“We don’t need no Education, at least not the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind.” In Ben Hewitt’s (Hewitt) article “We Don’t Need no Education” he brings up an interesting idea. An idea that children or more specifically his children do not need a traditional education. Instead of being confined between four walls, his sons, Fin and Rye, have a much larger classroom, the world around them.
Hewitt did not have this freedom growing up. Both his parents worked as educators with the school district and, ironically, Hewitt dropped out of school on his 16th birthday. Not because he had something great in mind that he could not fulfill through guided studies but because he was “bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.” He felt he was being imprisoned by school.
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Children racing to school, racing from class to class, speeding through life with no time to actually learn anything except what Hewitt explains as “conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison.” While most children spend so much time in this “prison” Fin and Rye are exploring and learning about the world around them at their own pace and finding enjoyment in doing so. Hewitt call’s this alternative method of educating his boys “unschooling” which is considered a type of homeschooling but differs in that it lacks the structured study plan of most homeschool methods. He explains that while most children his sons’ ages have been in school a large part of their lives, his sons only spend 2 hours per month studying in a traditional