An Interview With Brycen About Unschooling

On 6/11/12 Brycen answered interview questions sent to him by a reporter who was interested in learning more about unschooling. Here is the interview:

What do you like about being unschooled?

BRRC: What I love about unschooling is the ability to be free and wild. To choose what I want to do when I want to do it. If I want to play music, which is my passion, then I can play music at any time. I am free in every way a person can be free, mind, body and spirit. In public school they shackle your body with their routines, they shackle your mind with their curriculum, and they shackle your spirit with their rules. If they find it difficult to shackle you, they resort to psychiatric drugs. I also continue to grow close to my family and friends because I have the freedom and time to spend with them.

What does a typical unschooling day look like for you? 

BRRC: There is no typical day for an unschooler, because everyday is based on what we want to do that day. My family is extremely spontaneous, aside from all of the regular groups, band practices, activities and events in the community that I have chosen to put into my schedule. Every day is  different. For example, one day may consist of the following: Chainmaille crafting, rollerblade-basketball with Mom, band practice, putting up the letters on the marquis at a historical theater we are helping to restore, running my Dungeons and Dragons group, leather crafting and making plans for future days. One day the whole day might revolve around hiking a mountain with a friend or two and studying nature, followed by a dip in the local lake.

What do you plan to do when you're done with schooling? go to college? Start a business, etc.?

BRRC: There's no such thing as finishing with unschooling. I also want to clarify that I haven't been "schooling" all of this time, I've been living my life and I plan to continue doing that. As far as starting a business, I already I started two- I started my first when I was 12, and the most recent, selling my chainmaille crafts, I started last year. I am also a performing musician, public speaker and child advocate. I've known I wanted to be a singer ever since I was five years old, and unschooling has made it so I could pursue that dream, and that is what I will continue to do. I'm not interested in college because it would not meet my needs or help me meet my goals at this point in my life.

What would you like readers to know about unschooling...any myth you'd like to bust?

BRRC: I want readers to understand that unschooling is not merely a style of "education"- It is the most natural way of learning and it is the optimal way to give children joy in everything they do. I want parent readers to understand that you do not have to "teach" your children. We have been "taught" that learning must be taught, that learning just can't happen as a result of living. Whereas, unschooling allows children to reap learning as a result of living our lives. Children need to be given the freedom to play because that is where real learning actually manifests.

Anything else you'd like to add?

BRRC: I do not consider video games to be playing. Video games shut my brain down as opposed to lighting it up. Playing- dramatic play, building, exploring, inventing and having fun outside all engaged huge portions of my brain and is how I naturally learned most everything I know now.

Unschooling Always Fits Because You Make It

School is a pre-made shirt that claims to be "one-size-fits-all", when in reality it barely fits any and out-rightly suffocates others. Unschooling is the environment in which you can make whatever size shirt or whatever style shirt you want and it will always fit-- because you made it.

My Vision for World Peace: Love and Respect All Children

“If every action you made had loving intentions, if every move we made was born of love, the world would be healed, the world would be whole.” -Brycen R. R. Couture

My Vision for World Peace: Love and Respect All Children

by Brycen R. R. Couture

The first and most obvious thing is that love is the single element that can heal the world. Most people aren’t sure where to put the love, how to cultivate it or how to feel it. Allow me to tell you: You need to start by loving your children.

If you give unconditional and total love, nurturance and meet the needs of your kids, then they are going to grow up and be able to pass that on to their kids. The children of today are the entire population of the future world. If everyone treated their kids with total unconditional love and met all of their needs, we would have a full world population of people who have been loved, who have had their needs met and they would believe and trust in the natural coexistence of all life. How monumental is that?

When I say children, I mean from zero to early 20′s. The needs I believe children are not getting met in this society are, first and foremost, from [a lack of] Attachment Parenting. Children are made up of needs and whatever you put into them. If you meet those needs, then children are full of met needs and love. If you are putting shame, hatred, anger, punishment or violence into your children, then they become full of that negativity. Most of the culture sends children off to public school- That system is punitive. It is a very solid box into which we try to stuff these very creative individuals…

One of the worst beliefs that adults have in the mainstream culture is that if you give kids freedom, they are not going to know how to handle themselves. “Freedom” is a concept that adults in a sick culture have concocted. While you are still innocent, freedom is just living, its not something you obtain or can have or abuse; freedom is just what life is. It’s constraint that destroys innocence and restricts life. Constraint can be punishments, school, when your needs aren’t responded to and other forms of child abuse; those things constrain freedom, so they also constrain lives.

What matters is love, what doesn’t matter is superficial material objects such as designer clothing, video games, computers, technology, TV- Things like that don’t meet needs. Schooling does not meet needs. School is something that was obsolete ever since it was created and needs to go. There’s the idea that getting a good job means success. That is so wrong-minded. What matters is happiness and joyfulness with your life and doing what you are passionate about and that you love. Again, the whole love thing- If it has to do with love, its good!

Goodness is love just as love is good. It’s a circular thing. If you give $100. to a charity because it soothes your conscience that’s not necessarily out of love. Everyone should cherish the world and the world will be healed. If you loved your children with irrational abandon, if you loved all people, the world and yourself, if every action you made was made with love, the world would be healed. If every action you made had loving intentions, if every move we made was born of love, the world would be healed, the world would be whole.

Global Equality that Supports ALL People is Necessary for Today

The time of movements that only support one group of people is over. Groups that only support women, or one other category of people are obsolete. We need to have a movement that supports all people. When we work for children's rights, that represents all people. Children represent all groups. Children represent everyone. If we want equality for everyone, we need to start that by treating kids with love (hopefully you know that means equality) so that they grow up into and creating that egalitarian world.

Why Genocide Was Committed Against the First Trees of New England

The first people in the Industrial Age to cut down the colossal trees in New England were overwhelmed by the energy of the trees. People back then were emotionally and spiritually unhealthy as it was and when the trees sensed that and reached out energetically, the people reacted by cutting them down. They reacted out of violent and aggressive defensiveness and they subconsciously knew it was the trees, so they attacked the trees.

Nonviolence

If I was to give a speech on nonviolence, because I'm a gamer, I would say it like this: You can beat any game the system throws at you. The problem is though, if you are violent to defeat violence, the system is still the winner because violence was their goal in the first place. The way to beat the system is not to play their game. And as soon as you stop playing their game, you've won.

All you have to do is live the better example, live nonviolently and make your life very loud so the system can hear you no matter where you are. So basically, advertise the fact that you are nonviolent. Obviously the books I'd recommend on truly living nonviolently are: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Love by Marshall Rosenberg, Instead of Medicating and Punishing by my Mom, Laurie A. Couture and any speeches that Gandhi wrote. These would set up a pretty good basis and start you off on a literary path of a whole host of awesome people.

People have been saying for years and years and years, "Nonviolence!", but its only been really recently, with my Mom being one of the forerunners, of people seeing nonviolence and compassion towards children as a way to save the world.

I'm Not Cut Out For Irrelevancies- But Then Again, Who Is?

I’m not cut out for irrelevancies. Anything of an artistic nature is of some interest to me, as opposed to the strict and rigid numbers I find myself working with in order to satisfy the government mind. I know their reasoning as well- these complex, cerebral numbers and equations are fed to me in an attempt to debilitate my heart and soul, to flush out the love and the passion for my expressive endeavors. My refusal to give up my art and succumb to the expectations of the dictatorial system proves to be a problem to the overall cultural machine- not because I alone assert my autonomy to the state, but because I am one of many individuals who see fit to live and grow as their instincts guide them and shirk the system's bindings and chains.

I am speaking about the vast differences between traditional schooling and Unschooling. The rigidness in traditional schools is specifically designed to stifle the natural creativity within children. The state requirements put on homeschoolers and unschoolers is for the same purpose. As an unschooler, I find myself continually frustrated with these state requirements.