Day 32: Lehrplan: LEBEN, Klassenraum: WELT Crossing the Persian Gulf gave me the opportunity to meet and spend a day with the most interesting family in the world. Christian and Audrey were living in Germany with their kids Lucas (8) and Emilie (4).They had good jobs and were earning good money, however these jobs and this kind of life was preventing them to spend more time together as a family. As they were not ready to spend the rest of their lives like that, they decided to make a change. They rented their house, bought old UPS truck and adapted it to their needs. Their mobile house provides them all the comforts and facilities they would have in a “real” house. Overland to India, overland through Africa, with the last four years traveling the world was a new lifestyle for the Ivan family, and the whole world is their home now. And what about the expenses? Same as all the other nomadic lifestyles – it is cheaper to travel than to stay at home. You don’t need to win a lottery to do it, you just need some courage to leave your comfort zone and do some planning. Life expenses while you traveling are usually lower then when you are staying at home.
Now you must be asking yourself where kids go to school. They don’t. Lucas has spent two months in the school, but the conventional education system and traditional way of teaching were not really working for him. He could not fit in, so his parents decided to do homeschooling. At the end of the each year Lucas passed the exams to get the government certificates. They are not simply following prescribed curriculum and doing homeschooling but they are combining homeschooling and unschooling – or road schooling as Lucas father would call it. Does this work? Lucas and Emilie are the smartest kids I have met in my life. Intellectually they are far more advanced than their peers and opposite from what you may expect, and are not missing any social skills at all. They are learning through experiences, games, curiosity, friendships, travels… I was shocked to hear how Lucas speaks English, German, Romanian and French absolutely fluently, and in the few months he had spent traveling through Iran he learned enough Farsi to have conversations with Iranians.
Our schooling system creates obeying idiots that need to fit in the frames and do not ask “Why is this this way? Why do I need to do this?”. Society worships obedience, and from our earliest age, schools taught us to follow the authority and to follow our parents, priests and teachers. Instead of obeying, believing, repeating, memorizing, and copying Lucas and Emilie are learning through natural life experiences. In practice they are doubting, questioning, observing, being skeptical, being curious, learning about other cultures and meeting different people. These kids will never become soldiers, followers, believers, because the believer never learns. They will never believe in something just because they were told to believe in it. They will never have faith, they will not believe in something without understanding it, without proof. They are skeptical, they ask questions, they seek answers. Their respect, you need to earn. They will never follow stupid, meaningless orders for years, because they will need to understand why they need to do it. These kids will become individuals, they will not follow and bow down to stupid superstitious things in the name of state, politics, church, religion… Yes, they will be dangerous to politicians and state, they will be dangerous to priests and religions but they are the ones that can make this world a better place. We need more kids like this.