able to work in a job that gives them real satisfaction, however the blind acceptance of the day to day drudgery of a job you would rather not go to can't be good for the soul of the individual or the family unit. To me it seems like a tragedy that so many people on this planet live for weekends and vacations, spending most of their waking hours clock watching in just the manner most of us learned in school. I am certain that the human animal was not designed to live this way, and that without school's influence it would be very difficult for many employers to fill positions, either due to them being mind numbingly boring or because to work each day at their set task many people need to compromise their principals.
By preventing school from anesthetizing the minds of our children we are well on the way to giving them a brighter future free of the need to compete or keep up with others. I can't offer much in the way of suggestions for adults on how to get beyond this mindset of blindly doing what is expected and take an 8-5 job with little time left over to live and enjoy life. The only suggestion I can give is for you to find some worthwhile endeavor that you are passionate about and see where it could lead you as far as making a living is concerned, or if you are unable to do that minimize the hours that you are a slave to your bank manager by living as simply as possible and minimizing your unnecessary possessions and debts, you may be surprised by how much easier it is than living the consumer lifestyle. This change of lifestyle could put you in closer contact with your spouse and children and in my opinion lessen the chance that you will be afflicted by a break down of the family unit.
We have found a way to make our lifestyle fit our unschooling philosophy, what we do is rewarding financially and spiritually fulfilling, and as an added bonus we don't have any problems with our conscience over what we do. The one difficulty I have is the knowledge that if this were a perfect world our services would be redundant, that in a sane society most of what we do for survival would end because we mostly live off the side effects of this consumer society's wastefulness. With the exception of the sale of livestock and eggs, taking what other people regard as waste generates all of our income, we however see these “waste” materials as a valuable resource. From what would be regarded as the lowliest of matter to food still fit for human consumption, we recycle many organic items, either through composting or through animals. We are the local compost site and each weekend from spring to fall hundreds of gardeners bring their leaves, grass clippings and brush; the leaves and grass clippings are fed straight to the cows, they pick through and eat what they want, the rest makes a comfortable place to lay down, and eventually ends up as compost. The brush is deposited in the sheep and goat pasture where the animals eagerly strip the leaves and bark, what is left behind will be ground up and composted along with the grass and manure from the cow paddock.
The other “waste” that we get paid to take is largely a direct result of the madness of the consumer society, in which it becomes more economically viable for a store to discard products close to their “sell by” date rather than reduce the price to encourage shoppers to buy day old bread etc. Some of the produce we take is damaged beyond salvage, but it would be less than 5% of the volume of waste we receive from the supermarket each day. Most is still fit for human consumption, but it is discarded because some magical date has arrived which turns wholesome food into garbage, or because one apple in a bag is marked or rotting. Just recently we gained a new customer, the local co-op who maybe because they are small are more cautious with what they discard, little of the produce we pick up from them is still saleable. The produce and baked, frozen and dairy goods from stores are regarded as exempt items in that they can be fed to the animals without any cooking as long as there is no possibility of contamination from raw meat. The other category of food waste is that from the kitchens and tables of institutions such as the university and hospital, this must be cooked at 212 for 30 minutes before it can be fed to livestock, so for the present time we are composting this while working on a method of cooking it using heat from our outdoor wood boiler.
The way Western society regards food as “garbage” to be thrown into a dumpster and hauled off to a landfill site to rot and pollute is the essence of stupidity and environmental terrorism; this should be regarded as a valuable asset, which to us it is. We are paid for the service we provide to the stores and institutions and while saving these organic materials we also save our customers money, in that they pay half what it would cost to send the same volume to landfill. So you would imagine that most stores and kitchens would take advantage of our service, however the opposite is true, they look at these substances as waste to discard at great expense, however once someone else looks on them as an asset the minds of the producers of these “wastes” can only dwell on what a favor they are doing to allow you to have their “garbage”.
We started out this operation with that as our mindset, we would go into three stores and haul out their trash, very thankful to them for allowing us to do so. We were supplementing the animals feed as well as doing something good for the environment, and happy about being allowed to do so. In return for saving them many hundreds of dollars you would think that we would at least receive gratitude, but on the contrary we were made to feel like cockroaches feeding off the waste pile. After eight months of doing this we found out that another store in town was looking for someone to take their waste too. We saw the store manager and told him that we would haul out their food waste for no payment as we were doing for other stores, but after just a week we could see that this was not economically viable, we needed a pressure washer to clean the barrels after each use and a truck to haul out the volume of waste we were then encountering. I wrote a letter to the store manager explaining this, giving the first week of our service for no charge, he was very open to the idea of paying for our services as he had done in the past with another food waste recycler. So from our humble start as Dumpster Divers a business arose, and along with it a whole new level of respect from the people we were dealing with in the stores, we are no longer made to feel as though we are vermin.
The cycle here is almost perfect, the children can see the beauty in the simplicity of living in tune with Nature instead of fighting her every step of the way. We use absolutely no chemical fertilizers or herbicides on the land, using instead nature's wondrous fertilizer; compost. Our fields are full of earth worms and the soil has a rich texture, while the neighbors corn field has no life left in it and the soil is almost sandy due to so many years of chemical dependence. I believe our treatment of the land helps the children see the connection between health and what it being used to sustain the organism; whether it be microbes in a live soil, chickens living free range and scratching in the dirt, hogs living in a family group and so obviously enjoying life, or their own bodies, growing strong from a healthy lifestyle.
Of course not everyone can live on a farm, there is not enough land for that, but many things that we do here can be translated to a smaller scale to help children grow with an awareness of the environment, life cycles and how it is so important to our Planet to treat it well and not pollute it, and learn to know the difference between an overlooked resource and trash.
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