Flags of the World! (a thing about unschooling... but maybe not what you're thinking)

I posted several weeks ago about Mal's obsession with flags.

Since then, he's stayed pretty consistently interested. He's constantly saying things like, "Did you know that Chad and Romania have the EXACT SAME FLAG?" And the answer is always that no, I did not know that. 

I've actually learned a lot from Mal's interest in flags, as well. I've always loved maps and globes, and since he's into that now. In fact, after having bought Mal a beach ball globe a couple of years ago because we didn't want to shell out $50+ on a passing interest, I did buckle down and buy him one that will arrive tomorrow.

But I digress... One thing I've learned is that South Africa has three capitols because its executive, legislative, and judicial branches are in separate cities. That's pretty cool.

One thing we did get him recently was a foam map puzzle with a bunch of flags. He knew a lot of the flags, anyway, but since having put it together a couple of times, he knows all of them flawlessly. It's kind of a bummer because they didn't include any of the Central American or Caribbean countries (save Cuba), so we'll have to pick those up somewhere else. I did show him the Haiti flag immediately upon seeing it was snubbed.

Anyhoo, all of this exciting stuff to get around to my main point here.

One of my friends mentioned recently that unschooling never worked with her kids because they didn't take to "academic" stuff like what Mal is doing right now.

Now that I think about that statement, I see how a big idea in body liberation melds perfectly with the unschooling philosophy vis-à-vis the moral neutrality of most stuff in life. I believe it is Ragen Chastain who says something to the extent of "Running a marathon and having a Netflix marathon on your couch are moral equivalents." The world at large might celebrate running a marathon as the summit to a virtuous endeavor, but why? Vegging out, being lazy, and listening to your body when it says that you need a break is awesome. Running, if you like it, is awesome. Choosing to do one of those things over the other doesn't make you a better/worse person. It's just different people doing different things.

Getting back to unschooling and Mal: He has always taken a deep dive in the things he's interested in. His earliest obsession was probably the Disney Cars franchise. After we'd watched the movies once or twice, he could listen to the score and tell you what scene a piece of music was played. He knew the names of ALL of the characters, even background ones that might be shows once for three seconds in one of the three films. He collected hundreds of cars, he played with them almost every day, talked about it all of the time, found Cars shorts on the Disney Channel app on his own, noticed that some music was featured both in the movies and in the cartoons. It was two years of that.

He's also fixated on Unspeakable (which he still watches but not like when he was 5 or 6), Henry Stickman, NumberBlocks, Super Mario... and last year, Encanto. We actually have the play sets out on the kitchen table right now. He does bring them out to play and make scenes with occasionally. When the movie came out, though, he literally studied the songs until he knew all of the lyrics. In fact, his friend filmed him for almost half an hour once (she's a better audience than I am!)

When Mal finds something he likes, he has the space to take the time he wants to pursue it. With NumberBlocks, he learned a lot about how numbers work together. Since he got over that obsession, he's lost some of the multiplication tables, but I know that since he learned those things at 5 and 6 years old, he can remember and/or relearn them again in the future. He's learning a lot of geography and kind of civics with flags. Many times he'll act out a superficial version of relations between, say, Russia and Ukraine or North and South Korea using their flags as almost action figures. He'll probably forget a lot of this when he moves on to his next big interest.

The question is: Are those subjects superior to the strong relationships he formed with Cars and Encanto or a YouTube channel or a video game? Or all they all valuable pursuits for the pursuits' sake? Is the only reason I or others see unschooling as justified because Mal is learning something that some educational decision-makers out there who have never met him have decided is "important"?

I would argue that this cycle of finding something enjoyable and then wanting to know more and delve into it more is worthy in and of itself. It's what makes life worth living. My sister likes plants. My dad likes trains. My mom likes to read. Some day James and I will have time to figure out what we like again, I'm sure of it.

But my point is that, as adults, we get the option of pursuing interests without the baggage of "but what use is it in life?" My dad can watch Virtual RailFan and plan vacations around trains without people accusing him of "playing" and suggesting that he reads more books, like my mom does. We get to like what we like.

I'm enjoying this geographical path we're on right now, but I loved Cars and Encanto, too (he was on his own with Unspeakable). Mal is who he is and he's becoming the person he will be. Without anyone telling him what is really important and what he SHOULD be spending all of his time on. I love that for him.