On a Friday afternoon in early February, 16-year-old Jessica Kjellberg is navigating the crowds at New York Comic Con, the giant annual gathering of comic fans in New York. She’s heading back to her special gig at the Griffons [sic] Claw Armory booth, a New Jersey–based purveyor of steel swords, as well as more fantastic movies and comics-inspired weapons. In an effort to look vaguely medieval, Jess, who has wide-set blue-green eyes and an athletic build that hints at the many hours she spends practicing kung fu and sword-fighting, is wearing tight black pants, black lace-up boots, and a black corset-style top embellished with red embroidery.

Jess had come across the company’s booth at a previous convention and, impressed by the quality of the steel broadswords, asked to help out. She’s not sure what she’s being paid, but money’s not the object. She just likes being part of the action. Many of the other teenagers at the convention, which attracts people from all along the East Coast, are playing hooky. Not Jess — even though she’s been setting up the booth since 9:30 that morning. She and her twin sister, Caroline, live in the East Village with their mother, who runs a luxury skincare company with the girls’ aunts, and their father, a copyright lawyer, who performs in a band on the side. The twins haven’t been to school since third grade.

Technically, the state of New York considers Jess and Caroline homeschooled, but that term, with its connotations of conservative Christians chanting Bible lessons at the kitchen table, or parents drilling their offspring in preparation for the National Spelling Bee, doesn’t capture what the twins actually do. For lack of a better term, Jess and Caroline describe themselves as unschooled, which is to say that they — and not their parents — decide what, when, and how they will learn.

This year, Jess is doing several school-like activities: Latin and math lessons with tutors, an introductory sociology course at Hunter College, and a lot of reading (she’s up to “J” — Julius Caesar — in The Complete Works of Shakespeare). She gets excited talking about, for example, how Latin is like a puzzle, but she confesses, “Weapons are my life.”

Last year, Jess spent between three and eight hours a day training one-on-one with her martial arts instructor. The year before that was largely spent hanging out with The New York Jedi, a group that performs Star Wars–inspired light saber battles at events like Comic Con. The Jedi have a show this afternoon, and a member of the group stops by the Griffons Claw booth. He’s dressed in a floor-length black leather coat and has a vague Kiss-like look — white face, black clown lips and eyes, crazy hair with sparkles. He complains he doesn’t see Jess enough. She brushes that off, but the fact is, she’s been focusing a lot on academics this year, plus training a lot in martial arts and taking up fencing.

“I’m just going to give you a call at like, 2:00 in the morning,” he says, half-joking.

Jess smiles and does some excited little bounces. “Do it! Do it! Do it! I love spontaneity.”

An adjustment for parents

An hour or so later, Isabel Ringer, Jess’s 12-year-old friend and martial arts student, bounces up to the booth, with her mother, Kayte Ringer, trailing behind, looking tired. Isabel, a tiny, pixie-like girl with green eyes, fair skin, and a heart-shaped face, quit school two days ago. She can’t stop grinning as she chats with Jess about a cartoon portrait she’s had done at another booth and about the history of Japanese weaponry — many have their origins in farm tools, Jess explains, because for centuries only samurai were permitted to carry swords.

 On day three of the no-school experiment, Kayte says she feels like she’s flying by the seat of her pants. Jess, who Kayte calls “our heroine mentor,” has been talking up unschooling, and Isabel likes the idea, but Kayte isn’t sold yet. It heartens her, though, that Isabel’s stomachaches and migraines have already vanished.
 
 “I see how happy she is,” Kayte says, gesturing to her daughter, who is still absorbed in conversation with Jess.
 
 Isabel had languished at school for years and had been begging for an out, especially after starting martial arts lessons with Jess. She didn’t mesh well with either the cliquish kids at a prestigious progressive school on the Upper East Side, or the learning-disabled ones at another private school. For the past five years she had suffered from chronic stomachaches and migraines that Kayte, after putting her through a battery of medical tests, finally chalked up to anxiety. But Kayte, a single mother who runs an integrative body therapy practice, called Rolfing, out of her West Village apartment, could not see how she would find time to homeschool Isabel. Then, at a parent-teacher conference a couple weeks before, the teacher said Isabel, who is a night owl and would arrive at school exhausted, seemed out-of-it and “traumatized.” Kayte had had enough.

 “All they kept saying was, ‘she’s too fragile,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘well, maybe we’re too sensitive for school.’”

 In honor of the convention, Isabel is wearing a royal blue fake velvet cape that trails behind her as she walks, a choker with a large sleigh bell attached, and a fleece hat with floppy bunny ears. She’s supposed to be a Sith, one of the Star Wars “bad guys.” Despite a battery-operated light saber bought at last year’s convention, she doesn’t look remotely menacing, though she seems entranced by the weapons in the booth, running her hands over a mock dagger, which Jess offers to buy her. Kayte makes some mild protestations about having weapons in the house, but Isabel grins and says, “It’s not your house, it’s my room!”

 Kayte pauses and sighs. “This is all so new to me.”

 She seemed to be talking about the world of Star Wars, comics, and martial arts enthusiasts, but she might have been talking about unschooling, too.

Helping kids find their milieu

As schools nationwide have cut recess, mandated weeks of test preparation, and lengthened the school day in the name of accountability, unschoolers seem to take pride in going against the grain. They champion flexibility, creativity, and so-called “child-led learning.” Some eschew textbooks, grammar lessons, workbooks, tests, and anything else that resembles school. At its core, though, unschooling is about helping kids find their own milieu rather than requiring them to fit in with a school’s rigid structure and norms. If that milieu is plodding through workbook after workbook, then so be it.

No one knows how many families unschool, because no national agency collects such statistics and because unschoolers themselves debate what constitutes “real unschooling,” since each family’s approach varies. The number of children educated at home, however, has risen from an estimated 850,000 in 1999 to 1.5 million — or nearly 3 percent of the school-age population — in 2007, the last time the U.S. Department of Education surveyed parents and kids. The survey does not ask about unschooling in particular, although advocates of unschooling maintain their approach is growing more popular.

Homeschoolers of all stripes credit John Holt, the educator and advocate of progressive education who coined the term “unschooling,” with starting the modern home education movement some 30 years ago. But until recently, unschoolers stayed largely beneath the radar. New York University sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens, in a seminal academic study of homeschooling, argues that in the 1990s conservative Christians came to dominate the movement, not so much because they constituted a majority, but because they formed efficient, well-organized advocacy groups that skillfully explained their methods to legislators and the media.

In the past two decades, however, unschoolers have grown more visible. A genre of unschooling self-help books, online forums, websites, and blogs has sprung up, with parents detailing their experience and offering advice to others. Annual unschooling conferences for parents and kids attract hundreds. For teenagers, books like the The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by former middle school teacher and unschooling advocate Grace Llewellyn advise kids to take control of their own learning.

Llewellyn also runs the Not Back to School Camp for teens aged 13 to18, which boasts no set bedtime, very few mandatory activities, and a self-consciously tolerant outlook. Both Jess and Caroline Kjellberg have attended. Like their peers, unschooled teenagers congregate in Facebook groups and post YouTube testimonials. One teen, putting a self-ironic twist on a sometimes-voiced criticism of unschooling’s laissez-faire approach, calls her blog “I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write.”

The Internet, of course, has encouraged subcultures of all sorts. It has also subtly normalized one of the basic tenets of unschooling: that pursuing one’s own interests, however narrow, is both worthwhile and doable. Even as public schools push for accountability and the college admissions process grows increasingly cutthroat, the Web is ushering in a new wave of amateurism and, perhaps, a renewed respect for the autodidact.

In recent decades, the concepts of self-directed learning and multiple intelligences have gained mainstream acceptance, while books like Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class champion the cluster effects of a deep and talented pool of creative workers, demonstrating how they help shape the character of a city and define a lifestyle. In parts of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, where coffee shops are packed with freelancers, many scarcely a decade older than Jess and Caroline Kjellberg, tapping on laptops and jabbering on iPhones, one might wonder whether, for a certain kind of kid, school may be obsolete.

An unconventional education

Eighteen-year-old Cullen Golden may well be that kind of kid. Except for the fact that he lives with his parents and nine-year-old sister in their apartment in the East Village, he could be any of the thousands of young, aspiring filmmakers in New York City. He collaborates with homeschooled and unschooled friends on goofy but imaginative short videos that he uploads to YouTube and posts to his website and Facebook page. With his fellow unschooled friend, 17-year-old J.T. Schafer, Cullen has been working on a Lord of the Rings–style film they half-jokingly refer to as “The Epic Movie” for three years. They filmed it last summer at Cullen’s parents’ house upstate, but have to reshoot. After some prodding, they confess they forgot to turn on the button on the camera that would allow them to play the film in widescreen, a must for picture quality. Also, Cullen, who for the past couple of years has taken playwriting classes at the MCC Theater, a hip off-Broadway venue in Manhattan, thinks the script needs reworking.

Cullen, who has round blue eyes, a gap between two of his top teeth, and long reddish hair he often wears in a ponytail, has never been to school. His parents, Lori Johnson and Joey Golden, who had moved to New York from Detroit to pursue acting careers, settled on unschooling by accident, after deciding, Lori says, that sending Cullen to school felt like saying, “Here, raise my child for me.” (Although both Lori and Joey acted extensively when Cullen was young, Joey now works for a firm that designs websites for big businesses and nonprofits). At first, Lori tried to make Cullen do spelling and math worksheets. It never worked — there was always something more interesting.

“Every year,” Lori says, “we’d be like, ‘It’s March! Should we be trying to do something that looks like school?’”

After Cullen’s younger sister Addie was born, things got more hectic. Cullen did all kinds of activities, from soccer to avant-garde dance, but throughout, he’s been able to pursue filmmaking with an intensity he doubts would have been possible if he had gone to school or if his parents had insisted on a more structured homeschooling approach. In addition to filmmaking and playwriting, he plays in a guitar quartet; composes flowing, lyrical guitar pieces, as well as some more satirical ones; and shoots stylized photos of cityscapes and nature scenes. He also plays a lot of video games, something his mother has learned to live with. In addition to playing them, he’s the “ideas guy” for J.T., a computer whiz who designs his own games. For awhile, Cullen studied with a math tutor whom he raved about, but last year got too busy.

Cullen knows he’s had an unconventional education but acts nonchalant about anything he may have missed. If he doesn’t know some things high schoolers are expected to have learned, he says, “It’s not lost. It’s not like [because] I didn’t learn it when I was little, now it’s all over.”

Unschooling not an excuse to sit around all day

The notion that learning continues after childhood or adolescence is not a radical idea. After all, an entire industry of for-profit and not-for-profit continuing education programs rests on that premise. Unschoolers are full of anecdotal success stories about brilliant kids who did not learn to read until their teens (Cullen, his mother says, did not read confidently until age 11), but researchers have no data with which to measure how unschooled children perform academically compared to their peers or how they fare in later life. Some states — New York included — require homeschooled children to take standardized tests in certain grades, but the federal government does not collect that data, so there is no way to know on a national scale whether encouraging children to learn at their own pace hurts them, helps them, or makes no difference at all.

Because of the lack of data, experts hesitate to draw sweeping conclusions, but they do say that unschooling’s potential to give a kid either a great, diverse education or a limited and weak one depends a lot on the family’s resources. That’s hardly surprising — there’s lots of data correlating SAT scores with parental income. Maurice Gibbons, an early and influential champion of self-directed learning and the author of a 2002 manual on encouraging high schools to take charge of their education, raised that concern.

“If you have a really rich home life and lots of activities and lots of books around and lots of materials, I could see that as a fascinating possibility,” he said. On the other hand, he said, “I wonder how someone living in the projects, how they would do with unschooling.”

There’s also the question of geography. The Internet has undoubtedly made it much easier to discover and explore diverse passions, but having ease of movement and access to the resources of a big cosmopolitan city such as New York helps a lot. Being old enough to get around by oneself expands one’s choices, too. Even the most ardent unschooling parent has to broker compromises between siblings. Jess Kjellberg, for example, can hop on the bus from New York to Philadelphia to visit her boyfriend. Her friend and Latin buddy, Joe Lodin, 16, never attended school, but he pegs the beginning of his unschooling to when he could get around by himself, often catching the train or the bus from Westchester to Manhattan.

“Now,” he says, “I will consciously think I have an interest in x, and then I will do all the research on x and then see if x is available in a class nearby.”

 Most of the discussion of unschooling in the popular media has focused on younger children, perhaps because reading and basic math remain such touchstones in education policy. But unschooled teenagers occupy a fuzzier terrain. On the one hand, adults tend to think of teenagers as self-absorbed and hormone-addled. On the other hand, it’s not beyond the pale to think that self-motivated teenagers might take it upon themselves to, say, study Latin, as Jess Kjellberg and Joe Lodin have, or delve into anarchist political economics and music theory, the way Caroline Kjellberg has. The question is whether this laissez-faire approach can work for just any kid. 

 Gibbons suspects not. As kids get older and parents get more hands-off, he says, “It really does leave all initiative and methodology and direction to the individual student.” Some teens, just like some children, are capable of challenging themselves, he says, but others many need a push.
 
Grace Llewellyn turns that argument on its face in her 1991 book The Teenager Liberation Handbook. Teenagers, Llewellyn writes, are inherently creative and motivated; they just need to channel their energies. They are also a lot more levelheaded and reasonable, Llewellyn says, than adults give them credit for. Caroline Kjellberg puts it more bluntly. Unschooling is not, she says, “an excuse to sit around all day eating Cheetos and smoking weed.”

Still, can’t having near-total control over one’s schedule feel kind of overwhelming?

“I’m perfectly capable of handling it — everyone my age is perfectly capable of handling it,” Caroline says, pointing out that, until a little more than a century ago, girls her age were getting married, starting families, and heading households. That’s a long row to hoe compared to deciding whether to do some computer programming or go to play rehearsal.
   
What about college?

To say that unschooled teenagers have a lot of control over their schedules is not to say that every moment is a pleasure, though you might get that impression from reading the popular unschooling guides.

“They talk about how wonderful every day is because they’re very unstructured,” Caroline Kjellberg says. “And [how] every day they get do to these fabulous things and every day they’re so happy to be alive.”

The reality, she says, is that unschooling is just life. Sure, it’s great to decide what you want to do, but there are days when things don’t go your way. She wishes unschoolers acknowledged that more often.

“Everything is supposed to be this very, very loose, extreme hippie kind of thing, and if you’re not like that or if you have days where you think maybe it’s not the best thing, it can get kind of confusing,” she says. “’Cause it can be like, ‘well, am I a real unschooler? Well, if I was a real unschooler, would I be like this?’”

Jess is more of an evangelist, though she’s under no illusion that unschooling is all endless joy. There’s something to be said for delayed gratification, for doing things now that will help you out down the road.

“I know there’s a lot of stuff that, like, I need to know and should learn,” she said one day last fall, shortly after plunging into algebra and world history courses after a year off from doing martial arts (she later dropped the world history, which she deemed too much busy work). “I’ve sort of waited until now, but I’m really motivated. This is the most academics-heavy year I’ve ever had,” she added, giggling, as though it were almost a little silly. “But I love it.”

Jess has since decided she wants to enroll in Hunter College next year. The SAT math is not her strong suit, so she has enlisted her Latin buddy, Joe, to tutor her at a pizza place in Morningside Heights. After a year at Hunter, she hopes to transfer to Brown University — she likes the idea of having no required classes. Her sister, meanwhile, is taking advanced placement courses in English composition and American history, in part because she appreciates having something to keep her on track, but also to earn some “completely, indisputably objective grades” to show to music conservatories when she applies next year.

“The fact that you took a class doesn’t mean you know anything. It just means you took a class,” Caroline says, but that’s the way college admissions works. To get in, both girls know they will have to play the game.

Cullen Golden isn’t sure he wants to play the game. At 18, most of his peers, even the ones who are unschooled or favor relaxed homeschooling, have already applied to college. Recently, while Cullen, J.T., and two other friends were hanging out, the conversation turned to college admissions. At his parents’ urging, J.T. said he had applied to 10 schools, though he expected to defer and was holding out the possibility of pursuing an as-yet-undetermined “big project” instead of college. Cullen kept quiet throughout the conversation. His eyes darted a bit, like he didn’t want to have to do any explaining.

Asked about it later, Cullen sounded more confident. He’s considered film school, but is not sure it’s necessary and has yet to take or prepare for any of the admissions tests many schools require. Last fall, he and his mother scoped out the acclaimed Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where they viewed some student films. Cullen was underwhelmed.

“They seemed very planned out, very basic,” he said. “That was kind of weird because I was like, ‘What are you teaching them?’”

He figured he would wait it out, see what he could keep learning on his own. His playwriting teacher is giving him help on how to write a screenplay and, on the suggestion of a friend’s filmmaker father, he sent his resume to a film production company, hoping for an apprenticeship. Cullen’s mother, Lori, isn’t sure her son needs to go to college, either, but she does not want him to feel he can’t go.

A couple of years ago, when kids his age were frantically cramming for college admissions tests, getting expensive tutors, and memorizing test-taking strategies, “it just seemed like ‘what a weird thing to do,’” Lori says. “But that’s almost an unfortunate thing because maybe it closed some doors for him.”

 Cullen frames the issue differently. “It is interesting,” he said recently. “Some of the people I know who aren’t in college are kind of not really doing anything.” He doesn’t want that, but says as long as he has projects like the Epic Movie he and J.T. are working on, he’ll be fine.
 
 “I think the best thing to do is keep pushing forward,” he says. “Just keep doing stuff.”

Ever-changing interests

The week after the comics convention, Jess Kjellberg and Isabel Ringer have arranged for a martial arts lesson. They used to meet at a regular time, but since Isabel left school, everything is up in the air; they finally settle on 5 p.m. A friend of Isabel’s from camp comes along. The winds are gusting past 30 miles per hour, so their usual sparring on the pier a block from Isabel’s apartment will be too difficult. The girls traipse upstairs to the apartment, which is large for New York standards, and drop staffs, sticks, coats, and a steel broadsword on the living room couch.

While the girls spar, Isabel’s mom, Kayte, goes on the computer and scrolls through the homeschooling paperwork she has to file with the state. She has no idea how to do it and was up half the night reading books on all different kinds of homeschooling. They’re stacked on the kitchen table, along with some classics she hopes she and Isabel can read aloud together: Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, and others by Hans Christian Anderson. Jess, who’s letting Isabel and her friend practice on their own for a bit, spots The Unprocessed Child, a mother’s memoir of unschooling her daughter which she had lent Kayte. “Go unschooling!” Jess says, with only a tiny trace of irony.

Kayte says she doesn’t know what to do. It’s day seven of the no-school experiment.

“It’s more me. She’s better adjusted to it. She’s fine with it,” Kayte says. “She acts happier by the day.”

After a bit, Isabel and her friend scamper upstairs so Isabel can put on black kung fu pants to match the ones Jess is wearing. Jess browses martial arts videos on YouTube while Kayte hovers, waiting for her next client.

“She told me today she hates workbooks,” Kayte says of Isabel, sounding at a loss.

“Yeah, I went through a phase like that,” Jess says, nonchalant.

“I left a note by the computer,” Kayte says, “saying ‘Do you want to write an essay on Jane Eyre?’”

On the wall behind the computer is a big poster that reads, “Isabel’s Home School Wish List.” French, piano and voice lessons, cooking, a fashion design project, martial arts with Jess, the city homeschool association’s spring play, gymnastics, lots of other stuff. Isabel has amended it to include pottery lessons and “band” — the rock group she plays in with two girlfriends. Kayte inspects it.

“We were going to do another one, because it’s already changed,” she says.

Jess doesn’t miss a beat. “It always changes,” she says.

 Two weeks later, things have indeed changed. Isabel kept amending her wish list until it spilled over onto sheets of paper that have collected on the piano bench.
 
 “I can’t really make up my mind,” Isabel explained. “I get really excited about one idea, and then that leads to another thing and that leads to another thing.”

 Reading about the Greek god Dionysius recently, she stumbled on something about a potion and immediately became obsessed with mixing imitation versions in preparation for her magic potion–themed 13th birthday party next month. Kayte, though, had been waking up at 3, 4, and 5 in the morning, worrying. Her attempts to spark an interest in “the classics” had fizzled, finally, with Gulliver’s Travels.

 But seeing Isabel sit still for hours, stringing intricate beaded charms to decorate the potion bottles, Kayte felt better. She’d rarely seen her daughter focus like that before. She reminded herself that Isabel had started reading and writing stories for fun, and now, was asking about computer graphics lessons at the huge Apple store down the street. They made a big pot of chili, and Isabel, who hadn’t had an appetite for months, kept going back for more.

Kaitlin Bell

In the fall of 2002, I was teaching third grade at an independent, coeducational elementary and middle school in Manhattan. As October rolled by, I asked a student what he was going to be for Halloween.

“I’m going as an Indian,” he said, excitedly. He seemed to be looking forward to the upcoming candy fest. But to me, his response was a flag — a big red flag with “teachable moment” written all over it.

Zoom ahead several years to a graduate-level class about “otherness” at the New School for Social Research in New York. One Monday evening, our discussion turned to multiculturalism, terminology, and political correctness in schools. The question on the horseshoe-shaped table was does the term “multicultural” actually impede our ability to connect with “the other” in our lives? 

As a teacher-turned-graduate student, I listened intently to my classmates sound off on the hot button issues: Multiculturalism is inappropriately associated with racial diversity, given the fact that the two are very different concepts. “Diversity Day” and “Multicultural Month” too neatly divide from the rest of a classroom’s curriculum the fact of diversity. Schools should abolish programs devoted to multicultural awareness and instead, simply be diverse institutions. Terms used in schools should reflect the latest in social thought, otherwise how can we raise kids who will become conscious and sensitive adults?

When I became a schoolteacher in 2001, multiculturalism and diversity curricula were considered good things. Multicultural activities and books were part of the curriculum. Diversity coordinators were being hired in many of the private schools, and teachers were applying to attend national conferences on diversity. The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) offered Diversity Leadership Awards each year.

But now, in graduate school, I listened to my classmates (much younger than me, just out of college, and with no teaching experience) and wondered about their thoughts. I didn’t necessarily disagree with them. My classmates, however, were demonstrating a typical problem. In graduate school classrooms, think tanks, non-profit organizations, and government offices, issues like diversity in schools are debated all the time. New terminology replaces the old, things become politically correct or incorrect, theorists publish controversial articles, minority group representatives speak about rights on the evening news, and social movements sweep along. We adults absorb the latest in what we should and should not to say.

Teachers try to stay updated. But could I have kept my eight-year-old students aware of the changing thought about, say, the issue of how to refer to American Indians? Aware enough so that in that one moment in time — the Halloween costume remark — we all would spew the most fashionable term?

A glimpse into the classroom

Though private and public efforts to jazz up schools do make a difference in keeping classrooms and curricula up-to-date, many classrooms — and I’ll speak only of my experience in two Manhattan private schools here — are a little bit like museums of childhood. Mine certainly were. It starts with the stuff you can still find in classrooms. A tinkerer like me might like to grind the old pencil sharpener, with lead marks dating back 40 years. (We had an electric sharpener, too, but it broke far more often than the grinder type did). A book collector could pore over yellowed copies of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Winnie-the-Pooh. Who can deny the charm of framed children’s drawings whose creators are now middle-aged?

Then again, picture the classroom as a landfill. Many classrooms are stuffed with musty piles of papers. Chipped paint reveals layers of unfashionable color choices, as if you could peel back each one and reveal the philosophy of the day on the walls. If you hunt, you can still find a slide rule or a U.S.S.R. picture book. Some classrooms are just not cutting edge, regardless of what the admissions brochures say. Ideas and the materials used to teach them, for better or worse, tend to endure through generations.

The age of things extends to ideas, of course. Lesson plans that worked are recopied, while lesson plans that didn’t are filed into three-ring binders and kept for reference. If there’s a binder for “Diversity Day,” it gets recycled year after year. My classroom was chock-full of evidence of the greatest ongoing education experiment: trial and error. Like a museum (or a garbage dump), a classroom encapsulates nuggets of human thought.

It’s not that the curriculum is totally immune to the changes “out there.” In fact, like vaults run by pack rats, classrooms serve as the perfect repository for the ideological debris of political campaigns and social movements. What starts as dialogue or dissent in think tanks and graduate classrooms is inevitably dumped into teachers’ laps along with the immediate events of the day. Teachers must marry the politically correct, culturally sensitive world with the violent, offensive world, and translate the result into a civically and environmentally responsible yet age-appropriate curriculum.

Consider the teacher’s task after hurricane Katrina, or during last fall’s election, when Martin Luther King’s image could be viewed regularly on the news and the name Lincoln was dropped into more conversations than I can recall in recent history. Consider the teacher’s task on September 11, 2001. That, in fact, was my fourth day of teaching: streams of soot-covered office workers filing past the school, panicked parents trying to push their way upstairs to collect their kids and take them home, the head of my division explaining to students that “bad things happened to America today, but you are all safe.” 

Again and again, new worksheets are created, new lesson plans put into place, new safety plans written, new “current events” times carved into the school day.

The questions at hand

So when my student said, “I’m going as an Indian,” what should I have done? My graduate classmates might have offered multiple choices: Remind him that a recent trend is to use the term “Native American”; explain that an even more recent trend is a backlash against the label “Native American,” against labeling at all; tell the boy he ought to use the officially recognized term “American Indian,” but compliment him for getting it close; use the moment to explain that dressing up for Halloween as an ethnic or racial identity instead of as a mouse or a pumpkin could be considered offensive, because reducing said identity to costume pieces perpetuates negative stereotypes. I did work through several options in that moment in 2002, but by the time I was ready with a response, the boy was long gone, off to the book nook where, I can imagine now, he pulled The Indian in the Cupboard from the shelf.

But I was new to teaching then. I have quicker reflexes now.

What am I getting at? Something I wish I had gotten at with my graduate classmates. That teaching is already a difficult job. Keeping eight-year-olds up-to-date on the political and social changes in our world, contextualizing those changes for them from the previous status quo, as politically incorrect as it may have been, and creating anew each day a curriculum that matches the latest in current events? We do our best.

I sat down with two teaching buddies who still work with the elementary school set and asked them about politically correct terminology. I’ll call them Scott and Amanda. Both work in private schools in Manhattan, both have graduate degrees in the field of education, and both were eager to discuss how, as teachers, they handle changing thought on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

“Would it faze you if a child said, ‘I’m going to be an Indian for Halloween’?”

“Deep inside, I’m feeling, uh-oh. This could end up being very stereotypical,” said Scott. “It raises questions of what representations on Halloween are inappropriate.”

Scott’s school allows costumes on Halloween, though within reason. Students are sometimes pulled aside and asked to alter details of their dress — I remember the debate over a fake cigar, complete with burning end, one year. Amanda’s school has a no-costume policy, though parents provide candy parties in the decorated classrooms.

“I think I would ask the student about his costume,” said Amanda. “Like, what are the things we learned about Native Americans that you incorporated into your costume?”

“So a gentle change of term?” I asked.

“I actually use the terms ‘Native American’ and ‘Indian’ interchangeably,” said Scott. “I think it’s important to understand the history of the words.”

In the moment the student told me he was “going as an Indian,” I didn’t know the history of the words, nor was I up-to-date on the latest best term choice. So I did what I always tell my students to do: I researched.

A brief history of names

It appears that when Christopher Columbus hit land and was hit with the urge to do what all explorers do — name things — he might have had one of two thoughts. Either he rejoiced, “We made it to the East Indies, or India, or somewhere over yonder! Check out the Indians!” (Sarcasm mine.) Or, improbably, he mused, “These spiritual people are with God, with Dios.” That seems like a long shot to me, and I could not find any sources to back it up save for some hobby historians writing about it on the Internet.

Either way, or for some other reason that never seems to have made it into our history books, the label “Indios,” and then “Indian,” was attached to Seminole, Pequot, and Sioux alike. “Indian” became the catchall word for anyone explorers and settlers met along their journey. It gained recognition worldwide, and some languages even adopted new words to differentiate between Indians of the Americas and Indians of India.

Then came the 1960s. Indians, along with non-Indian supporters, voiced objections to the term they’d been labeled with for centuries. Aside from the fact that it could have been a colossal geographical mistake by Columbus, the term “Indian” had become a bit of a joke. The dawn of film and cheap plastic toys had given Indians a bad name. Cowboys and Indians were so strongly made representative of good and evil, civilization and savagery, respectively, that many people believed the only way to erase the stereotype was to erase the name.

Thus Indians were reborn again, this time as “Native Americans.” “Native” because their ancestors were here before anyone else, and “American” for obvious reasons. Sensitive anthropologists informed the government of this new label, and the government promptly absorbed it into its classification system.

The term “Native American,” however, provoked some questions of logic. What makes a person native? Birth? If so, there’s a whole bunch of us in a big happy native, if not Native American, family. And “American,” like “Indian” before it, supplanted the beloved tribal names that existed long before Vespucci did.

By the 1980s, many acknowledged they preferred the old way. But the term “Native American” has nonetheless stuck around, to the dismay of some. Comic George Carlin bites at the “pussified, trendy bullshit phrase.” Cherokee writer Christina Berry requests that “Indian” be used but with contextual sensitivity (avoid the worst: “Injun” and “redskin”). Lakota activist Russell Means wants his people to call themselves “any damn thing we choose” and refuses to be classified as “Native American.”

In addition to “Native American,” the vast machinery of label production has spit out “Original Americans,” “Indigenous Americans,” “Amerindians,” “First Americans,” “First Nations,” and “Aboriginal Peoples,” to name but a few. The vast machinery of academic and activist opposition has spit back a reproach for each one, though you can’t completely fault those who try out “Native American Indian” or “Aboriginal American Natives” in a misguided attempt to get it right at both ends.

The U.S. government officially uses the term “American Indian,” while the Canadian government has adopted the term “First Nations” in place of “Indian” and lists the name under the umbrella term “Aboriginals.” The term “Indigenous Peoples” encompasses a wide range of tribes in Mexico and Central and South America.

When I sort through the often contradictory materials, the phrase that comes to my mind is political scientist Walter Connor’s “terminological chaos.” And this chaos is faithfully documented by the caretakers of education, in the filing cabinets and on the bookshelves of American classrooms.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom

Both Scott and Amanda teach social studies curricula that rely heavily on the heritage of the American Indians. November is both National American Indian Month and Alaska Native Heritage Month, and much of the commemorative excitement plays out in their classrooms. Scott’s school invites the Red Hawk Council Dancers every year, who, if I remember correctly, explain to students that what they have seen of American Indians in the movies isn’t always true. Scott also takes his students to the Museum of the American Indian. They don’t know the museum is one among many getting heat for not returning Indian artifacts to the tribes who claim them.

A bulletin board announces “Native Americans!” in bright red punch-out letters and is tacked full of “indigenous artwork.” I remember devoting a stretch of wall to the “False Face Society,” lined with Iroquois-inspired masks made of paper and markers, only to learn that I may have been making a major cultural intrusion by allowing my students to create their own false faces. For a long time, I reminded my students to walk “Indian file” (one behind the other) and sit “Indian style” (knees bent, legs cross), because I had grown up with these terms. I grew out of them, however, and started to say simply “single-file” and “cross-legged.”

Amanda reads The Indian in the Cupboard to her students.

“Do you adjust the term as you read?” I asked.

“No. The books are dated and are still in the classrooms,” said Amanda. “People don’t get brand new materials with the latest political material in them. They’re not interested in the idea that there’s a controversy over a name.”

Amanda said that even in middle school history classrooms, where her husband teaches, “Half the books say one thing, half the books say the other.”

There are a few resources a teacher might use to make sense of the terminological changes for his or her students. In 2002, a book called Contentious Issues by Márianna Csóti appeared in the United States. It’s a book about big ideas for little kids, as the title suggests. One section of this stereotype-destruction manual reads like a laundry list of terms you can use to get beat up at a bar: “Paddy, Paki, Sambo, Spade, Spick/spic, Spook, Taffy, Wog, Wop.” What comes between “Paki” and “Sambo” is “Red Indian,” an archaic British phrase that is still used by some to distinguish between American Indians and Indians from India. Many condemn the term as disparaging on the basis of race, and others wonder why black and white remained okay whereas red and yellow fell into disrepute. Csóti encourages adults to be clear with children about terms. “Red Indian” is racist, “Indian” is politically incorrect, “Native American” is “not wholly acceptable,” and the child’s best bet is to go with “Indigenous.”

I can only imagine what reaction the book would receive in my graduate school classrooms. Outrageously offensive? Possibly harmful, feeding the fire by putting words in kids’ mouths? Perpetuating a classroom environment in which difference is too starkly highlighted? Politically incorrect?

To me, it’s a saving grace kind of book, something to help put all the rapidly changing thought into one place. I asked my teaching friends about it.

“I have an increasing apathy toward political correctness,” Scott told me. “There’s always something new. I want to understand and be compassionate and considerate, but in the end, it’s about the values you project as a teacher.”

Scott was faced with a teachable moment himself when reading Runaway to Freedom by Barbara Smucker with his students.

“The book used ‘nigger’ quite often,” Scott said.

Runaway to Freedom is a historical fiction novel geared toward kids in the nine-to-12 years category, and it reveals, in context, how the word “nigger” was used in the 19th century.

Scott continued. “I asked my students, ‘Do you all feel comfortable going on with this? We have until tomorrow to decide if we’re all comfortable. Go home and talk about it. If anyone has any concerns, let me know.’ I checked in with the administrator, too.”

In the end, Scott’s administrator approved, and his students decided it was okay, that they would learn about the word in context.

“I was actually really moved by the book, but it was hard to read,” said Scott. “We agreed we wouldn’t actually say the word, we would just say ‘N.’ The kids took it very seriously.”

“It’s about teachers with good intentions who want to do the right thing,” said Amanda. “You can’t shield students from the idea that bad words exist, or that there are really ugly moments in American history.”

“In the end, the lessons you’re teaching — about different cultures and the history of a place — are about understanding the humanness of things,” she added. “They’re about building understanding for otherness.”

Suzanne Farrell

Celia McWee, 83, looked forward to Saturdays for 13 years. This was her favorite day of the week because she would use it to make herself pretty for her Sunday morning visit. But she wouldn’t go to church. She would visit the state prison. She would drive three hours from Augusta, Georgia, to Ridgeville, South Carolina, to visit her son, Jerry McWee. Jerry had been on death row since he robbed and killed John Perry, a grocery store clerk in rural Aiken County, in 1991. He was executed on April 14, 2004. He was 52.

“Saturday was an exciting day because it was my day to choose the outfit I was going to wear, to go to the beauty shop because I wanted to look my best for him,” she said, crying. “And Sunday going up there was exciting because it was something to look forward to. But on the way back, it was nothing but tears.”

For as long as her son was in prison, her weekly schedule kept her going, she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she would not leave the house until she received her son’s phone call. Tuesdays and Thursdays were her days to go grocery shopping, do the laundry, and vacuum. And then came Sundays, when she would share a ride with other inmates’ mothers to the prison. She would meet them at a gas station in Columbia, South Carolina.

Although her son was executed four years ago, not a day goes by that McWee does not recall the sound of his shackles dragging on the floor of the prison each time she visited him.

“The noise that most stands out in my mind is when they would bring them from one building to the other, and we could hear them walking with those chains around their ankles and around their waist and their wrists,” she said. “That is torture. I mean, to see your son being brought in worse than you do to a dog.”
 
McWee’s house is filled with pictures of her son. She proudly reminisces about the day Jerry got married and when, despite having only a high school education, he joined the police force. Then she shows a black-and-white print of Jerry in an emergency medicine technician (EMT) uniform. After two years as a police officer and five as a firefighter, Jerry had decided to make his life all about helping others in need. That is when he went back to school to study emergency medicine.

“He was the kind of guy that would go out of his way to help others,” she said. “He was a people person like me, used to helping the ones in need. Never would I have imagined this could have happened to my family. Everything was so nice and dandy, and it took so little time to turn things around. It is true he is in a much better place now, but I still feel he should be with me instead.”

McWee’s feeling is common to many relatives of inmates executed by the state. They are trying to recover from the trauma of waiting many years for their loved one’s scheduled death. But often their suffering is made worse because many people still do not recognize their pain as legitimate. 

Zipped wounds

Like McWee, Bill Babbitt had a tough recovery. His younger brother Manny, a decorated Vietnam War veteran severely affected by post-traumatic stress syndrome, was executed at San Quentin State Prison on his 50th birthday — May 3, 1999. He had been charged with robbing Leah Schendel, an elderly woman who died of a heart attack during the crime in Sacramento, California.

What makes Babbitt feel better is touring the country to talk about his brother’s “unfair” execution; Babbitt is a member of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), a group founded in Philadelphia in 2004. The group offers support and advocacy for victims.
   
He gives his testimony using what he calls “the power of remembrance,” letting his “zipped wound” open, and pouring out what he thinks needs to be said about Manny’s case. He is trying to educate the public about why the death penalty was unnecessary in his brother’s case. Yet many still consider his efforts to be those of a “second-class victim” who is defending a criminal, he said.

“My job is to educate and tell them, ‘Hey, you lose a rabbit or a dog or a cat, and you grieve over it,’” he said. “‘Manny was a human being. Why should I not grieve over him just as well?’ It is the unfairness of that I have to talk about.”
 

A trail of victims

The families who survive the state execution of their inmate relative are still not specifically referred to as “victims of abuse of power,” as defined by the United Nations General Assembly’s 1985 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.

Article 18 of the declaration defines a victim of abuse of power as a person “who, individually or collectively, [has] suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of [his or her] fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national criminal laws but of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”

In some countries, including the United States, killing by lethal injection is not considered an abuse of power. The declaration does not include the death penalty as a “violation of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.”   

“But these people [families of death row inmates] have, in many ways, suffered a trauma, and their experience, in many ways, parallels the experience of survivors of homicide victims,” said Susannah Sheffer, director of No Silence, No Shame, a project of MVFHR.

The problem is that people don’t think of the inmate as someone who might have a family who will grieve when he is executed.

“Families of the executed are invisible victims, hidden victims. People are not even thinking through the fact that when an execution is carried out, it’s going to leave a grieving family,” Sheffer said. “A lot of people hold the family responsible, [a] kind of ‘guilt by association.’ They think this [the inmate] is a monster, so the parents must have created that.”

Jerry McWee’s mother said she is haunted by the image of her son strapped on the execution bed, blowing her the last kiss. She also said she was not the only one to suffer from her son’s death.

“It is a horrible, horrible experience to have to go through for years. It not only punishes the inmates, it punishes so many people,” said McWee. “One of Jerry’s daughters, Misty, exactly one year after his execution, tried to commit suicide. She cut her wrists, because she said she had to be with her father and that she did not belong on this earth.”

The legacy of guilt

Babbitt has been battling feelings of guilt instead. Babbitt turned Manny in to the police, and later he was not able to stop his execution. Babbitt believed his brother’s death was particularly unfair because his brother suffered from a mental illness. It was out of desperation and fear that his brother would commit more crimes that Babbitt decided to collaborate with the police, who promised him his brother was going to be fine, he said. 

That is why he told Manny to go out to play some pool, when in fact the police were waiting outside of his house to arrest him. But Babbitt did not expect Manny to be convicted and sentenced to death. The hardest part of all was having to explain to his mother why he let that happen, he said.

“My mother loves me, and I know she has forgiven me for turning Manny in. The problem is I have not forgiven myself for promising Ma that Manny would not get executed,” he said. “I took a gamble with my brother’s life, and I lost.”

Since the day Manny was executed, Babbitt has not felt strong enough to see his family, even on holidays. He believes he is not “worthy of their love and trust anymore,” he said. He feels uncomfortable around them even though they forgave him for what he did.

“If it wasn’t for my faith in Jesus, I would have killed myself. But I didn’t want my family to have to go to another funeral. I had to be strong and live to tell that story,” he said. “I will see my brother again when my time is up on Earth.”

No Silence, No Shame

Babbitt and McWee know each other well now. They met at No Silence, No Shame’s first gathering for families of death row inmates in Texas in the spring of 2004. The conference was organized to allow people who share the same grief to share their stories with one another.

According to Renny Cushing, director of MVFHR, the project is now trying to “put a face with the name of the family of the condemned prisoners,” by bringing the testimonies of these family members into courts. Cushing said the hope is that juries judging a death row case will consider these testimonies before announcing their verdict.

Cushing is also a survivor. In 1988, his father, Robert Cushing, was killed through his screen door at his home in New Hampshire by two bullets fired by an off-duty policeman. Officer Robert McLaughlin Sr. had a dirty record: He had killed his best friend, had taken part in an armed robbery, and had arrested an elderly town woman for no good reason, according to Cushing in his testimony in "Forgiving the Unforgivable” on MVFHR’s website. Cushing and his brother had been keeping an eye on the officer ever since, and McLaughlin didn’t like that pressure, said Cushing. That is why McLaughlin went to the Cushing house that night — to settle the score, so to speak, but he shot the wrong person, said Cushing in the testimony.

“If the state is going to kill someone’s father, we would like to have the court think about what that would mean, and the people who are most effective [at] talking about that are individuals [whose] father was executed when they were children,” Cushing said.

On average, 50 to 60 people are executed every year by the government, and they typically have three family members each. That means 150 to 240 more victims are created annually, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

No Silence, No Shame is trying to reduce those numbers by making the public aware of these survivors’ experiences, to show the ripple effects of the death penalty.

Studying loss

Sandra Jones, a research sociologist and professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, released a study on the issues of grief and loss faced by the families with a relative on death row.
     
Jones spent years building relationships with families of death row inmates. She has taken it upon herself to bring kids of inmates to see their fathers in the Delaware County Prison in Pennsylvania when their own family members refuse to do so.

She became particularly close to Brian Steckel’s family. Steckel was convicted of raping and killing 29-year-old Sandra Lee Long. Jones witnessed Steckel’s execution in 2005. She is now writing a book about her personal experience with death row inmates’ families. She said the government ignores these families because it feels guilty.

“If the system gave these families the attention they deserve, it would come across [as] really hypocritical, because they are the very system that is killing their loved ones,” she said.  

She also explains that the reason death row inmates’ families are often forgotten is that the survivor victims themselves do not want to be put in the spotlight, since they feel guilty for and are ashamed of their loved ones’ mistakes.

“The family gets criminalized along with their loved ones, and stigmatized to the extent that they don’t feel comfortable coming out and demanding attention because they feel guilty. They have a lot of guilt and a lot of shame. They [ask] themselves what they could have done differently,” she said.

“Writer Elizabeth Sharpen sometimes refers to them as the ‘double losers,’” Jones said. “A lot of these guys on death row have murdered a wife or an uncle or somebody within the family, and so the surviving family members are put into this position where if they support and grieve the loss of the loved one on death row, they are made to feel they did not really love the one who was murdered.”   

Losing a child to the death penalty becomes a never-ending loss, one “similar to having a disabled child that you are grieving for every unmet milestone he misses throughout life,” said Jones. It becomes a “wound that never heals and keeps opening up with every failed appeal.” 

Between losing a child to a murderer and losing one to death row — as is the case for McWee — the latter seems to be the more painful of the two because of the “never-ending wait.”

Having to wait for your son to be executed is “horrible, because you know it is coming, but you don’t know when,” said McWee, whose son, Jerry, was executed 14 years after her daughter, Joyce, was murdered by Joyce’s husband on December 31, 1980.

“[My daughter’s murder] was a shock, but [it was] nothing compared to the death penalty hanging over your head for 13 years,” she said. “News of her murder came unexpectedly, [but] the wait is horrible. One day he called me at 12:30, and he said, ‘Mother, I have been served.’ I had no idea what he meant. All I knew was that lunch was served at 11:30. So I said, ‘What [do] you mean, you have been served? What did you eat for lunch?’ So he said, ‘Mother, you don’t understand. I have been served with my death warrant — they have given me my day of execution.’”

Murder is murder

Even murder victim families sympathize with state execution survivor families, finding it unjust that their pain is labeled differently from theirs.

The Rev. Walter Everett, a pastor at St. Jones United Methodist Church in Sunbury, Connecticut, lost his son, Scott, in 1987. Scott was murdered by Mike Carducci in Easton, Connecticut. The pastor has been part of MVFHR since it was founded. He said he feels close to parents whose children are on death row.
   
Everett said it is important to educate people about the death penalty without making a distinction about different victims. He travels around the country to speak about the experience he shares with many families whose loved ones have been executed under the death penalty.

“I see them just as much a ‘victim’ as I am. That person, regardless of what their son or daughter has done, or their loved ones, they still love them, so they become a victim when that person is killed,” he said. “Since I got to know several people whose family members were executed, I see the pain they have gone through, and I believe their story should be told as much, because their pain is just as deep as my pain.”

Everett took part in a vigil in California to stop the execution of Clarence Ray Allen, a 76-year-old, and at that point blind and in a wheelchair. Allen was put to death on January 17, 2006, for planning three murders from his cell while serving a life sentence.

“I went out there and I met his children. Lovely people. And they hurt, they pained as he went through that,” he said.

Former death row inmates who have been exonerated share the belief that their families’ grief rarely receives attention. Since executions now take place behind closed doors, the system has become “sterile,” said Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person on death row to be exonerated because of DNA evidence.

Bloodsworth served nearly nine years in a Maryland prison for the 1984 rape and murder of nine-year-old girl he had never met.

“They don’t want to show the ‘crying mother’ over the executed son. No matter what he has done, he is still paying for that, and they don’t show that part of it,” he said. “She has got no say. She raised a murderer. That is how they are looking at her, and that was not her fault, necessarily.”

Bloodsworth regained his freedom on June 28, 1993, but his mother, Jeanette, did not live to see him walk out of prison. She died earlier that year. Bloodsworth was taken in chains to see her body, but prison officials refused to allow him to attend the funeral.

“My mother went through hell watching me. I was her son, and I was going to be executed, and nobody cared about a word she said. I thought that was a terrible way to have to treat somebody,” he said.

Rob Warden is the director of the Center on Wrongful Conviction in Chicago, and has been a legal affairs writer for more than 25 years. He said that while the stories of inmates’ family members are not necessarily ignored, the focus is often on the person “walking out of the door.”

“The stories of relatives of wrongful conviction in general tend to be overlooked,” he said, “because they are so overshadowed by the poignancy of the innocent person or the person who was executed himself.”

This does not imply that these stories should not be told. On the contrary, they should not be forgotten, Warden said.

“We should understand that when we execute somebody, no matter how heinous that person might be, it is over for that person,” said Warden. “But the pain that is inflicted on parents, or siblings, or children, is permanent. It is everlasting. It will be there. It is ongoing.”

Federica Valabrega