Here is my son at an empty pool. So many places we go are empty because we go in the middle of the day. This photo happens to be at the University of Iowa, where my brother is getting a PhD in chemistry. But the photo could be anywhere. As someone pointed out in the comments section here last week, people are not used to seeing kids in the world. At least during the school day. Kids are missing from the world during that time.

I never realized how creepy that is. Everyone notices us walking around because kids are not supposed to be seen during the day.

There are so many things I did not notice about the world until I started to notice school. Which reminds me of a study by Roy Baumeister. He had people walk with books balanced on their heads for a few minutes each day. And it turns out that making someone mindful for just a few minutes a day actually makes them more mindful about things all day long. Mindfulness snowballs.

I think this is true about school as well — being mindful of how our society teaches kids has made me more mindful about how our society does lots of things. And I’m shocked by how much I had been missing.

My son is learning to use a potter’s wheel. The woman who is teaching him is a potter (is that the right word?) and working with her is phenomenal. When someone knows their craft so well, their teaching is breathtaking to watch — it comes from deep in their soul where their passion for the craft lives.

I wanted to write about all this. I wanted to tell people that finding the right mentor for the right project is what makes life fulfilling. In unschooling or in work. There is no difference.

But then I posted about this topic on my other blog and the discussion was mostly about should people homeschool.

Suddenly, I have no patience for this question. It’s like the question, “Should people job hop?” The answer is unequivocally yes. If you job hop, your work is more engaging, you make a wider range of friends, and you earn more money. On top of that, job hopping makes for a stable career.

But people don’t like hearing it. Because hearing it makes it harder to pretend that staying in one place is really okay. I don’t want to debate about whether the hard thing is the right thing when it so obviously is. I want to talk about how it’s so hard to do what’s right all the time.

This is a guest post from Kate Fridkis, whose family did homeschooling when she was growing up. She blogs about body image at Eat the Damn Cake and she blogs about homeschooling at Skipping School.

When you’re homeschooled and interested in something, you don’t go to your mom and say, “Mom, teach me more about this.” You try to figure out how you can gain more exposure to that thing. You might ask your parent/s for advice on where to start. And then you go out into the world and learn some more.

If you want to be a poet, you contact the most famous living poet in your area, and you ask if you can hang out with him/her. You join poetry workshops and groups and you sign up to compete in poetry slams. You send your poetry out to magazines and competitions. You start a poetry club. By the way, by this time, you are learning a lot more than poetry. You are learning how to organize people, compete in a public arena, and manage what is beginning to resemble a small business.

When you learn naturally, on your own, it’s hard to cut the world up into subjects. If no one tells you that this particular thing is called science, and in science you learn biology, beginning with the parts of the cell, and then you learn about genes, and eventually you get to chemistry, then you might find yourself doing science by accident, for fun. Just because you want to.

Which no one ever believes, because people think that kids are lazy.

“If I left my kids alone,” they always say, “They’d just play video games all day.”

They would definitely do that some days. Because video games are fun. But if they were homeschooled, they wouldn’t have learned that work and play are two totally different things that you’re supposed to do at different times. And the part where you’re supposed to be learning is over on the work end of the spectrum, while the video games are all the way on the other side, under a big sign that reads “play.” Work is an activity that you can be bad at. You might fail at any moment. You know it’s work because it’s required, and because your progress is always being measured. Play is when you can relax and be yourself.

It’s sometimes hard for people who went to school to imagine living in a world where work and play are the exact same thing. But guess what? That’s this world. And for kids who grow up out of school, learning is the same as being alive.

You don’t exactly need a teacher for that.