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MY CHILDHOOD WAS, in many ways, a walled garden constructed in accordance with 19th-century notions of innocence and autonomy. I was aware on some level that there was a broader culture from which we had deliberately exempted ourselves. My mother called it the World, which was neither the planet no…

This is more or less the pedagogy laid out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile, or On Education, the vade mecum of modern homeschooling

But the vast majority of our day was spent doing nothing. My mom talked about the importance of “hayloft time,” her term for idle reflection. Children needed to think, she was always saying. They needed to spend a lot of time alone. She believed that extended bouts of solitude would cultivate auton…

I was hiking to the top of sun-dappled, bouldery cliffs