Life’s a Snap

School's nearly out for the summer, so the teacher asks which of her second-graders will be back next year. Everyone is returning except for Zach Van Benthusen.

"Are you moving, Zachary?" the teacher asks.

"I'm dropping out," the 7-year-old tells her. "I'm going to be home-schooled."

It was spring 1996. Jane Van Benthusen and her husband, Loran, had been two of the most active parents at Lee's Summit Elementary School. They worked school carnivals and skating parties. They attended assemblies and plays, volunteered at holiday parties and chaperoned field trips. Jane was planning to run for PTA president.

"We spent a huge amount of time there, those two years," Loran recalls. Eventually, though, the couple decided that they would be better off putting all of that effort into their own kids — "instead of everybody else's," Loran says.

Things had gone badly with show and tell. Zach had prepared a presentation on his most prized possession, a piece of petrified wood. When he called the wood a fossil, the teacher corrected him, saying it wasn't a fossil.

"Excuse me?" Zach said. "It is a fossil."

The teacher wouldn't listen, even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

The second-grader decided Zach was done. He researched home-schooling on the Internet. "I started reading that Einstein was home-schooled," Zach says. "And Abraham Lincoln." They were great men — why couldn't he do that?

Jane and Loran decided to try it for a year. Jane was already staying home with Zach's younger brother, Jace. They didn't have a plan, but Jane wasn't worried. Zach was already finishing assignments before the other kids, she says.

Zach and Jace filled in workbooks, drilled with flash cards and took online tests. But about three months into their home-schooling experiment, Jane and Loran threw out the curriculum. That was after they attended a meeting of Let Education Always Remain Natural, a secular home-schooling group. There, they heard the group's leaders, Kriss Miller and Kelly Wilson, describe "unschooling" — a hands-off approach that allows a child to choose his or her educational path. Unschooling is based on the belief that children's natural curiosity will guide them.

When Miller and Wilson started LEARN in the Kansas City area in 1995, almost every other support group required a signed statement of faith, Miller says. They made LEARN open to all faiths, and the group's members represented diverse religions — Jews, Muslims, Catholics. It also included atheists.

Miller swears by unschooling. Her three children — Ashley, 23; Abbi, 21; and Madison, 11 — have been unschooled. Ashley now lives in an apartment at his parents' home and runs a recording studio there, making enough to get by and pay his college loans, his mother says. Abbi lives in New York City but is on an eight-month tour of Southeast Asia performing in Grease. Madison writes and sews; lately she has been interested in Hawaiian mythology, medieval history and archery.

Miller says she knows at least 40 families in the metro area whose children are unschooled.

In Zach's case, music has been a motivator. It was always playing in his family's house, and he was fascinated by his dad's Kiss records hanging on the walls. For Halloween in first grade, he dressed up like Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley.

When Zach wanted to learn guitar, his parents bought him a six-string and set up lessons with "Fast" Johnny Ricker.

When Zach wanted to make latex masks, they bought the materials and worked with him.

When Zach was 12, he started working as a puppeteer for Paul Mesner Puppets, working in puppet shows at schools and churches.

"That's an unbelievable education," Miller says. "And to say it would be better for him to be sitting in a classroom learning about the Civil War — is it? I don't know. I'm not saying it doesn't have value, but is it necessary at that particular moment, or would it be better to wait?"

The more Jane and Loran Van Benthusen let the boys control their education, the more comfortable they felt.

"As they followed their interests, all the other subjects just went together," Jane says.

Unschooling isn't new, but it's drawing more interest. A February 2 story on CNN.com estimated that 150,000 of the 1.5 million home-schooled children in the United States in 2005 were unschooled.

Unschooling is legal in Missouri and Kansas. Neither state's board of education monitors, regulates or imposes guidelines on home-schooling. In Missouri, statutes say parents are responsible for making sure that their children get 1,000 hours of instruction — 600 hours of reading, language arts, mathematics, social studies and science — throughout the school year. They must also keep a written record of their children's progress. But these guidelines are hollow; there's no monitoring mechanism.

"When you see kids developing their own base of knowledge and being able to use it, it's really reassuring," Miller says. "If what you believe is that independence, self-sufficiency and satisfaction lead to a happy life, then you don't have those preconceived notions about what kind of education they need to have."

Elementary-school dropout Zach Van Benthusen hasn't answered a school bell, written a book report or solved a calculus problem in the past 10 years.

But the 17-year-old has written a couple of plays, one of which the Coterie Theatre will stage at its Young Playwrights Festival later this month. In 2004, Time magazine named the Coterie one of the country's five best theaters for young audiences.