Why all this hate for schools? The case of the Famiglia nel Bosco
Recently here in Italy the case of the “Famiglia nel Bosco” or Family in the Woods made headlines. It was a family living in radical isolation in the Abruzzo region. The English father and Australian mother decided together with their children, an 8-year-old girl and a pair of 6-year-old twins, to live off-grid in a totally isolated house.
They adopted so-called neo-ruralism. They lived without basic services like electricity, running water or conventional heating and maintained almost total social and technological isolation.
But one thing caught my attention. The children were being educated in an “alternative” way, not to say primitive. They did not attend school.
It doesn’t seem crazy at first sight, right? The case of Homeschooling is not rare nowadays, where parents generally follow a curriculum trying to simulate a school, but at home. I could write this post simply arguing why this is already a debatable idea. There is no shortage of arguments.
However, in this case it was something much worse and something I didn’t even know existed. They didn’t practice Homeschooling. They practiced Unschooling. The idea is that the child learns only what sparks their natural interest, without schedules, without tests and without mandatory textbooks.
The Result?
The Italian justice system had to intervene and temporarily remove parental custody, though not totally. Wow, the Italian State stealing little children from their parents just because they wanted to live simply? Far from it.
The court-appointed guardian reported that the eldest daughter, 8 years old, could only write her own name under dictation and could not read. She also didn’t know how to perform basic math. The children didn’t know how to interact socially. They didn’t know how to play with other children of the same age. Besides educational issues, other serious problems were pointed out such as malnutrition, precarious oral hygiene and a lack of vaccines.
The School as the Villain
My point is not just to attack the newly discovered Unschooling. It would be wasting time on an obvious stupidity. What worries me is the growing tendency of modern parents to ignore or demonize schools. Some do it for lifestyle and others for politics. It is bizarre how we reached a level where formal education has been cast as the villain.
Why are so many parents declaring war on the classroom? I see three main causes for this phenomenon:
- The Romanticization of the “Natural” and the Instinct Fallacy
We live in an era that idolizes the organic and the intuitive. There is a dangerous belief that institutions like school, medicine and science corrupt the purity of the child. The Abruzzo case is the extreme of this. It is the idea that the child, if left in peace in the woods, will learn what is important. This ignores millennia of intellectual evolution. Is school artificial? Yes, just like basic sanitation and democracy. And we need both.
- The Echo Chamber and the Fear of Contradiction
School is, by definition, the place where the child encounters the “other.” The different. For many parents immersed in ideological or religious bubbles, school has become a threat because it bursts this bubble. Removing the child from school is often not about protecting them from poor teaching quality, but rather about ensuring they never hear an opinion different from their parents’. It is the desire for total control over the child’s intellectual formation.
- The Devaluation of the Teacher’s Authority
There was a time when the teacher was an authority. Today they are treated as a service provider who gets in the way of home education. The ease of access to information on the internet created the illusion that content is the same as education. Many question what school is for if everything is on YouTube. They forget that school does not serve only to download data into the brain. It serves to teach how to coexist, to respect collective rules, to have discipline and to understand social hierarchies.
The “Family in the Woods” case is a cruel and necessary reminder. Formal education is not an enemy that imprisons childhood. It is the tool that frees the child from being merely an extension of their parents’ desires and fears.
Without school, what remains is often not idyllic freedom, but intellectual abandonment and social isolation. School prepares us for the world. Isolation prepares us only for loneliness.
