art by Shino Arihara

Seventeen years ago, my future wife and I arrived at Stanford. Simone and I were products of public high schools: I labored and lucked into a basketball scholarship at Stanford, while she arrived at the Farm with boxes full of novels to read on the side. We graduated together with a fairly unified, zealous belief in public school as one of society’s unquestionable linchpins—the cultural proving ground, the staging area where society’s characters are defined. We enrolled in the Stanford Teacher Education Program and taught in Peninsula high schools for a few years. Simone (Spearman, ’93, MA ’94) now teaches AP and remedial English in Santa Rosa, a teeth-gnashing career defined by love for learning, concern for students and a loathing of bureaucratic obstacles. Despite their shortcomings, schools have rewarded us both immeasurably, and we’ve tried to return the favor. If you’re reading this, odds are good that they worked pretty well for you, too.

As a result of all my wife and I have learned on this path, our daughter, Saja, has never attended school. I teach her at home, confident in the arrangement roughly 51 percent of the time. While still repaying loans from our STEP years—primarily with money earned from teaching other people’s kids—we’ve chosen to keep our daughter out of schools. The irony is not lost on us. When asked where we fall on the homeschool spectrum, I often reply that we “unschool with an academic bent”—a short answer that earns nods from other homeschool parents and puts grandparents at ease.

But, although we keep one paranoid eye on educational standards, we grow more inclined to follow Saja’s lead. If one day finds her reading only fictional American diaries, the next might be continuous ballet in preparation for a recital. So be it, we say, with fingers crossed. We’re essentially banking on a child-led immersion program—not “sink-or-swim,” but “swim-in-some-of-this” and then “swim-in-some-of-that.”

That’s my Confident Father voice talking, the one full of phrases like “strew her path” and “trust the child.” My other voices shout him down dozens of times a day. The Realist wonders how Saja will ever hold a job if she gets out of bed only to re-read Harry Potter. The Teacher argues with Saja about the value of legible cursive; he also frets that we should be past two-digit multiplication by now. Without some playground fights under her belt, the Jock worries whether this kid will ever be able to rebound, in any sense of the word.

Some friends believe that as trained teachers we must know what we’re doing. That’s true, but not in the obvious sense. Despite the expertise afforded by training, no teacher knows a child as well as a caring parent, and no school can foster changing aspirations while evolving to keep pace with shrinking attention spans, commercial interference, struggles for “standardization” and uncountable other cultural trends.

One of the concepts STEP instructors stuck fast to me was Stephen Krashen’s idea of “i+1.” Krashen, a linguist at USC, defined “i” as a second-language learner’s level of linguistic competence and “i+1” as a step above that. (“i+1” might be language such a student might not easily define but, given context, could decode and then use.) It’s a concept that’s obviously applicable to just about every kind of learning: “i+1” is shorthand for “people learn by building on what they already know.”

There really is no “i” in school. The scale of the institution’s structure, the scope of its goals, allows for no useful definition of what a student’s “current competence” might be. In practice, schools base “i” on some changing combination of what we think kids know, what we think they should know and what teachers can actually teach. Every kid’s actual “i” is different from the kid’s in the next desk, but we keep telling teachers to formulate dozens of separate “+1” strategies to bring the group to next year’s entry-level norm—so the process can start again.

Working outside of this structure, we’re trying to build a better “i.” We put our trust in our parental instincts and in Saja’s human curiosity. Early this morning we’ll be right back at the multiplication. And, like any thoughtful parent, I will continue to savor those moments when my daughter’s confidence shines through, whether it’s despite my paranoia or, in some small way, because of it.