Unschooled Grandchildren - An Immigrant's American Dream?

If your family is anything like ours, your parents likely worked really hard to raise you under very difficult circumstances. Perhaps they came to this country with little or no education and had to take whatever job they could get in order to survive - all while evading immigration officials, facing racial and/or gender discrimination and abuse, working odd hours in poor conditions, mastering a foreign language and, maybe, holding several low wage jobs at a time to support not only their families here, but also help their families in Latin America.

If your parents are anything like ours, they likely tried to save you from facing racism and discrimination by ensuring you were part of the few or the first in your family who graduated college. They likely hoped you would study your way into the American Dream they were sold into, a dream where money and education earn you the respectability and acceptance they craved.

If your parents are anything like ours, they probably hoped your ability to work legally in the United States, your language skills and college degrees would earn you a large fancy house like the ones our mothers used to clean and new cars like the ones their employers drove. Their grandest hope may have been that their grandchildren would shine at one of the “good schools” in a nice neighborhood, like the ones attended by the children they used to have to care for.

 If your family is similar to ours, when you told your parents you had chosen to become a one-income household, buy an inexpensive house in a similar neighborhood to theirs, and would not be buying a new car anytime soon, they tried to be understanding. They might have made an effort to hide their slight disappointment at your perceived unwillingness to shoot for the stars despite their efforts. They likely worked it out in their mind, thinking homeschooling couldn’t be any worse than school.

After all, our parents are used to government services failing our people and know that schools, even the so called “good ones,” are not very effective. They watch Univision and Telemundo and by now are aware of how the public educational system fails Latino children and at times puts them in danger. Grandparents certainly don’t want that for their precious grandchildren.

The idea of one of their college-educated children putting in 100% effort to make sure their grandchild excels with a homeschooled curriculum was probably appealing. Their grandkids would have the privilege of one-on-one attention to thrive. “If you refuse to work hard and sacrifice yourself like me, so you can put them in a nice private school, I guess homeschooling will do,” they may have said. Their grandkids would have to be the generation to earn their way into the fancy house, they told themselves and then said, “Rome was not built in a day,” rolled their eyes and came to terms with the idea that the fortune of a family cannot be changed in a single generation.
 Then…

If your parents are anything like ours, they probably felt astonished, aghast and extremely worried when you told them their precious grandchildren would be unschooled.

“UNSCHOOLED!? WHAT is that?!” they likely exclaimed in a more colorful language, when you said you would not be purchasing the latest curriculum or drilling your kids on the kitchen table. You might have terrified Abuelita when you told her the kids would be learning through their own chosen activities. Then, like us, you likely had to give an explanation about how, to you, unschooling is the American Dream they never knew they always wanted. Perhaps, just like we did, you explained these four things and many others and maybe they understood or maybe they didn’t… but at least you tried:

1) Unschooling Gifted Us the Luxury of Time Together

Our immigrant parents’ control of the amount of time they could spend with us was almost nonexistent. They were on survival mode, always running from one job to the next, from one errand to the next, or too tired to joyfully engage with us. Unschooling allows our family access to the one treasure money can’t replace: one-on-one time with a child, one-on-one time to read unlimited books in bed, cook together, chat, explore any subject ad nauseam, walk in nature and learn about one another and the world. Thanks to our parents’ hard work to get us where we are, we no longer have to concentrate solely on surviving, we can focus on thriving. That’s the ultimate luxury they earned for us with their efforts and we are grateful for it.

2) Unschooling Allows Children to Learn on their Own Terms

Unschooling is social justice at its best, especially for granddaughters. Being able to have a large amount of say about what they learn, how they learn it, when they learn it and for how long, is liberating for children. This is especially true because, historically, Latina girls have been denied agency over their time, their emotional safety and energy, their bodies and actions. Unschooling helps Latino children regain the autonomy our people have long lost through economic oppression, cultural colonization, religious imposition and fear of prejudice.

3) Unschooling Allows Us to Preserve our Families’ Cultural Ties While Fostering Pride and Respect for Them 

As a Mexican family, we honestly don’t have time to wait for curriculum publishers to figure out a less Eurocentric way to teach history, to quit using authors of color as mere tokens in brief excerpts here and there. Our children will be grown by then. We need those subjects to be front and center and we need them now, because when a child grows up learning their cultural heritage is simply a secondary subject to be glossed over, it is likely they will grow up thinking of themselves and their family heritage as less significant, particularly in today’s political and media climate.
Unschooling also makes it easier to travel to the motherland during cheaper and less busy seasons, fostering connections to extended family and encouraging the use and preservation of the Spanish language by making it relevant in our children’s lives.

4) Unschooling Makes it Easier to Reclaim the Support of a Village

As migrants, our parents lost the support of their communities when they came to this country. The connections that gave them a shoulder to cry on, a helping hand to come to their aid, or someone to laugh and share experiences with had to be rebuilt. In this country, racism and socioeconomic circumstances might have forced them to self-segregate as a form of protection. The socializing opportunities offered by unschooling in the form of park days, field trips, conferences and diverse activities make it much easier for our generation to build deeply meaningful long lasting social circle, not only for our children but ourselves as well. In addition, the free time afforded by unschooling facilitates the inclusion of grandparents in the lives of their grandchildren, helping them create more meaningful connections.

Unschooling helps narrow the opportunity gap and bring about the success and affluence generations of Latinos dreamed and worked so hard to achieve. The type of affluence and privilege money can’t buy and represents a different and more meaningful type of prosperity.

A prosperity that includes intellectual independence, freedom of movement, time for family connection, opportunities to discover and develop personal talents and in doing so, honoring and developing the skills of hard work, dedication, resolve and initiative, the core values our parents represented and instilled in us.
Skeptical grandparents might have unknowingly, given their grandchildren the prized opportunity to learn these values when they paved the way for us to focus less on survival and more on their growth. For such magical treasure, we will be forever grateful to them, because it will have more generational impact than any fancy house.