In 1971, when gasoline was about 35 cents a gallon, our family of two adults and three children, aged four, ten and thirteen, set off on a mobile adventure in home schooling.
The best teaching, (as well as the best writing, the best art) we thought, would be showing rather than telling. We wanted to live in a closed system together, to live with limited resources, and to study Bricolage and Kyriology. When I went to my college Webster, these words were not there, but Bricolage is the art of making do with what you have, and Kyriology is the study of important things.
We bought an old 35-foot school bus at auction and fitted it out with mostly recycled materials. When we left San Francisco, the bus had bunks, a piano, a wood stove, a 50-gallon fresh water tank and holding tank for grey water. It had a chemical toilet, a pump-up Coleman stove and an ice box. We carefully selected a library, facts only, no opinion. We signed up for the Calvert School, which offers a correspondence course which can be conducted by parents and mailed in.
The children helped navigate, budget, keep a journal, deal responsibly with water and waste disposal. We had many adventures, not all of them pleasant. At the end of the trip, the children were only too glad to return to public school (one of them was put ahead six months) and I was only too glad not to have to cook brown rice any more. The Bus Trip furnished material for many school essays.
Thirty-seven years later, one Bus Trip alumnus is an architect dealing with green design and construction; the other is a high school principal. Between them, they have five children and five degrees, with a Ph.D on the horizon. Each has been married for more than 25 years.
The pages to come are the Log of the Odyssey of Number Eighteen.
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