Hello, my name is Rob (
I’ve always been a little bit averse to authority. When I was very young and didn’t know much about politics I thought that I should call myself a “liberal,” because I correctly identified what the true meaning of that word is; which is to say that I’ve always been pretty open-minded. Turns out, according to my high school teachings, they revealed to me that I was a Republican based on some stupid questionnaire. Who would’ve thought, a guy who should be called a liberal is actually a conservative. Makes sense, right…huh!?
This little virus they implanted was such a mind fuck. In modern parlance, people would call me a “libertarian,” and since I’m particularly zealous in my liberal nature and rejection of coercive authority, some would go so far as to call me an anarchist, which I guess I’m okay with because I don’t mind the literal meanings of words. Because of the aforementioned mind fuck though, I didn’t know any of this until very recently. They very expertly convinced me that I was a neatly compartmentalized label, and that I was on the right side of the left/right dichotomy. I hadn’t even heard the word libertarian until I was almost 30 (I’m 38 now). Some education.
The cracks began to form in this façade when I was in college, but they were just cracks. I was still engaged in the political process. I voted for Bob Dole (Maybe Ross Perot, I can’t remember now) in 1996 and George Bush in 2000. By the time I reached my first University research job in 2001, I was beginning to pine away for intellectual stimulation, because I certainly wasn’t finding it in the University system. I would spend literally days scouring the internet using keywords like “enlightenment,” “philosophy,” “psychology” and others that all failed to yield any satisfactory result for my insatiable intellectual appetite. I did occasionally stumble across some futurist publications and sci-fi stuff that piqued my interest, but in my opinion, the internet didn’t start getting interesting for non-computer science people like myself until about a decade after it became available to the public (meaning we didn’t know where to look basically).
So one day, I finally decided to start thinking for myself instead of looking for enlightenment elsewhere. In so doing, I decided that George Bush and his administration was a murdering propagandist who ran us head on into a war that had nothing to do with our country and our collective interests. The veil hadn’t been fully lifted from my eyes, but it was a good start. I even went so far as to boycott the following election, because John Kerry represented what amounted to a whole lot of nothing. There was a hollowness to his rhetoric that echoed every time he spoke. I wasn’t even aware of any third parties, so I simply just didn’t vote, and I told everyone I could about it, because I thought it was some great original idea of mine (lol).
Not too long after my almost wholesale rejection of the political process, we had a graduate student come through our lab that was something of a child prodigy. He started his undergrad work when he was 12, meaning that he had graduated high school and got accepted into University at the age of 11. When I knew him he was only 18, and by the time he turned 19, he was done with the academic portion of his PhD and had his laboratory research portion well under way, and that was after taking a year off from graduating with a Bachelor degree!
I got to know this whiz kid a little as we worked together. I was a lowly lab technician, as I couldn’t stomach another 5 years working my ass off in the University system without pay, so I went to work instead. Many of the other grad students looked down their noses at me, but he didn’t seem to notice or care, and thought of me as a peer, and I felt the same about him in spite of our age gap.
After thinking about it a lot, I realized that he wasn’t that smart. I mean, he was really smart, don’t get me wrong, he was doing a PhD in biological science, but not exceptionally smart as compared to other students who went the more traditional route and graduated later on. Everybody there had pretty high IQs and most of us were, well, meh. So I theorized that there must have been something about his life experience leading up to this point that made him so unique. That is, if my assumption about him not being a super-genius was correct of course. To test my theory, being a scientist myself, I began to probe him about his early education and family situation.
Turns out there was something unique about him. He was home schooled (gasp!). He came from a stable, two-parent household. His parents were hard working people who owned their own business, and therefore could afford the flexibility and financial burden of paying for public education while also paying to keep their son out of it. It’s funny because I had never met someone who was home schooled before that, but man did his example leave an impression on me.
I concluded, and I still think correctly so to this day, in spite of my lack of scientific rigor at that point, that the major difference between him and all the other smart kids in the world who trudge through 13 years of school and 4 years of University, was that he was homeschooled. More precisely, his parents took a pointed interest and pivotal role in his education and upbringing. The difference between a child prodigy, and some kid who graduates at the top of her class at the prescribed time, is simply the educational environment to which each was exposed. In other words, you’ll never see a kid meet her full potential when she’s in public school, or any other school built off the Prussian military model for that matter. It wasn’t until this realization that I knew just how screwed up the whole system was, and my life for that matter. I was a product of this unholy machinery, and it showed.
This is what started me on the path toward where I am at now, a stay-at-home dad. Partially catalyzed by my rejection now of both the state political and the education systems, I bailed on my University research job shortly thereafter. I was still in a bit of a brain fog about all of this at the time, but it was driven by a deeply rooted disdain for what I had now perceived as something that cheated me out of my early life. That, and I realized that most research done at Universities is garbage, to put it bluntly, and I just couldn’t stand doing what I considered to be simply sitting around all the time doing someone else’s hobby. I wanted to do something real.
I went out and did some odd jobs for a while and tried finding work in my home town, but Western New York being the socialist cesspool that it is, it was very difficult to find work in biological science unless it was for a public institution, and I wanted to work in the private sector. My newfound attitude ultimately led me to sell everything I had and move to San Diego after about a year of trying at home. The private sector in biotech is alive and well down here, in spite of the leftist political stronghold that is California as a whole. It took me a while because of the high cost of living here, but I did establish myself and have put down roots here in San Diego, I think permanently.
The whole alternative-child rearing thing got put on the backburner as a result of the mini financial crisis that the above created for me, and the lack of urgency considering that I didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time, let alone potential wife material. I didn’t revisit the idea until very recently, when I decided to get married to my current wife.
We were engaged and living together a few years ago, and so naturally we were talking about child rearing, and education, and I brought up the idea of homeschooling. This was met with extreme levels of apprehension by my fiancé. She wasn’t satisfied with my anecdote about the child prodigy, and so I was forced to do some serious research at that point if I was to convince her, and I was happy to do so.
I came across a lot of data in my online research that supported the idea of homeschooling, that children generally perform better than public and even private school kids, and showing it to her had its effect. She was warming to the idea, but it still bothered her because she was worried about socialization, and we were throwing around the idea of alternative types of private school.
When I started researching the socialization aspect, I came across a fellow by the name of John Taylor Gatto. He was a former multi-year teacher-of-the-year award winner in my home state of New York before he went rogue and started advocating for “unschooling.” Personally I’m not entirely behind the merits of completely unschooling my child (I think they need a balance of structure and spontaneity to their education, if only to cope with the rigid thinking they’ll encounter out in the world, sort of a bilingual approach so to speak), but the treasure trove of data that this man has on the subject of education is second to none.
When I showed all of this to my fiancé, and the documentation he provided about how U.S. public schools were originally chartered as indoctrination centers (they literally used the word “indoctrination,” no bullshit), I had won her over. She was on board with homeschooling. The information that’s publicly available about how corrupt our public education system is, is astonishing in both its terrible nature and the fact that almost nobody knows about it. Needless to say, once she saw these government documents, there was no turning back.
My wife and I have now been happily married for 3 years and we have a beautiful 2 year old daughter. Having gone deep down the rabbit hole of alternative ways of child rearing, I came across the idea of peaceful parenting before our daughter was born. In my opinion, this goes hand-in-hand with the libertarian ethic. If you don’t like centralized coercive authority in society, then you shouldn’t expose anyone in your life to coercive authority, especially your children. We are raising our daughter peacefully, and it’s probably the best decision I’ll ever have made.
Now here’s the good part. She’s never been hit. The only time anyone has raised a voice at her is when she’s about to do something unsafe. She is quite possibly the most intelligent and defiant human being that I have ever met, and I love that about her so much. She is unencumbered in her emotion and her action (except for the safety concerns of course). Now the following I believe to be the result of peaceful parenting, and that’s because I’ve been around kids as bright as her, but none of them have flourished in the way that she is doing now.
By 18 months she could already speak in full sentences and count to 15 (for some reason this was a wall she hit for a while, probably because I was so amazed at it that I stopped trying to teach her more, doh!). I couldn’t even do that by the time I started kindergarten. She can already identify all of the letters of the alphabet by site and she recognizes some words as well. Her annunciation of words and ability to both understand and convey abstract thoughts is beyond anything I’ve ever seen in a 2 year old before. I may be biased, because she’s my daughter and I love her more than life itself, but I’m of the impression that if any obstacle stands in this child’s way as she makes her way out into the world, it will be a trivial matter for her to surmount it. If surmounting doesn’t work, she’ll simply obliterate it.
I believe there’s a strong connection between this in her character and the peaceful parenting we’ve exposed her to. This is a subject maybe for another blog post, but there is a lot of science behind what I’ve observed in my child. There’s lots of evidence that hitting, yelling and punishment lead to lower cognitive functioning in children and developmental stunting as a result. It shuts off the higher cognitive functions in the brain when they go into fight-or-flight mode, and this shows in kids who are dealt with in authoritarian ways.
Becoming a parent sort of vulcanized my love for liberty to the extreme. I at this point have carefully considered and completely rejected all forms of coercive and violent authority. So here I find myself on Steemit, led here by other freedom-loving anarchists and libertarians.
That’s me in a nutshell. Parenting pretty much consumes my life these days, and I consider it my full time job. That being said, if anyone is interested in the peaceful parenting and homeschooling things and hearing more about them, please say so in the comments below. I’d love to share my thoughts and my research on those subjects, and it would stimulate me to look into the subject more thoroughly, which I’m always happy to do. I’m glad to formally introduce myself finally on Steemit, and I can’t wait to see how this thing develops.