World Schooling

Unfortunately, the world is not a classroom. It is difficult to find An Introduction to Geography and other marvelous books like that when you are changing trains in Bolivia or setting up camp in the Canyon lands. Without a chance to do lots of homework assignments on latitude and longitude, unschooled teenagers are surely handicapped and will be uninformed throughout their lives. Some of them bravely try to make their way through the world anyway. It's a wonder they're not all drowned or lost.

One of the more outrageous unschooling stories is that of Robin Lee Graham, who quit school in 1965 at age sixteen and sailed around the world alone in a boat named Dove. It took five years and the whole world paid attention. His book, Dove, tells of all kinds of things no teenager should be allowed to face—battling loneliness and storms, losing a mast, falling in love in the Fiji Islands, feasting on shellfish in the Yasawa Islands and on roast pig and papaya with Savo Islanders, traveling with dolphins and cats, motorcycling through South Africa. "Was I different just because history didn't turn me on and boats did?" he asks. At the age of thirteen, he had already spent a year sailing in the South Seas with his parents. Then,

At fiftee
I was back in a California classroom, my spelling still lousy, but I was almost as useful with a sextant as a veteran sailor. On our 11,000-mile voyage I had seen lands of unbelievable enchantment. It is hard to believe that my parents, having allowed me to sail the South Seas at a most impressionable age, could ever have expected me to be a typical American school kid, to go on to college and graduate to a walnut office desk, a home on Acacia Avenue and membership in the local golf club. I am sure Corona del Mar's high school is a good one. For me it was a return to prison. Beyond its asphalt playground and wired fences there were sun-splashed, palm-fringed shores waiting for my shadow.

[Later that year, while making secret plans to sail away with friends, Robin says:] School became almost unbearable. It wasn't so much that I disliked learning—for I realized the need to be at least partially civilized and my grades were average—but that I detested the routine of school days, the unchanging pattern from the brushing of my teeth to learning English grammar. I came to hate the sound of the bell that summoned me to class, the smell of tennis shoes and sweat in the gym, the drone of history lessons, the threat of tests and exams. Down at Ala Wai harbor it was all so different. I loved the smell of rope and resin, even of diesel oil. I loved the sound of water slapping hulls, the whip of halyards against tall masts. These were the scents and sounds of liberty and life. [When he actually sets sail for his global voyage a year later, he reports on the first day at sea:] At nine o'clock I forced myself to eat a can of stew and then tuned the radio to my favorite Los Angeles rock music station. It was interesting to hear the news announcer report that I was on my way—"the first schoolboy ever to attempt to sail the world alone." The announcer audaciously guessed a lot too, and guessed wrong when he added, "The most important piece of Robin's luggage is a shelf of schoolbooks." "Like hell," I told the cats.

When Robin completed his voyage, Stanford invited him to enroll. He tried it, but quit after a semester to start a life of homesteading in Montana. (You can read about that in his second book, Home is the Sailor.)

I know people are not used to the idea of teenagers roaming on their own, despite the examples of occasional Robin Grahams. If you totally panic at the thought of exploring strange territory without your mother, independent travel is probably not for you. But if some excitement surges with the panic, maybe you should start fantasizing with maps. No significant legal barriers prevent teenage travel, and if you think you're ready, you are. Yes, tragedy could strike, but no more likely to you than to an adult, and far less likely than if you walked through the halls of most inner city high schools in the U. S. of A.

By: Francis David