Self-Education For Excellence : The Inside-Out Philosophy of Lifelong Learning

Video Transcription

Jeff Korentayer
Good morning, Allyson McQuinn.

Allyson McQuinn
Good morning, Jeffrey Korentayer. How are you?

Jeff Korentayer
I’m doing well. Thank you. How do you do?

Allyson McQuinn
Doing awesome.

Jeff Korentayer
Good. So we are… Well, I’ll say a few words. But I think you have probably a little more to say today because you literally wrote the book on our topic today. And I have decided we can talk about your book on self-education. And actually, well, we’ll see it in a moment. There’s a picture of the book. We’ll get there in a moment. But we’re going to go through some of the key points. We have some good questions that have been submitted ahead of time, we’ll get to those. But yeah, let me just bring up that screen so we can see what I’m even talking about. Yeah, so that book—Self-Education for Excellence, The Inside Out Philosophy of Lifelong Learning. And Allyson, do you want to maybe say a general word at the beginning? Or you tell me where you’d like to go.

Allyson McQuinn
Sure. Well, just basically that the book arose from my experience with my own children. And basically just, it’s a piece based on love. So when I gave birth to my babes, I fell head over heels in love with them. And I decided very early on, that the construct of the current education system just wasn’t serving. You know, my relationship with them, I couldn’t kind of jam it together. And so it was just feelings of chagrin and disappointment. My experience myself in the education system and just feeling like I was never really served well. I never felt honored. I never felt excited by my educators. I never really felt championed. And so it just seemed that I was locked down or locked into an agenda from the outside in. And the more I read and the more I studied and the more I was immersed in Heilkunst medicine, really locked down and impressed upon me that something about allopathic education was extremely deleterious. What happened (and again, I’ll get on to the next slides very quickly) is that more and more I was serving teenage children that were in suicidal states. And this angered me, because it reminded me very much of my own experience of being marginalized. And so, it’s very poignant to be sitting in your office holding the hands of a teenager as they’re weeping, letting you know they no longer want to be here. So more and more of this, and I’m gonna explain a little bit about why that is today. And so I’m very passionate about this subject. You may notice right off the bat that this is not something that I just wrote because I thought it would be a decent research piece. Believe me, there’s a lot of heart behind this.

Jeff Korentayer
And as I’m listening to you talking, Allyson, something is occurring to me about myself and what happened to me in the education system. And on the surface, I look like a really (excellent, not excellent), I was a good student. And I like school and I did all my homework and everything. But what I realized looking back now is I got split in two. You know, I had a strength in the maths and the sciences. But I had this other side of me which would have been quite interested in the arts, and I’m kind of making up for that now in my adult years. But yeah, just to put it simply, I got split in two. And now I’ve spent the say the latter years of my life trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, as they say. So, just listening to you, that kind of occurred to me. At the time, I never would have complained much about school or thought it was a problem. But it certainly was a problem as far as my life path. And I like the way you put it like this, this force that separates someone from their object of desire or their love object—parent and child, of course, there’s a love relationship there. But even within an individual, we all have a love object as far as what we desire, what we want to learn about, what we want to become and be in life. And that’s another force of disturbed love or broken love that kind of comes from this the force of the public schooling system. So anyways, that’s just all streaming out of me. I didn’t know I was gonna think or say any of that. But yeah, so you let me know. Do you want me to go ahead to the next slide?

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. And because you dovetailed so beautifully. Into the next slide, for sure.

Allyson McQuinn
So John Lennon said when he was five years old, “My mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Jeff Korentayer
Yeah, exactly. You got the wrong answer, according to the school system.

Allyson McQuinn
Right. Totally.

Nomads Before The Church

Allyson McQuinn
So with the next slide, let’s go back a little bit in history. And it used to be that we lived very nomadically and we traveled really around large, large geography and landscapes with our families. And the reason that we did this is in micro-communities as nomadic tribal people, we were actually following the food source. And so depending on migrating animals and what was prevalent in the way of the food supply at that time in different geographic areas, we would travel with our families in these wee pods, you know, sleeping in tents together, learning together, the little kids were always around kind of the mamas in these tribal nomadic groups. And so if a mum was making something or grinding something or fashioning a basket, the littles would all be there playing together and being mentored. Often, not really with a great amount of purpose. But there was always a babe on a mum’s lap helping. Because what happens is that children are natural learners and they really want to know, “What are you doing?” In Waldorf education where my children went early on in their childhoods, the teacher said, “Well, you don’t teach. You learn by mentoring.” Which means that a parent or an adult would sit and start knitting. And the children would inevitably stop playing and come and really ask, “What are you doing? Can you show me? I want to know how to do that.” While other kids will just go off and play on their own and not really be interested, but maybe in a year’s time they’ll show similar interest. So this is called volitional learning. And it happened very much as nomadic people before the church came. So to further that model, when children got to be a certain age, they would go out on the hunt with their dads and they would start fashioning different tools and arrows. And they were celebrated for bringing home food. And there were rituals and dances and celebrations and rites of passage and learning these different skills that were really necessary for survival. The thing is that now in our modern day is that most kids, if left to their own devices in the wilds would have no clue how to survive. I, luckily and fortunately, was raised by a father who was a farmer. And so I lived on the farms. And we hunted in the summer and I learned to fish very early on and ran free like a wild thing during the summers. And I would not give that up for anything. You know, I really learned a lot of skills. And if you put me in the wilds, I would have some difficulty orienting, but I would figure it out because I know which plants you can eat and how to eat sorrel and dandelion and wild herbs and wild fruits and that kind of thing.

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, shall I go ahead on the slides?

Allyson McQuinn
Sure.

Roots of State-Based Education Model

Allyson McQuinn
So the “roots of state-based education”. Most people actually don’t know this, but it comes out of the industrial age in the Third Reich. And I just want you to sink that in for just a moment. I mean, these kids often were coming from factories. And the idea was that to get them out of factories, we had to kind of mimic a factory setting so that children would understand and be able to adapt. So people may realize that it actually is a leftover remnant that we ‘ring bells’ between classes. This is leftover from the pre-industrial age in the Third Reich. It’s the factory-like setting. Look at schools, they’re not even shaped. They look like industrial complexes or jails (penal system). I mean, my kids went to beautiful schools that looked almost like churches. And the light was magnificent in all the classrooms and they were painted with muted colors and there were no overhead lights. There were only lamp lit classrooms and everything was entirely natural. And in fact, most people don’t know this, but people in the penal system who are in jail get more outdoor time than children who are in modern schools. So they were looking for dutiful workers, a workforce that was used to taking orders and complying. The other aspect of the education model is really about a ‘sorting machine’. So the idea that kids need to be sorted into groups of these are the smart kids, these are the remedial or dumb kids, and the mediocre kids for work purposes so that they will enter governments and just fulfill the menial paper pushing tests required that it’s not really designed to have people that really think for themselves or do their own research or buck the system, it’s about compliance. The smart kids end up in the baccalaureate programs. They’re the ones that end up as diplomats for countries. You know, they live a life that is of the elite or the distinguished individuals and so that end up with phenomenal educations and great jobs. It’s just the same grind. And the problem with that, is that there are brilliant (absolutely brilliant) artists and scientists. I mean, think of Einstein himself. He worked in Bern, Switzerland as a patent clerk. And he said literally, the education system did not serve him one iota. In fact, he spent quite a bit of time unschooling so that he could actually share the knowledge that he had gleaned naturally from his own sources. As you mentioned earlier, Jeff, splitting the curriculum into arts or sciences. I mean, we could not be physicians of Heilkunst and have the success that we had over the last 20 years—serving patients all over the world, hundreds per month of individuals we serve—if we remain split between arts and science. We need both the art of diagnosing and being able to see what the root cause of somebody’s disease matrix says. Plus, we need the science to be able to use remediation and medicine to cure those states on the law of cure (like cures like). So, you know, feeling that schizophrenia split as we have a lot of that through our studies at the Hahnemann college for Heilkunst was about healing. You know, that aspect that we could merge both more the feminine wisdom and the masculine will or the mystic side of spirituality with more of the mechanistic material side of science. We kind of fall on a trajectory that’s right straight down the center between the two polarities.

Jeff Korentayer
And it’s interesting, on a similar thought what you were saying earlier, Allyson, with the prison like schools versus you described those beautiful church-like settings with the light streaming in and everything. It occurs to me that in the first (in the prison-like setting) it’s almost, whether we could say it’s intentional or not isn’t the point, but it’s almost like it splits off that little human being from their rich sensory experience, their rich bodily experience, and just kind of split them off into just having kind of an intellectual experience. You know, you just have to grasp the information and the facts, tuck that into your little database somewhere inside of you. But yeah, that whole idea of the rich like the mind and body that goes together, the environment itself kind of leads to a splitting off as far as how we take in our education, how we engage with the environment and engage with our full senses and our full experience, our full bodily sensations. And even that ringing of the bell, it almost becomes this mindless. “Okay, time to pick up and walk to the next class,” like there’s no participation or engagement with the process. So it’s all very interesting, the way you’re presenting this. I’m getting these thoughts and feelings about it all.

Allyson McQuinn
Well said. And I talked about this in the book really is that, naturally, children age three (well from the time they’re born—three to five years old) is this great questioning. “Why is the sky blue, Mommy? Why are you taller than I am? Where do flowers come from? Why do we do things a certain way?” They’re eager to help, and they’re eager to know when they want to know why you’re baking and what you’re making, and they’re just; I mean, it’s endless. And then the sad thing is, is that when they get to be six or seven or eight, the questions stop. They start to dwindle, and the light starts to go out in state-based education. And it really is heartbreaking. And as a physician, I really wanted to join the dots between what is happening in state-based education and really the health of the individual. I wanted to really join the dots to understand, How is this actually affecting our nervous systems and our verve and our autonomy and really our immune function? Like, what kind of hits are we taking not just physically or mentally, emotionally? How is this affecting our physical bodies?

Jeff Korentayer
Yes. All right. So I turn the page?

Allyson McQuinn
Please. Thank you.

RESONANCE: The master principle of Heilkunst

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. So let’s talk about this a bit, Jeff, because this is really important, this “master principle in Heilkunst”. I’m going to ask you to lead off, Love, and really describe, What is “resonance” and what does it mean for the individual?

Jeff Korentayer
Yeah, good question. Well, the slide says it’s “the master principle of Heilkunst”. So that sounds like a big deal. But we’ll go back to what you just said a moment ago about the young children. They’re underfoot, they’re around in the house. And they’re just curious. They’re brimming with curiosity, and asking what you’re doing and what, why, how. When are you making something at the stove or whatever, they have all these questions. That, as you say, that’s an example of this kind of resonance oregon. It’s just constantly reaching out trying to find what it wants to connect to in the world, right? You know, we have that experience in our life in general. We resonate with certain people a lot, and some not so much. And we’re kind of drawn to those feelings of resonance, those things that fill us up with energy and curiosity and excitement. And, of course, we love relationships—that whole feeling of love, that kind of sexual bonding between people, so on and so forth. But that’s just one little example. As I say, the master principle, it’s like our life energy is constantly reaching out into the environment. And now, when it comes to specifically to Heilkunst and medicine and giving remedies, we have a very specific definition. We’re looking for that what we call the ‘similar resonance’ when there’s a disease state in a patient. And we’re finding that specific medicine that has that very high degree of similarity—that’s the curative remedy, right? Like cures like or the law of similars. That medicine (that remedy), cures that disease, as they say, through similar resonance. Now, that’s a very specific thing to medicine. But we have to broaden that to our conversation today is it’s not just about curing disease, but it’s that resonance, as I said earlier, which is really that feeling that fills us up. So again, whether… let me let me switch to this example when we’re talking even about young children again (and adults, too, the same) is like when we get into the principles of nutrition and healthy diet, yes, we can follow all the rules. “Okay, I’m gonna drink this much water, eat these foods and do these things.” And those rules of thumb are very helpful. But we also get to a point of health where we can kind of more be the captain of that ship, so to speak, where we can really feel that, “Oh yeah , I really feel like eating this food today (or that food today).” Like we really get a strong… when we’re healthy we get that strong sense of resonance and we guide those day to day nutritional choices. Now we have to be a little bit careful there. Of course, there’s other stresses, other emotional conflicts, other things that come up, which lead us more to cravings rather than resonance. That’s sort of a whole… we can do a whole little talk on that. But just to say—when you’re plugged in to your natural, healthy state and your resonance, you by and large gravitate towards those healthy choices for yourself, whether in food, in subjects. If you’re on this topic of self-education, that’s the idea. We kind of give the child a fairly large degree of freedom to choose what are the topics they want to learn this week or this this month or this day. Just kind of following those natural impulses they have. Now, as I say, there’s always a need for some guidance, depending on the age of the child. Like some intelligent educator or parents or whoever’s in that role to put a little bit of shape around things as necessary. But, as I say, not in a constricting way, and not in a totally prescribed way like the education systems, you’ve been talking about it. So I’m just kind of talking around these few examples. But I think, hopefully, getting my point across this idea of resonance being this inner guiding force or principle which really connects us to the thing that’s going to add more nutrition at one level or more fulfillment to us at one level or another. That thing that really helps us to grow and thrive in life if we’re kind of guided to it by what lights up our resonance from day to day, or even hour to hour.

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, well said. And there’s something that you said that I plucked out that I want to capitalize on because I feel it’s extremely important. From our side of the table, we’re dealing a lot with women who have suffered sexual abuse. But you mentioned resonance as part of our sexual function. And this is very, very important. A child that unfolds themselves based on resonance and what they love, have a strong discerning factor which is a function of the ontological aspect of the self. And all that means is that my sense of individuality comes from the choices that I make. And the thing is, is that if I’m coerced and told constantly or canceled out with my own love function over and over again, “No, we’re not going to learn that today, Ally. We’re going to learn this.” And you’re going to do these comparisons on the sheets of paper, and then you’re going to hand it in, and then I’m going to grade it and tell you whether or not you’re worthy of a mark that’s an A or B, C, D, or F. Really cancels out our capacity for true resonance and discernment. Later on, what happens is that my discernment is so broken. I can’t choose a partner well, I question myself that I’m falling in love, or that I choose a partner who can be very sadistic or cruel or masochistic. We see this over and over and over again, is that women, when we lose our spidey senses (and men too), we end up in dangerous circumstances and situations that are not resonant for us. And it affects our sexual function. Because we’re very unsure when we grow up who we want to be, what we want to do. I have people that spend months trying to refigure out what was canceled out by others’ agendas. And really our resonance destroyed is actually quite a dangerous thing. If you really think about it based on what we’re discussing today.

Jeff Korentayer
And when you put it that way, the image that really comes to mind the way you’ve said all that is (as to go back to when you asked me to define resonance, let me add this big addendum here) I’d put it this way, it’s like the positive function in our immune system. And what I mean is, we normally think of our immune system in terms of its negative function. Meaning, it wards off germs and microbes, you know, things trying to get into our system; our immune system pushes them out. In other words, our immune system says, “No, you don’t belong here. You’re not part of me.” But then the resonant side of our immune system, or the positive side, goes out and seeks out what does belong. What does belong? As I said earlier, “This food belongs in me. This subject I want to study belongs in me.” So it’s this positive drawing in to the whole system. So yeah, the immune system doesn’t just push things away. It also needs to draw things in. So the way you were saying that, Allyson, made me think of it that way.

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. Awesome.

Jeff Korentayer
All right. I’m gonna go ahead to the next slide.

The Principles of Self-Education

Allyson McQuinn
Brilliant. So the “principles of self-education” really means that when a child dictates… And again, it’s not that they’re left entirely to their own devices. They have guidance and that a mentor is very savvy at being able to discern what a child is really interested in. But kids will tell you what is ‘developmentally appropriate’ based on their love function. Due to their volitional nature, they’ll self-identify. “Hey, I’m really interested in knowing about tadpoles. Can we go to the pond so I can see what tadpoles are doing? And can we capture them and bring them home in a bucket so I can observe and watch them?” I mean, this is exactly how volitional learning and self-education starts. All I’m suggesting is that you are really fostering this true desire. And as a parent of children that were extremely curious (just like your children are), I was like, “Yeah, let’s go get that bucket.” And off we go with a net to capture the… “Oh my gosh! The tails are shrinking and the back feet are getting longer. What do you think that means? And why is that happening?” You know, the idea is not to instruct. It’s to facilitate what’s already in motion by the child and actually asking questions. And even though you know the answer, you suspend those answers and you ask more questions based on what they’re interested in.

So, another principle of self-education is that you get the ‘maximum absorption’. So Jeff and I have been really researching the book Staphysagria. I’m learning so much about the remedies and details that relates to anger and feelings of loss of dignity and victimization. Boy, in a way that my organizing lens is just popping with excitement. And I’m no different than a three year old or a four year old. I want to know certain things when I want to know them, and not before. This is the thing is that be due to self-respect, and respect and honor by others, I’m furnished with the resources to be able to do what it is that I truly love. And a child is no different.

And really, self-education is about ‘bottom-up project-lead’ learning. And this approach, which really furnishes confidence, it’s like, “Wow! Hey cool. Look mom, it’s a frog today. Wow, they are so awesome. Look, it’s got gills and those are all disappearing. And it’s really turning into a different type of amphibian.” And kids are just like, naturally, blown away by nature’s transformation. And you know what? So am I. And that’s the thing is that if we breed lifelong learning instead of trying to all cram it in… We’ll get to this in a moment, but people always ask me, “Oh my god, Ally, this sounds ideal.” But they get to be University agent, then what? They’re not going to have the skills to be able to integrate into reality. And it’s like, well, let’s just really ask for a moment, What is reality? Yeah.

So ‘no tyranny from other’s agendas’—children then don’t feel trumped by curriculum or false authority so that they develop their own authority. And this is absolutely critical. I am very connected to the world-schooling community. You know, I teach a lot, mentor a lot of parents in self-education. And this is really, really, really important. I think of one conversation. I went to a world-schooling summit here in Guanajuato, Mexico a number of years ago. And I sat down in this family that had just flown in from Australia. And the little girl sat down next to me; she must have been 10 or 11. And she sat down. She said, “Hi, how are you? You, my name is so-and-so. And what’s your name? And what are you reading right now?” And just the feeling of utter engagement where she approached me as an adult and her a so-called child, we’re supposed to be of different species (which makes me crazy, which is so untrue). And you know, we had the most engaging hour and a half conversation over lunch, finding out where each other lived, what we love, what’s interesting to us, what the characters are in the books that we’re reading right now. And this is normal in my world, and that’s what I’m trying to wake people to. It’s like, Waldorf, Montessori kids, world-school kids—they are turned on and lit up. And we’re so not used to seeing state-based kids like this. They are not engaging. They’re dead in the eyes. They don’t have that verve. They’re not enthusiastic. They’ve given up. They’re resigned.

Jeff Korentayer
Totally.

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. And it makes me incredibly angry.

Jeff Korentayer
Yeah. Once you start to see what’s going on under the hood as it were, and the principles, they’re animating or deadening a child, yeah you should and could get angry very much for sure. Say until you know, you just take things as they are. “Oh, yeah, they’re schools. Kids go to schools.” And you don’t think much about it until you do, of course. And then you really can start to have a big interior inner revolution around what’s really going on and how you really look at kids. As I say, before you have that worldview, you don’t notice the deadness in children’s eyes or whatever. You don’t even think twice about it. You just take that as the way things are, the way kids are, or whatever. But no, once you see differently, you can’t (what’s that expression?) you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it.

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. And then parents who come in, I mean for doing this for like I say almost 20 years, a lot of parents will bring their child and say, “Ally, please make them school compliant.” But oh my god, you’ve got the wrong practitioner. I’ll usually refer them off to you or another practitioner, because I’m just like, “That’s not going to happen.” In fact, I’m going to make them defiant and excited about their life and turned on and interested in what they want to know. In fact, I’m going to ask them until they really reveal what was lost from course of education practices, until they start to unpack and unfold their essential self. And booting that up so that their immune function and their sense of themselves is fully operational and not downtrodden based on tyranny.

Jeff Korentayer
And what your reminded me of as you say that is a lot of these—whether homeschooling parents, unschooling parents, or even Waldorf, and these other forms of education as well—they for whatever their reasons are they come to bring their children to these alternatives. And then they the parents themselves, by proxy, they start to go through their own healing process by being in relationship in parallel with what the child is going through with this form of education. The parents unfold and unwrap their own what got locked up into them because of public school education and all of this. So, yeah, it runs forward and back in the generations. Back to the parents, but it runs forward to the next generations as well. So, it’s kind of an interesting image like that.

Why Is Self-Educating Healthier?

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, so “Why is self-educating healthier?”

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. Well, we really break things down without going into too much detail into the three jurisdictions of Heilkunst medicine. And therapeutic regimen, it’s interesting because kids that are self-educated at home or unschooled or homeschooled, they’re free to drink, eat, sleep, exercise, learn more on their natural rhythms. And this becomes very important when children hit their teens. And most people listening would probably be absolutely shocked that I let my kids sleep throughout their entire teenage years. And I just want you to sink in, I let my children sleep for hours till 12 noon, three o’clock—every single day, 6-7 days a week. I allowed my children to sleep seven days a week, and I’m going to tell you why. Because they’re downloading so much information spiritually through their astral bodies between ages 14 and 21. And I knew, based on being a lifelong learning parent, that they weren’t going to unpack all of their knowledge and have it crammed in. In fact, they spot the education system was brutally retarded. And it is. You know, my son did choose for a little while to go to grade 10. And he said, “Oh my god, Mom. I’m in the back of the classroom teaching the kids how to do math because they haven’t a clue and the teacher’s useless.” And he said, “I’m not getting paid for this. And I’m not getting a pension either. Like, this is bullshit. I’m coming home because, you know what, I didn’t realize it was this retarded.” And so I heard comments from my kids like this all the time. Or, “Why do I have to write exams? I’m out teaching the teacher.” The other thing too is that asking permission to go to the bathroom Are you freaking kidding me? You know, our bodily functions are based on our innate desires and needs. So do not tell a child or restrict when they need sustenance. It’s ridiculous.

So therapeutic education, we find less diseases incurred from feeling bullied, coerced, or curriculum the wakes the intellect too soon. And you may be surprised to find out that children, before the milk teeth fallout as per Rudolf Steiner, that are coerced or forced to be educated based on concepts that are extremely boring and limited based on a teacher’s request, actually is extremely harmful. And people who are woken to stone at the age of five or six with concepts or made to read or math concepts or made to add because, “Oh look how smart I made little Johnny. Their parents are going to be so happy with us in an education system.” Actually, these children suffer Alzheimer’s and dementia later on at the other end of their life. So, wake up. Because we’re actually causing extreme damage—extreme damage—to the delicate organism of a child. Read Waldorf pedagogy and really understand that there’s a spiritual and emotional unfolding into our psyches that can be hugely damaging if we are not cognizant.

Jeff Korentayer
Yeah. Well, the way you said that, it’s like “Look, I made little Johnny smarter. They can read now. They can you do this math or whatever.” Yeah, you can see that apparently before you. But you are not seeing all these hidden invisible forces that are more damaging, which have much more long term effects. And it’s the same idea (a bit of a side point here, but) this is kind of one of the basic principles of some of the more robust understanding of economics is like you can point, “Oh, look. We raised this tax money. We built this bridge. Look at all these positive things we did.” That’s the visible. But there’s a whole world of invisible effects that you have to work really hard to trace back. Okay, what’s all the damage that’s been done because of that? As I say, if you just look at the immediate outer effects, you’re going to miss what you just said—all the damaging effects that are going on.

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, so my job became the preservation of my children’s health and well-being so they could unfold themselves. It was a safe space for them to be who they innately are. So when we went out to get to the local market, and the nosy shopkeeper there was like, “Oh, how come you children aren’t in school?” And my kids would go, “Oh, I had a dental appointment today.” They would lie, because I taught them to do so. Like people would just stay out of their damn business. None of your business where my children are, what they’re doing. It’s like this state has all these minions and sentinels that are imposing false authority and tyranny. Yeah, it’s counterproductive. Really.

How Will My Kids Socialize?

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, so let me see here. Go on to the next slide, “How will my kids socialize?”

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, it’s such a big question. So you want your kids to socialize in the education system where they’re restricted in all movement, asking permission to go to the bathroom and being bullied by other kids. That sounds really positive instead of being home with a beloved parent who has their true interests at heart and siblings that they get to grow up with or cousins or grandparents or mentors who are handpick that truly are offering curriculum based on a child’s true needs and love function. It just is the most ridiculous question. So how do you socialize? Jeff, are you hanging out with the same age group and 30 of those individuals a week where they may make fun of you? I mean, children learn… we don’t learn from people of the same age. I mean, I learned from my patients who are in their teens and 20s all the time, let alone wisdom bearers in their 70s and 80s. I wouldn’t choose to ever work or live amongst people of the same age as me. We would never evolve. So different ages create awesome opportunities for lear ning. Little kids will be taught how to tie their shoes (and it’s funny) by an older child in the family, for example. And this is true, I know. I serve many parents who have seven, eight or nine kids. And they will even say prepare or care for the little one. Even the older ones feed them and raise them and play with them. And this is true in Sudbury schools as well. Sudbury schools are great models. I have pictures of kids napping with their head on the lap of a teenager while they’re studying in biology, for example. We parent out of love all ages at the same time. So connect with homeschooling or world-schooling families. Check out the Sudbury school. Peter Gray is an amazing psychologist who writes for psychology today and has a beautiful book on Free to Learn—fabulous piece on self-educating and learning in kind of a more tribal concept, very much like the nomadic groups of old. So cousins, grandparents, friends, and you! Parents always say to me, “But Ally, I’m not smart enough. I didn’t get a degree in education.” It’s like, for God’s sake, let it go. Children will tell you what it is that they’re interested in knowing. It’s your job to provide the tools. They’ll tell you what they need and want to know.

Jeff Korentayer
Yeah, imagine that. They just know.

Allyson McQuinn
They just know.

Different Types of Education

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, “different types of education”. So we’ve mentioned some of these along the way, but do you want to just highlight this a little bit?

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. So just quickly. Look into Waldorf pedagogy. That was very resonant for my kids when they were little. The Montessori approach is also much more organic and gentle, allows the child to really unfold on their own terms. Nature schools are amazing. Kids really learn. Outside we ran a nature school on camp on the farm when our kids were little and really they ran wild in the fields. And, you know, raising the animals, we had 36 farm animals on our property. It was amazing to watch. Unschooling, world-schooling, project led learning. Reggio Emilia is a phenomenal model of project led learning that’s really unfolded by the child. Mentorship apprenticeship, especially when they get older. My son, for example, apprenticed with a blacksmith for years at like Upper Canada village setting. And loved it and learned a lot about forging iron in very hot temperatures in a safe way and made all kinds of great tools and bent iron. He thought that was phenomenal. And it was. So mix of all the above and create your own like camp on the farm. We just crafted it with homeschooling families and Waldorf and Montessori families. They all came to our farm. And, literally, in the summer, for two months they just really developed their own curriculum. Paid for hours in the 7000 square foot barn. And, when it rained, they were inside doing crafts of their own volition. And yeah, it was a beautiful thing to watch them unfold.

Oh, I can’t hear you Jeff. Your sound is suddenly… You’re muted, babe.

Jeff Korentayer
Sorry about that. I muted because there was a little dog (inaudible) in the background. Yeah, so I forgot to unmute. So here we are. I was just reading this next question, “How will my homeschooled child integrate into the ‘real world’?” I like how you put the air quotes around the real world there.

How Will My Homeschooled Child
Integrate Into the ‘Real World?’

Allyson McQuinn
So, just so you know, any university in the world accepts mature students at the age of 21 with an entrance exam. My daughter is a perfect example. She wanted to go to college at 16 years of age. And yes, at 16 years of age, she went to art college and she wrote an entrance exam. And God I love her, you know, that kind of resourcefulness. She hired her own tutor for the math portion of the show, and ended up with a 99% in the math and 100% in the English portion. And once she wrote that entrance exam, it really gave her carte blanche to enter education facilities after that. So it was a no sweat, no brainer. And that’s what I love about kids that are self-educated. I was like, “Do you need help? Do you need me to help you with resources?” And she’s like, “Why would I, mom? I’ve been teaching myself for so long.” I mean, she was the one on live MOCA way back at the age of 12, 14, teaching a kid in Greece English; while he was tutoring her in Greek. She wanted to learn Greek. And so she’d also signed up for a course at the University of Toronto online in Shakespeare. I didn’t even know. That’s really what autonomy breeds is, you know, my kids would just say, “Mom, I need a couple pieces of Bristol board.” And I’d say, “Oh, Ads, what are you working on?” Her name is Adie, so Ads was her nickname. She would just say, “Well, I’m doing a comparison between all of the Greek and Roman gods. And I’m going to draw circles with, you know, Zeus kind of at the center, because I don’t know that that’s done before,” she said. I said, “I don’t think it’s been done either. I would love to see it when you’re done so that you can teach me and show me what it is that you’ve learned from that.” So I serve patients all over the world. These kids are world-schooled, they enter universities, high school. Canada and the US are one of the most tolerant and open countries in order to self-educate. Some provinces or states require that the Board of Education know that you’re self-educating or educating your child at home with a curriculum. It’s so simple. All you need to do is submit a form that says yes, this is what we covered this month or this year. No big deal. I mean, often you’re just kind of fudging and making shit up so that they leave you alone. And that’s just what you do for your children to protect them as they educate. But I have students that go to Spain. There are countries like Norway, Scandinavia that offer education at the university level for free. So I have kids that I serve that are self-educated all over the world, Australia as well. And my daughter, for example, who is a paramedic now just caught up, went and took… God, I love her. She went to a counselor at the local employment center and said, “I need biology and chemistry. Help me get these courses at an adult educating learning center so that I can get that requirement.” Yeah, and she never needed anything else. She already had that pre-entrance exam. And she’s been very successful in their studies. In fact, out of 30 individuals, she’s the only one that maintained a 95% average during her two years. And again, this is from an individual who slept through her teens. So I say that with great meaning and purpose because children downloading their astral body in their teens need time to rest and integrate. The learning will come. My son is a Bowen Practitioner, that he studied Bowen which is like chiropractic or RMT. He’s 26 next month. He also was a trampoline acrobat and parkour mentor for very many years—five, six years. He also works now with a whole group of rollicking hunters and fishermen who actually make dog food (raw dog food). And he loves what he does; makes a ton of money, loves what he does, works with a great group of people. And again, going back to John Lennon’s maxim, you just want them to be happy. That’s all that matters. And if they decide… My daughter says she’s going to study to be a surgeon when she’s in her 30s or 40s. You know what? It’s absolutely brilliant. And she will figure it out because she has the resourcefulness to do that.

So again, taking courses in specific areas of study that your child is interested at the time that they show interest in those things—and not before. And for parents, please stop panicking. Please, please, I beg you to relax. I mean, the most neurotic and psychotic parents in the Waldorf education system were the fathers who are like, “Oh my god, they better get math and computer science or they’re never going to survive in the world.” Like, oh god give me a break. Are you kidding me? So rules in Canada and the United States are minimal; vary province by province, state by state. Do your due diligence. Germany, for example, prohibits homeschooling. And parents that are in the world-schooling community do not go to Germany to self-educate their kids. But Thailand is a mecca for homeschoolers. So do your research before leaving home. Follow Lainey Liberti, who wrote the introduction to Self-education for Excellence, my book. I asked her to do that because she had educated her son, Miro, on the road in Peru and Ecuador for years. I mean, he started his own business with handcrafted goods from Peru. An amazing human being. An advocate for… I mean, he’s only in his 20s, but he’s now sat on world councils, really advocating for healthy travel and world-schooling learning.

Jeff Korentayer
I have one link. I’m just gonna flash up on the screen. I’m going to put it in the comments here for the Canadian context. This link gives a good outline of the province by province regulations. Of course, our Canadian patients and viewers, that link will be useful to you. I didn’t want to lose the opportunity while we’re talking about that, but let me…

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah. And follow the Natural Parents Network protecting your family homeschooling laws in Canada. It starts out by saying, “If you’re homeschooling family in Canada, then you probably already know that Canada has some of the most favorable homeschooling laws in the world.” And that’s very true. Like a lot of people will go to that, our world-schoolers, because you can be in Canada for six months. And they will self-educate there on their way to Asia or South America or Mexico where we happen to live.

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, let me turn the page.

Resources For Self-Educating

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, we’re almost done. Alright, so “resources for self-educating”. If you look at the back of my book, the bibliography is three feet long in the back of Self-education. And some of the resources that I list there, Homeschooling for Excellence by the Colfax. This is a fabulous book about how they raised their children in the wilds of California, Northern California, while building a house. Three of those boys ended up at Harvard. So if you really mount, you know, measure success based on that. One of their children became a goat farmer and really trades in champion goats in the world.

Jeff Korentayer
Does he have the scholarship to Harvard, but he preferred doing the goats?

Allyson McQuinn
Yes. Well said. Well said. And you know, one of the boys was really into astronomy, and every year he got another piece of a microscope that he built himself. Alfie Kohn, John Taylor Gatto, Grace Llewellyn (she’s amazing when she talks about really liberation for students in their teen years), L.R Knost, A.S. Neil (of the Summer Hills schools in Scotland, I believe), John Holt. Peter Gray is a good friend of mine through the process of writing my own book. Just a super super guy, and really like me spoke up and said this is bullshit. And he got him into the Sudbury education system. And as a psychologist, he really studied what the effects were on his child and others that are allowed to self-educate. Kerry McDonald is another good sources as well.

Happiness is … Defined From The Inside Out

So “happiness is … defined from the inside out”. My beautiful daughter is on the left. And gosh, I couldn’t be more proud of her. Like I say, top of her class and just saving people’s lives and in the right jurisdiction of Heilkunst, or allopathic medicine, I mean. And just to watch her flourish because this was a huge experiment. I did not know how it would work out. But I trusted. And based on studying Wilhelm Reich and the natural unfolding and character analysis and cancer biopathy and neurosis and psychosis, what really destroy someone’s health by doing the opposite. And following really the Heilkunst curriculum, I allowed my children with my kind of burgeoning confidence that they would find their way. They both are in beautiful love relationships and dedicated relationships. They never had multiple relationships with multiple people at the same time. Neither one of my children drink or do drugs. We have beautiful and amazing, meaningful conversations. Like I say they’re in beautiful love relationships and happy happy happy. I mean, it’s all a parent really can wish for.

Jeff Korentayer
Yes, the ultimate parent scorecard or report card, isn’t it?

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, true.

Jeff Korentayer
Okay, so here is… Oops, where am I at? Oh, yeah. So we have this link for the book itself. I’m sorry, www.selfeducation.me take you straight to the book page. And if you’re in any conversation with friends or family, or you’re on the topic of education and it’s turning in this direction, that’s an easy link. You can just share with them. It’s even easy to remember, you know, no all the funny backslash and gobbledygook this and that. So that’s the the link straight to the book. And we’ll leave the line open here for a little bit. Allyson, I’m going to bring us back on camera so we could share our nice smiley faces again. I just need to find the button. I don’t know. How did you get that, Allyson?

Questions?

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, and even now if you find that you have questions after the fact, don’t hesitate to write to me at amcquinn@arcanum.ca. I’m happy to answer those questions for you. If you have any other questions, please post in the comment box down below. I’m seeing it on the lower right hand side. But yeah, happy to answer those. Happy to connect you to the world-schooling scene, Waldorf pedagogy, these things are readily available online. And really is to loosen the reins and not worry about how children will integrate into the real world. The real world is inside them, not outside them. And like, Jeff has done two Ph, postgraduate studies. So two PhDs course of studies. I’ve done one, where I’m writing a second book now on transcendent women working with psychotherapeutic physicians around the world and we’re recording weekly our sessions on transcendent women. Again, there’s no end to the excitement that you can have around learning and making things. How many books we have now, Jeff? Like 21? We’re working on number… Me too, some crazy like that. So if you have great verve and health and excitement and desire to explore and playfulness and curiosity, that never ends. You know, I’m going to be doing this. How old am I now? 56? This isn’t going to end for me. I intend to be writing and creating and crafting and being in love with learning right into my cold storage box or whatever the hell’s done with me after I’m here. But, it’s about fun. It’s about playing in the sandbox of life and really knowing who you are and what it is you are and what you’re ordained to be, not do.

Jeff Korentayer
We have a question. I think this was on which is what you said a minute ago. “What was the book that was wrote about unfolding Wilhelm Reich’s?” Was that your book you were talking about unfolding the essential self?

Allyson McQuinn
Yeah, I wrote a book on Wilhelm Reich. So it is a distillation of all of the research we did with his books Character Analysis, The Cancer Biopathy, The American Odyssey. Help me babe, what are some of the other titles? People in trouble? There is one specifically on children that I have taught at another parenting group in Monkton that was about… Children of the Future, I think that’s what it’s called. Anyways, all of his books are very heady. If you’re in medicine, they will shock you awake. But I did a distillation of unfolding the essential self from rage to orgastic potency. And that is available also on Amazon.

Jeff Korentayer
And I did just put that link up in the comments.

Allyson McQuinn
Thank you.

Oh, well. Well, I’m gonna go for a big hike now because I’m all fired up. And it’s not a topic… I mean, we write these books, but they take four years often to write that one. On self-education, took about 20 years of, you know, distillation and such. So that was published last August. It’s almost a year old (that book) now. And I did another one subsequent to that on natural birthing and birthing at home. And so that project feels like we really enlivened it and brought it to the fore. And I remember why I was so hyper passionate about it.

Jeff Korentayer
So I think we’ll probably close out this session. But as Allyson mentioned, whether you’re watching this on Facebook or on YouTube, you can continue to ask questions in the comments. We’ll continue to see those and address them as we go into the future in a future video or blog post or who knows where the question will lead us. But yes, the comments will remain open. And we thank you for joining us this morning.

Allyson McQuinn
Yes. And thank you for the pre-questions that helped a lot in crafting this presentation. Thank you for taking the time to attend. And thank you for caring enough about this subject to research it because your children are depending on you to do just that and find the right route. That is for you.

Jeff Korentayer
Okay.

Allyson McQuinn
All right. I gotta go. The door, somebody just knocked.

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