Susan Yao | From Teacher to Unschooler

Susan Yao is an educator, school founder, and advocate of self-directed learning. She previously served as Middle School Head at Friends Academy in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, following more than a decade of teaching. She co-founded the Vermont Village School, a community-based microschool emphasising student-led learning, autonomy, and community engagement.

The episode connects her parents’ years in China’s school closures with her own path through American schooling and into the early stages of unschooling. The conversation outlines her family’s approach to dyslexia, late reading, and open learning rhythms.

🗓️ Recorded November 6, 2025. 📍 Tarragona, Spain

🔗  Relevant links

1. https://susyao.substack.com/ 
2. https://www.vermontvillageschool.org/ 
3. https://www.lionsroar.com/author/susan-yao/
4. The Math Myth by Andrew Hacker: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620970686/ 

Chapters

• 0:31 Meeting Susan Yao And Her Path
• 4:46 China’s School Closures And Aftermath
• 7:15 Why They Chose Unschooling
• 12:15 Early Wins, Homesteading, And Worries
• 17:29 Dyslexia, Tutoring, And Letting Go
• 22:56 Unschooling As A Way Of Living
• 30:24 Teens, Motivation, And Late Academics
• 35:11 Building A Learning Community
• 37:51 Freedom, Fear, And Adult Time
• 43:08 Culture, Racism, And Self-Directed Projects

Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 0:20

Today we're together with Susan Yao and I found her on Substack. On her Substack, I think you came recommended by Missy Willis, Let 'Em Go Barefoot, who we actually had on right before this episode. So, Susan, good to meet you.

Susan Yao: 0:38

Thank you so much for having me. Nice to meet you too.

Jesper Conrad: 0:41

Yeah, I would like to start by asking what is your background? How did you end up in the whole radical education, homeschooling, unschooling world? What happened in your life?

Susan Yao: 0:56

Well, it's funny. My parents were unintentionally unschooling, but I didn't know that until I was on this journey. And so they grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, and schools were closed for a few years. And so everybody, it was like a national unschooling experiment, not really on purpose. That's just so it's just funny to think about that. I went to traditional public schools in the United States, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Massachusetts. And, you know, I was always on a college track of, you know, is supposed to get good grades or take honors classes and stay on a traditional path. And I would say as a student, my first self-directed project was in high school. As a teenager, I started to feel like there are more important things than getting good grades in school. And it's dangerous, it's a dangerous thought, right? You know, there's no turning back to the middle pill. Specifically, I cared a lot about racism, and that's what I wanted to spend my time on. I was good at school, but I was not excited by my classes. And so I dropped science. And many students don't even know that you can do that. You don't have to take all the subjects that you are supposed to take in school. So I had more free time to make a documentary and I interviewed teachers and students. And that was a very meaningful project for me as a student. And there was no credit, no grade. The school did lend me a camera and some editing equipment. So they were supportive in that way. But that was my first real taste of self-directed learning for myself. And eventually I became a classroom teacher. I started out in a charter school, and I was in progressive private schools, and I became a parent. And my husband and I, we had always been interested in unschooling and homeschooling. And I couldn't really tell you why, just that we had talked to other people about it. And so as we became parents, it was always in the back of our mind. And we found this amazing Reggio Amelia Forest Preschool for the kids. And so we were very happy to have them there while I was working in the middle school of the same school. And then it was once our older child hit kindergarten, school started to look more traditional and we started to have questions. And for example, he was very afraid of making the teacher angry. Even when he was at home outside of school, he would be afraid of angering the teacher to the point where sometimes he wouldn't follow my directions because the teacher's authority was somehow stronger or that fear was stronger. And also seeing how he was as a learner, he started to read on his own at age four. And I just thought school might become too limiting for him because he's always had very strong interests, and he likes to have the time and space to follow his own interests, do his own projects. And so we started coming back to this idea of unschooling. And then COVID is what really pushed us to go for it. Right. I mean, it forced everybody to try homeschooling. And we had already been open to the idea, and we just found that it worked well for us as a family. And then I left working in a school full-time.

Jesper Conrad: 4:35

Yeah. Susan, I need to go a little back because, as Westerner as I am growing up in Denmark, I'm totally ignorant of a lot of Chinese history. The schools were closed in a period.

Susan Yao: 4:49

Isn't that interesting? And I don't, I'm no expert on Chinese history. Isn't that interesting that an entire country underwent this social experiment? And I don't know if there are books about schooling in particular. The thinking was, you know, during the era of Mao and communism and the little red book, that schooling promotes elitism and is one source of the problem. So let's close them all.

Jesper Conrad: 5:20

How many years did it go for?

Susan Yao: 5:22

So it was, I think an infrastructure, you know, it was also chaotic, and that was also a reason. But schools, teachers, administrators, they were seen as the enemies for a period of time.

Cecilie Conrad: 5:44

Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 5:44

Even it' s a little wise.

Susan Yao: 5:46

I mean, we all have to run now to our computers and look up if anyone did any good studies on that. Maybe. Yeah. I only have bits and pieces from my parents. Um, I haven't looked into it, but I am very curious about everybody else who does never mention that they did not go to elementary school. Well, that's interesting. My parents are in their 60s, so you know, anybody around that age maybe didn't go to elementary school or didn't go to college. My father did go to college because they had just reopened college. And now China has a pretty traditional school system. So that's interesting to me, too. That after closing all the schools, they went in this very traditional direction focused on test taking and scores.

Jesper Conrad: 6:33

It's as I understand it, not that I'm an expert, it's a very elitist school system. The Chinese one.

Susan Yao: 6:41

I think they would say it's democratic in that any child with a high enough score can go to college. Yeah. And score itself. So maybe that's the logic behind the test system. But the actual result is that you know, children are doing whatever extra tutoring they can and trying to memorize as much as they can, and it looks very traditional.

Jesper Conrad: 7:04

Yeah. How is how is your experience starting with taking your kids home and retaking the responsibility of your child in what it will learn and not learn? How did that feel? Was it terrifying?

Susan Yao: 7:22

Yes. It was, it has really been a journey up and down. And I know you've talked to some of your other, you know, the other unschooling parents about this. It really is emotional. When the I think the kids were maybe five and seven when we started unschooling. And so when they're young, nobody is too worried in the beginning. You know, if reading, like I said with my older child, he was picking up reading on his own. And he he's a poster child for unschooling in some way, if if you're coming from a schoolish background, because he'll just spontaneously say, I'm gonna write an essay about black holes. And that's just what he naturally wants to do. But, you know, obviously, unschooling can go so many different directions. The goal is not to go in a schoolish direction necessarily, but it was let's see, we were homesteading at the time, so that felt very right. The kids were learning to take care of animals and grow vegetables, and being outdoors was safer, anyways. During COVID, we would go on hikes a lot. And so I think the early years were great. And where I started to worry is as they get older, my younger child has dyslexia. And so my main worry is not so much. I've heard so many stories of people who read as teenagers and they are successful adults. For me, I was worried that I was not enough, that I could not teach a dyslexic child how to read. Even being an experienced classroom teacher, I was always middle school. So I didn't know what early literacy looked like or how I could support her. We met with a tutor, and I mainly wanted her to know that tutoring is an option because you might need a reading teacher who's an expert in dyslexia. So we met. There is, you know, is an informal meeting and just getting to know her abilities. And meeting with that tutor helped put me at ease because we had this narrative that if we had kept our child in school, she would have been reading already. And the tutor said, probably not. She has dyslexia, you know, very classic profile. And we're holding on to this story that if you go to school, you learn the skills you need. And if you're at home, maybe you won't get what you need. Maybe your parents are not enough. And so letting go of that story has been a journey. And I think it would have been harder for me as a parent to learn about dyslexia because I've been in those school meetings where you have, you know, the serious conference with the parent. I'm worried about your child. They need extra tutoring, they need testing. And I think I would have resisted that. But allowing her to read at her own pace, find the activities that work for her, those have affirmed the unschooling path for me. For example, she's a dyslexic child who is not reading fluently, but can teach a three-year-old letters. And that is so beautiful. No school, right, would send a struggling reader into a preschool classroom to teach letters. But it's actually so good for her learning because she needs that extra review and she loves younger children. She has pathways like that available as an unschooler.

Jesper Conrad: 10:59

Yeah. Sometimes I get sick and tired of the word unschooling because it can hold this connotation of school is bad and learning is bad, and education, be educated, be interested is bad. And unfortunately, that's the word that has ended on this philosophy where I like self-directed learning, but even that doesn't cover fully what it is that I see unfold in many children, which is this personal learning journey that happens when they are ready, that they have time to learn in their own pace and not being judged on being an in being a group that needs to learn everything at the same time. And that is one of the joys I see with having them at home and having this more unschooled, less curriculum outcome-based focus that we let them travel in the direction where and when they are ready, it comes.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:03

I feel like we talk way too much about learning. I don't know. It can just be that we are explaining to some imaginary listener what they're learning when they're not in school. Because most people cannot think out of that box. Fairly so, because most people are in that box and you don't see a lot of kids who have never been to school. You combine the idea of childhood of growing from being five to fifteen with school, that school is somewhat needed. But actually, unschooling is about that it's not needed, but it's also about the fact that it's not about learning. Growing up from five to fifteen is not about learning. We learn all through life, all humans do, and unschooling is not about a different way of learning, it's a different way of living, and it's based on a different philosophy, it has a different value system, and the learning actually it's so hard to get around it, so we keep talking about it. And I think we're doing so in this conversation because we're used to talking a lot about learning because we're used to defending ourselves. And I just wanted to say that in many ways, unschooling is not about what they're learning. That can be such a provocative statement, but actually the backbone of it is something else.

Susan Yao: 13:26

As humans, we're hardwired to learn, right? And it's amazing we've created institutions where we put children and they say, Oh, I learned nothing today. And they think that learning is only sitting at a desk with an adult-directed activity, and everything else is not learning. But we I think learning is in the background all the time as humans.

Jesper Conrad: 13:46

So I understand what you're saying about at the moment, and some of them are doing more formal education at this point because they're working to get into university. It's unschooled teenagers, and some of them are not, which is totally fine. But then they say this, oh, I'm doing nothing. And it's a little bit like you're unschooled, you're 16, you haven't been doing nothing up to now. You're still not doing nothing, you're not doing formal schooling, but that doesn't mean that you're doing nothing. But lots of the things they do are considered nothing by uh the mainstream way of thinking about childhood. And I think I just think we need to push back against that idea because it's not nothing. There's a lot of things happening, a lot of growing, a lot of uh tempering of emotion, a lot of thought experiments, a lot of contemplating, a lot of observation, a lot of emotional peace. Arriving at emotional peace from points of not having peace, which is a learning journey, you know a journey, a skill, actually. That's a skill that I find in many adults, they don't have it. But if you have the time to work on that as a child and a young person, then you enter the stage of adult life with a completely different ability to cope with whatever. And there's a lot of whatever happening in adult life, but we we hardly have words for these skills. I even I am struggling now. I've been talking about unschooling for more than 10 years, and I'm still struggling talking about these things. Call it life skills, and it sounds like being able to turn on the washing machine. That's not what I'm talking about. That's important too. Yeah, but that you can tick that box in half an hour, then they know how to do that, you know. Yeah, yeah. But of course, there is the reading too. Yes. Susan, how old are your children now?

Susan Yao: 15:48

They are nine and eleven years old. Yeah, it's a different ball.

Jesper Conrad: 15:52

It's a fun, different place to be. Ours uh soon 14, 17, and one turning 20 and 26. There comes at some point this oh, what do they want later in life? Do they want to go into some formal education? Can they do that? And it's quite interesting because it seems to me there comes this wanting to use the brain in a different way when they get older, where there's a lot of play energy in the younger years, then the play energy for some years turns into a lot of chatting, talking with their friends, and then at some point there's this uh that it wants to be used more, the brain. It wants to be used in a different way. Indeed. But what is your focus on your journey? You stopped teaching and now you are stay-at-home, unschooling, homeschooling mom.

Susan Yao: 16:53

We have a learning community.

Jesper Conrad: 16:55

Oh, nice.

Susan Yao: 16:56

So we call it the Vermont Village School. It is three days a week, and I think of it like structure for unschoolers. It's a little bit different from a self-directed center. Some of them are like buffets where you can work on whatever you want all day. And so ours is maybe because our group is so small, or that's just the personality of the kids, they want to do things together. And we found that at age eight, many unschoolers are wanting that learning community. And so we are out in the village, you know, we're doing field trips together, or we have people come to us and share what they know. Next week we're going to a sewing studio. For example, we volunteer at local organizations. So we have that. And then I still consider myself a full-time educator, even though it looks very different than it used to. And it's much healthier for me, this lifestyle of having this three-day-a-week learning community. And then I do a little bit of consulting as well for income.

Cecilie Conrad: 18:37

Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 18:38

How did your um life stress change from being full-time work to work at home, mom? Because it is a shift, I feel, to go from working in an office or in a place, leaving the house every day to come home.

Susan Yao: 18:53

It was terrifying. I had a structured schedule pretty much my whole life because school is so many hours per week, and then they assign homework. So that dictates your time outside of school. And then I had always worked in a full-time school, which is 50 to 70 hours a week, and it is all consuming and exhausting. I think many educators are burning out right now, and so for me, it's it's liberating, but it takes time to get over that fear and really enjoy it. Yeah, the fear.

Jesper Conrad: 19:31

Do you want to talk about the fear? Yeah, I still find it interesting with the whole fear of how to fit into life as an adult, that the fear that comes with freedom, maybe I would call it. Um, I remember it when I finished high school. I was 18, and where some people take one gap year, I took six. But this that life is a buffet where you can choose what you want and figure out which direction you want to go in, then it was kind of nice to get that closed down by just going to work uh every day and have weekends and that structure where you don't need to consider what you want to do with your life and then freeing up more mental time. And of course, you are not as a mother at home, there's a lot of work. That's not what I'm saying. It's uh it's just a non-traditional path for many, even though if we look back, it was the traditional path for most of humanity. Right. So to be in a place where it's like, what do I want to do today? That is a little scary for me still, sometimes. And that's actually what I talked about before. One of the skills they get from being unschooled, that they learn during childhood, growing into the personality that will, of course, keep evolving, but also be the backbone of their life. They learn to make decisions, they learn to figure out how to create a good day for myself, what actually keeps me happy and keeps me on track with my values, and so they don't need that external structure to tell them what to do to be good enough.

Susan Yao: 21:16

My college classmates, many of them were lost because they had been so focused on getting into college, and then when they arrived, they didn't have right that external goal anymore. And so they would fall apart or find the next something to climb. So for many of them, it was a corporate job, and whatever was supposedly the most popular company or the highest paying company, and they would just go for that just because everybody else was choosing that. And so they they really did not know how to have their own direction or organize their own time. And so that was definitely new for me, too, when I um left full-time work.

Jesper Conrad: 22:01

I would like to hear about your documentary on racism, you did back then, with the angle that we had a Chinese immigrant daughter on the podcast earlier who had written a book called On Tigering, where she told about that many Chinese immigrants ended up being really strict because they wanted their children to succeed and show that they could succeed in the American society. It seems to me that either you have a different upbringing with less tiger mom style from your parents, or and if not, then there must maybe have been how would they have taken you deciding to unschool and homeschool? And like, how did that go? I know it's three questions.

Susan Yao: 22:51

Very different questions.

Jesper Conrad: 22:52

Oh, yes.

Susan Yao: 22:54

I will try to answer them all. I am wary of describing huge groups of people as all parenting one way. I don't think that's true. I'm sure there are some trends, but it's complicated, right? The trend is a mix of, you know, is it Chinese culture? Is it immigrants? Is it this generation trauma that our parents went through? Is it racism in the United States pushing you in a certain direction? You know, I think many factors make a trend. So I would say my parents, no, they're not tiger parents. So much of it came from me, and they were certainly happy that I wanted to go to college and be on a traditional path. But unschooling definitely made them nervous. And like I said, when the kids were young, when they're preschool age, nobody is too worried. But as they get older, you know, and noticing the, you know, the like late reader was definitely one cause for concern. But I think for the most part, they are supportive. Or, you know, they might have fears, but they're not constantly arguing with us. I've heard some real horror stories from people who homeschool or unschool where they have conflicts, you know, a lot of conflict with their family. So we've been lucky in that we haven't had much of that. But there is definitely some worry that we try to keep at bay. And I honestly think grandparents might worry no matter what, right? Even if the kids were in school, then they're worried about this teacher, or, you know, they're worried about my brother getting married, and they'll find something to worry about. It doesn't mean you need to stop what you're doing.

Jesper Conrad: 24:46

And the racism project, what was it about and based on?

Susan Yao: 24:51

That was in high school. I had dealt with racism as a young child, and I had a lot of anger about it, but I hadn't processed it. And so in high school, I went to a conference of Asian American teenagers, and that's the first time I learned more about the history of Asian Americans in the United States and the, you know, the racism and struggles we had faced. And I met Asian Americans who were activists, who were positive change agents in their communities, and I found that very inspiring. And so for the first time, I had examples of channeling my anger in healthy ways and just trying to, you know, make it a better place for everyone. And so that's when I decided there were there was something more important than getting good grades, and I pursued this project on my own. I don't remember why I chose documentary, but there was a filmmaker at that conference, and maybe maybe that's what gave me the idea. But that conference was definitely life-changing for me. I just hadn't thought as a teenager, right, I could make change in my community and find the time and resources to do it. And you'd you'd think schools would help you do that.

Jesper Conrad: 26:18

I don't know what I think. It's a very oppressive mainstream way of thinking about what young people need. But I mean, we're more than 10 years ahead of you in a way, because our kids are so much open. So we're in a different space. And when I look back at when my kids were nine and eleven and other but younger, now when I see younger children, I'm really just thinking, oh, leave them be, just leave them alone. It's really interesting. I remember my own stress and how I thought I had to do all kinds of things. And of course, you have to do all kinds of things, take them on day trips and cook them meals and have conversations and all these things. But really, when they are that young, the whole idea of academically schooling them from a top-down point of view, even worrying about whether they read or not. We have one out of four who was a very late reader. Even that, from my point of view now, is just oh, that was such a waste of worrying time. That was such a waste of everybody's energy that we even worried for one second about that. Of course, we weren't so we couldn't sleep at night, and we had to have long conversations with other people, and especially, of course, grandparents and I don't know, our siblings, friends. We had one who didn't read until he was 13. And he didn't read, couldn't read while everyone else was reading around him. Our daughter, one of our daughters, started at four. So it was just well, actually, no, he learned to read before our youngest learned to read, but our youngest is also very much younger than him. But anyway, it was there was so much worry, and today he's choosing his trousers when he's buying new jeans on the basis of whether his Kindle can fit in the pocket, because he's not going anywhere without the Kindle. He's probably the one, and they read a lot, all of our kids. Well, mostly the three older ones at this at the moment. They all read a lot. I think Stone reads. Oh, he reads. But maybe the oldest reads slightly more because she reads really fast when she's reading, but that's just the skill that she has. So maybe I don't know. If we did a page count, I don't know who of the two would win, but it would be a lot of pages, that's for sure. Right? So the one we have who started reading really late, is a very, very avid reader today. It was never really a problem. Had we been had we had the crystal ball known, we would have had so much of my hand. And that's what we also see with a lot of the other academic stuff. We had a 17-year-old now who's doing math, never done any math before, literally didn't know how to divide two numbers, didn't know what the equation was two months ago. And she's just learning speed learning it all right now. What do you call it? K through 12, something like that. Educational systems don't really line up a line, so it's hard to talk about because culture is quite interesting, actually. When she's running through all of that, she has a plan of doing it in four months.

Susan Yao: 29:37

I'm pretty sure she'll explain about how the math myth was one book that made me feel better about not doing intentional math. And in it, it gives the number that unschoolers could learn elementary math in 20 hours. That some families had casually measured it and found that, you know, in just a few hours. And but schools will convince you that you need all 12 years, right? Every minute of math cannot be missed. They really make you feel bad if you go on vacation or something. And but maybe 20 hours is all you need when it feels necessary, and maybe it will never feel necessary. I am just starting to have the hindsight that you have now that wow, I didn't need to worry so much because now I can see where they are a few years later. And I did a lot of worrying. Oh, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 30:28

Well, I still do a lot of worrying, not about the same things anymore, but I think it's just part of the game of being a parent. And now my kids are old enough that I can talk to them about the things I worry about, and then we have mature conversations and figure things out. So that's different, of course. Sometimes we meet in the unschooling movement almost a pride or batch of honor of not doing any academic. At all, as is anything that has to do with schools or academics is bad, that it's actually better not to know it than you're kind of cool. And I find it a little difficult dance to have because I want to love and respect and honor everyone's way of doing it. And I find it difficult to figure out how to take the toll because I think as parents, each of us have values. We have values about what we think is important, and those are inherited down to our children by just being around them. Do you meet this in your unschooling circles you have been in that it's almost like not learning is really cool or the right thing to do?

Susan Yao: 31:53

I know what you mean, and I have never been at that end of the spectrum of unschooling where it's truly anything, any possible pathway, no limits on screens. I've never been there. And so I'm always keeping an eye to skills that might be necessary. You know, if you want high school to be an option, then I want you to be aware of what limits your choices or gives you that choice. Or if you want to have a certain job, I always want to sort of notice what they might have or not have yet. And so our community, our community does not have that. We do have a range. One family has unschooled multiple children, a couple are adults now, and it truly is, you know, anything skills academic or not academic. The way we define academic is also such a problem, right? And then one school chooses to do a curriculum at home, even though our learning community does not have that kind of curriculum. So I think we have a range, but I haven't found that in our community.

Jesper Conrad: 33:49

You you said something interesting there about even the way we talk about academics is a problem. Can you unfold that a little? I find it interesting.

Susan Yao: 34:00

Well, I noticed this when I worked in schools because math and reading are just they're seen as the most important academic topics. And so I taught social studies and history, and so that's academic, but often seen as less important than reading and math. And then you have art and physical education, which in the US are being cut all the time. And, you know, if there is a field trip or we need to cancel a class, it's always let's cancel art first or let's cancel music class first, and not the important subjects. And I one reason I see us defining academics this way is that the skills that benefit you as an individual in the job market, that is what we consider academic. And we think a lot about individualism because we are trying to promote collectivism in our learning community. And in school, we are just we're teaching children that your individual skills matter more than the group's skills, and so you need to do what you need to get ahead, and we even punish collaboration. Plagiarism is just one of the most severely penalized mistakes in school, and it is usually accidental that, oh, I was talking to my friend and their idea is in my project, or I was taking notes and I didn't put quotation marks, and so now I have a zero, or you know, a letter in my file, because that is the worst crime of academia. And that really discourages working together.

Jesper Conrad: 35:51

Which is what we need, and which is also how people we learn from each other, we learn from being curious and having conversations.

Susan Yao: 35:59

Yeah. And a lot of group projects end up just teaching you that one person needs to do all the work, or some people take credit and don't do enough work. We're not really learning how to work together.

Jesper Conrad: 36:12

But if I can go back to the how we talk about academics question, I also think there's the other way around the problem, and there is so in in the radical unschooling community. We can put academics in high esteem. I think maybe where we come from, we wouldn't not appreciate social studies and history and languages and physics, chemistry, biology, all these things that are subjects taught in schools and part of the group we call academics. They wouldn't be like in a hierarchy like that. There are some key things, which is reading, English, and math, but that's because they are tools for the other ones. So it kind of makes sense that you need those three because you can't really do the other ones without. But I think in the unschooling community, sometimes there's this idea that all these things we need to not do them. Right. That's our so now they become taboo, and it's more important to do you're almost a better person if you're good at your skateboard and at drawing and at playing the guitar than if you're good at knowing about the Roman Empire and speaking three languages or whatever. And so I get that academics have been a top thing and it's been oppressing other people, and it's been violent and it's been bad. But flipping it doesn't fix that problem, it just reverses the problem, makes the problem look different, as if you have a yellow problem, but now you have a green problem, but now you have, but you still have a problem. And I find that quite challenging, being the mother of quite geeky unschooled kids who happen to be very interested in the Roman Empire and mathematics and black holes as she managed before. So it's as if I had quite we, mostly me, I was more identifying with it, more doing it in the beginning. Quite a few years where I didn't call myself an unschooling mom. I didn't say we were unschooling because I kept getting this feedback from the community that I was doing it wrong because of my kids' interests. So they have the wrong spontaneous interests, they have to be more interested in other. I mean, then it's just like, what? Right? What? Like when the feminists at the same time, because I stopped having a career, went home, took care of my four children, my husband, my own house mate. I was a housewife. So the and I started writing a blog, so I was like shouting about it, and the feminists came at me and said, But you're ruining everything. Uh we we get a bad conscience, and we're standing in a bad light being career women when you're staying at home with your children because that makes us look bad and that makes us feel bad, and then we have less freedom. So please stop doing that. You're ruining the freedom of women. And I was like, wait a minute, I think I'm a woman, and I think I made a free choice to do this thing. So what are you saying that my free choice is ruining your free choice? There's no logic there, really. If you yeah, and there are just some problems in this field that are that we I think we need to talk about them. I think we need to just point, hey, my freedom to do a thing that could be considered conservative is still part of the spectrum of free choices. I feel free when I do it. Yeah, so I had that problem. Now I'm having the academics problem. I'm back in the game. I've called myself an unspooler for a long time because I am, and we are, but we're just also studying academics.

Susan Yao: 40:03

That is absolutely one of the choices available to you. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think of Michelle Foucault, who taught us that all of these alternative cultures they end up re reproducing oppression by creating rules and policing each other. That's the wrong way, right? It's the wrong way to be an unschooler.

Jesper Conrad: 40:21

Yeah, exactly.

Susan Yao: 40:22

And you undermine the freedom that you believe in.

Jesper Conrad: 40:24

It's recreating exactly the same system just by flipping it. So now we had a yellow system before. Now we have a green system, right? Same system, different color. Yeah, that's funny. I think it's almost a societal immaturity problem because I see that dialogue has disappeared and people stand so clean on their this is the only right way to do it, and everyone else is stupid, kind of uh rhetorics and everything from politics to football to unfortunately also academics uh schooling versus unschooling. Right now, because we all have an echo champ. Well, you know, when we were teenagers, we would read a newspaper, everyone was reading the same five different newspapers. It wasn't like there was any, there was an egg, you choose the newspaper you like, but now you just the algorithms would just keep repeating what you say. Yeah, you don't even know you're in a bubble. No, maybe you do, but you don't really know what's yeah, even if you do know you're in a bubble, how do you know what all the other bubbles look like? Right.

Susan Yao: 41:32

How can you even know? You can't even see the other bubbles. Oh scary business.

Jesper Conrad: 41:38

Oh, I need to get some prints I don't like, maybe. Then talk with them and end up liking them all of a sudden. Oh no, dialogue. I don't I'm not sure. Susan, about dialogue. It has been wonderful talking with you today. We will try to round up the podcast for people who want to find what you write on Substack, as I did, and who want to learn more about the micro school. Can you share with people where to find you so they know where to go?

Susan Yao: 42:11

Sure. So our learning community has a website, Vermont Village School. We decided not to be on social media. The website is the main way to find us. And then I have a personal Substack that's more about me as a parent. And I created it for all my college friends who grew up in traditional schools and are now curious about alternatives for their children. And so that's on Substack. Suzy. So we just put the links in the show notes.

Jesper Conrad: 42:41

We will. I also need you to re-mention the book on the about math because it didn't get the title for that one.

Susan Yao: 42:48

The Math Myth by Andrew Hacker. It's a great book questioning why we teach math the way we do in the United States and how it does not match what you even need for your career. Even if you work at NASA, it does not match. And it's keeping so many students from graduating or becoming doctors. It, you know, it it's it's a barrier that is not even connected to the real world.

Jesper Conrad: 43:13

I'll put it on my reading list right away. Absolutely. Thank you for the talk and thank you for the book recommendation. And it was a pleasure.

Susan Yao: 43:21

Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed this conversation. And thanks for all you're doing.