Yup

Sandra Dodd left the following comment on my blog here. It was worth repeating as a post of its own.

About this bit (from which you might be fully recovered by now anyway)" -=- Am I sliding down the slippery slope to "school at home?" I want to see things "produced" to have proof of our homeschooling "success."-=-

My thought was yes. Every time you "produce proof" or require practice on a schedule, you're seeing the impossibility of unschooling success. If you keep pulling the plant up to look at the roots, you'll NEVER know how the roots would have grown if they hadn't been pulled out and measured. Every time they're pulled out, roots so small you couldn't see them are broken off. Tests and measures keep natural learning from following its own course, I think.

She is, as usual, right on the money. The image of pulling up roots again and again to see or prove that they are growing is very powerful to me. I can see my daughter blooming in an extraordinary way, why would I pull up her roots to measure them and why would I try to force fertilizer or pesticides on her that she doesn't need?

I am mostly recovered from that day of angst last week. Thank you Sandra for giving me an image to replay every time I start to sweat it!