The Call of the Wild and Free summary

What do you think of when you hear homeschool family?

Maybe you think of those ultra-conservative religious communities that choose to isolate their children from what they see as modern society’s degenerate morals.

Our school system doesn’t treat children as what they are – children. 

Anyone who has a child knows that they’re naturally prone to moving around and exploring, yet schools insist on bending their bodies to the shape of a chair as if already preparing them for office life.

Homeschooling is unconventional, to be sure.

But, didn’t anyone ever tell you? Unconventional is good.

Homeschooling is something of a misnomer because homeschool education is neither limited to the home nor limited to the school model.

In fact, a homeschool would be severely limiting itself if it attempted to replicate the school classroom in the home. To be honest, a homeschool wouldn’t compete if it tried to out-work the local public school at its own game. 

Today, it’s getting harder and harder for families to find time to spend together. With children at school and with the increasing need for both parents to be breadwinners, busy schedules are encroaching on everybody’s free time. One study estimated that the average US family spends only 36 minutes together each day. 

For some, homeschooling affords an opportunity to reinvigorate the family experience. It represents a return to a time when child-parent mentoring was the norm, and families were more tightly knit. 

While there’s no one formula for a successful homeschool experience, we will look at the five core principles identified by the Wild + Free community that are designed to enrich any education. The first principle is the school of nature, which is about helping children re-establish a close relationship with nature.

It’s no secret that we, as a society, are losing touch with nature more and more. And our children have not been immune to these changes. We’ve systematically traded natural environments for artificial ones across the board: We’ve switched grass for artificial turf, exchanged nature parks for theme parks, and abandoned outdoor games in favor of video games.

Storytelling is side-lined in the traditional school system. It’s treated as less important than “harder” subjects like math and science. And, it’s generally taught as something that’s only done “for fun.” 

But this attitude presents storytelling as separate from other domains of learning. On the contrary, storytelling is a powerful learning device that can enrich the study of any subject. That’s why the second principle of the Wild + Free philosophy is to utilize the power of story.

The attitude that the school system has toward play is that it’s tolerated so long as children get their work done. They even designate chunks of time to "playtime." But, in doing this, schools teach our children that play is something extra to learning, and learning only happens when we’re not having fun.

For some reason, we’ve got it into our heads that real education must be difficult, boring, and painful.

Adults don’t respect children enough. Indeed, we adults often treat children as ignorant, and their interests as frivolous. We act as though we have nothing to learn from them, and they have everything to learn from us.

But in many respects, children are more diligent and more scientific than adults are. Children are far more inclined to inspect, examine, question, and experiment than adults. Really, it’s we who need to learn from them.