Too cool for school

Illustration: Brendan Leach

Oliver did not want to go to the first grade, and his mother and I didn’t want him to go either. He was just too remarkable—above school, beyond school and much better suited for “unschool.” That is how he’d spent his kindergarten year: at home, in a classroom with no classmates, no curriculum and no teacher, surrounded by two adoring at-home parents and his worshipful little brother, Owen. All of this, we were sure, would eventually add up to a colossally self-confident teenager who could talk his way into any university or job. Looking back, we were as conventionally ambitious as the next mom and dad. But at the time, it felt like enlightened conventional ambition.

Still, we knew there was a chance we were mainstream wolves in organic sheep’s clothing, so we’d gone ahead and enrolled Oliver in private school. Not sending a kid to kindergarten was one thing; forgoing formal education altogether would be a radical step. If the three of us decided after the first day that there would be no second day, we’d eat the tuition deposit. His mom and I deemed the money “remarkable-kid insurance”—it was the cost of being enlightened parents raising an enlightened child. (One handy thing about being enlightened is that you can rationalize anything.)

When Day One arrived, I parked our car at the school and we all stepped out—except Oliver, who locked himself in, lay down on the backseat and roped the seat belt around himself like an activist tree hugger. I’d left the window slightly open, and we negotiated through the crack.

“I’m not going to school!”

“You don’t have to go to school. But if you come to the opening ceremony, I’ll give you an organic blueberry muffin,” I said.

Oliver countered: “The whole muffin!” (Oliver usually got half—his food, unlike his education thus far, was carefully managed.)

I agreed, and Oliver opened the door. Right then I thought I saw in his eyes that he wasn’t afraid to go to school—he was afraid that he wanted to go to school. This rattled me, because I had assumed we were allies in terror. Evidently I didn’t know my son as well as I’d believed. Evidently only one of us feared change.

We headed over to a tent pitched on the playground, where Oliver’s new teacher was telling a story to the students and their parents. Oliver sat on my lap, and as he took in the tale, I could feel him relaxing. I said, “Are you going to go to school, Oliver?”

“We’ll see,” he answered.

When the assembly ended, the teacher approached our row of chairs and reached out his hand. Oliver stood up and grabbed hold, while still holding on to my hand, and the three of us walked to the classroom. Then Oliver let go of us and ran off with his peers; I said goodbye to the back of his head.

A few minutes later, his mother and I were sitting on a bench outside the school, along with Owen. All of us were in tears.

Owen said, “What happened to Oliver?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

His mother asked, “What are we going to do without him?”

The answer, of course, was: grow up. Just like Oliver, who came home later that day filled with perceptive observations about his teacher and classmates. Now audibly humming with confidence, he could not wait to see them again the next day.Everything his parents thought they could give him, he had found on his own.

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