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"\n\nClick here for part one, here for part two and here for part three.\n\n Of all the trouble Wilson caused at his old daycare, his crowning achievement had to be the time he broke into a restricted shed and persuaded a younger kid to pee in a corner. More than a year later, Wilson, Oliver and I stood outside the very same shed at an open house for The Austin EcoSchool, a private elementary that had moved into the property when the daycare moved out.\n\n \"Hey Wilson*, why don't I break the lock then you sneak in and take a leak in the corner?\" I laid on the sarcasm extra-thick, just in case he thought I was serious.\n\n Wilson grinned the way he always did when cracking wise. \"No, I'll get Oliver to do it.\"\n\n Oliver, in any event, was too busy trying to break into one of the school's composting bins. A teacher wandered over. After chatting us up for a bit, she asked, \"So, do you think your son would benefit from a self-directed education?\"\n\n I had to think about that one. The daycare had been self-directed too, and look how the pee shed ended up.\n\n \"Our approach is to find out what interests a child and build lessons around those interests,\" the teacher said. \"What's Wilson into?\"\n\n Well. Let's see. Wilson liked Legos, birds, tanks, being naked, and anything in the fart category. But all I could think to say was, \"Buying stuff.\" I was only half joking. Lately we'd been having a lot of painful economic lessons on how far his weekly allowance would (or wouldn't) go.\n\n The teacher didn't miss a beat. \"In that case we'd do math problems with price tags.\" She came up with other suggestions, so many of them that I felt bad for being flip. Still, I had heard this sales pitch before. With the approach of a new school year after months of homeschooling, Erin and I had started exploring the outer reaches of alternative education in Austin, schools where grades, homework, standardized testing and other trappings of traditional education were considered a scourge. Some refused even to use the word \"school\" label, preferring to call themselves \"communities\" that \"nurtured\" students, a.k.a. \"self-starters.\"\n\n We weren't out to upend the system, we were just here because nothing else had worked. Wilson had tried a public school and a charter school, and the structure at both places had overwhelmed him. We thought he might do better at a school that gave him the illusion of control over his own education, especially since I'd been homeschooling him that way. Worksheets and learn-to-read tutorials only ticked him off, and my attempts at more creative teaching backfired: When I tried to get him to sculpt numbers with shaving cream, he ended up covering every inch of his nude body with the stuff. \"It tingles!\" he said. Eventually, I used spring break as an excuse to drop any pretense of academic work and we \"unschooled\" (an actual educational term), learning about things as they came up in the course of a day. Granted, most of these lessons involved danger, like how to throw a pocketknife into a stump, or how to escape a water moccasin in a murky swimming hole. He'd show occasional interest in reading as a means to search for videos on YouTube (\"I need to spell 'Lego Star Wars super battle droid on a pogo stick'\") but he wasn't in a hurry to tackle, say, Harry Potter. We planned on having him repeat kindergarten anyway, so we figured anything he picked up now was just gravy.\n\n After weeks of searching, we found a school we actually liked. It was named after this educator from India whose name I could never pronounce. The school's uncompromising approach to self-motivation made the Waldorf and Montessori methods seem like boot camp. The day I visited\u2014minus Wilson, who was with Erin for one of their periodic lunches together\u2014I passed a large pack of six- and seven-year-old boys and a few girls cavorting on the playground, all of them barefoot and madly happy. Inside, a young teacher had set up a voluntary math lesson at a table. The kids seemed engaged with their connectible counting blocks, none of them zoning out like Wilson's classmates would do at his charter school. A couple of kids decided they'd finished the lesson and returned to the playground. The teacher didn't stop them. A year before, seeing five-year-olds with this kind of autonomy would have scared me. Now it seemed right up Wilson's alley.\n\n I sat down with the manager for what was supposed to be a general information session about the school. Once she asked me about Wilson, I unloaded his whole history. I left out nothing, from the raw deal he got as a baby to his dismissal from his hippie charter school to his ongoing recovery at home. By the time I finished, we only had a few minutes left, but the manager was cool about it. \"He sounds like an interesting guy,\" she said.\n\n I scheduled another meeting with her a few days later. This time Erin went, and she didn't come back with good news. Though the manager invited us to enroll, she'd pointed out that they'd had a student with problems like Wilson's last year and they couldn't do much for her. \"Plus,\" Erin added, \"they have a lot of boys right now.\"\n\n I knew what that meant. Wilson had a problem with groups of boys his own age. One-on-one he was usually fine, but dealing with more than two at a time often frustrated him. Just a week earlier a few boys at a park shut him out of their playing. \"I'm gonna tear this park apart with a crane!\" he shouted at them in a hot rage. If a robot uprising, zombie war, or vampire plague (or all three) happened tomorrow, Wilson would be ready. If he went back to school at this juncture\u2026 not so much.\n\n We didn't want to hide Wilson from the real world. But we also didn't want to send him back there too soon and risk pissing away his progress. If he were ever going to thrive in a self-directed environment, he had to start by deciding for himself when he was ready to go.\n\n Not long after we chose to sit out another semester, Wilson woke up one morning and proclaimed: \"I want my training wheels off.\" I was dubious\u2014he'd asked this before, and he'd always fallen off his bike and cried and wanted the training wheels right back on. After I took the wheels off, he waved aside my offer of help. He then rode down the hall as if he'd done it a million times, not so much as a wobble. I didn't have to explain anything or prop him up; he just did it.\n\n We went outside to ride the rest of the day. By dusk he was barreling top speed down a hill with both feet propped on his handlebars. The next day he insisted on going to the park with the dirt mounds where BMX racers of all ages jumped their bikes. It was the kind of place that intimidated me as a kid, but Wilson fit right in.  \n\n*All names have been changed except for members of the author's family. Also, just in case you were wondering, Wilson goes by his mother's last name. So no, his name is not Wilson Wilson.\n\n Wilson is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Read Part 5 here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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