Dealing with broken trust

What do you do when your trust is broken? Amy Milstein says you either blame or learn, which I think is a great way to think about it—and most of us would rather learn. There has been a huge controversy in the unschooling community about the Martin family, whom I’ve followed and admired for a long time. Many people are saying that the “unnanny,” Dayna Martin, has broken their trust and is a fraudulent guru.

It sounds like the Martins are having a lot of problems these days and my heart goes out to them, but this did wake me up in the fact that when it comes to unschooling, we always say that no one has all the answers—that we learn naturally ourselves (both as children and adults), and if we do put our trust in a guru for all the answers I don’t think it’s really unschooling. We like to read about other unschoolers and their examples, of course, but when you have someone show you the way altogether, isn’t that, ah, schooling?

I think we could all use this as a lesson about that. If Dayna’s made a positive difference in people’s lives, that’s wonderful.  But the biggest thing we need to do as unschoolers is to trust ourselves and our children—not a guru. One of the hardest lessons we have to learn as we unschool ourselves is that we don’t have to trust doctors, teachers, and “experts” for every answer as we have been conditioned to do—much of what we need, we have already. Unless you need heart surgery, you can find most of your own answers in your heart this moment if you just learn to trust it.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia