A Blue-Collar Girl in a White-Collar World
I am republishing this piece written by my daughter Emma and originally published on Daily KOS (click here to see on Daily KOS)…I am (and to some extent, have always been) a writer, but my desire to become a novelist did not emerge until after I’d made the choice to drop out of high school and become an “autodidact” (someone who is self-taught — see My Experience With Unschooling). All I knew then was that being in a traditional school setting made me terribly unhappy (for reasons that could fill a separate blog piece) and that I’d always had a knack for creative writing. I had no idea what was in store for me, venturing out into the wilderness, leaving everything I was expected to believe about school behind.
I don’t think I would’ve been able to do it, either, if my parents hadn’t been so supportive and my brother hadn’t already blazed the trail before me (see leftyparent’s blog — Pulling Eric out of School). I met some form of resistance from almost everyone else, having come from two generations of college graduates, a world where all