Robie Tenorio and Gil Gregori live in southern Humboldt
County, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, in the part
of California generally referred to as the North Coast.
They have developed a family-run organic farm and orchard
on the Mattole River, one of the few remaining wild rivers
in California. It is a beautiful area which contains stands
of ancient forest, a unique species of salmon and some of
the most remote coastal land in the state. It is also an
area known for radical environmentalism and a strong back-to-land
ethic.
Robie and Gil both come from urban working class families
in the San Francisco Bay Area. As young adults, both were
deeply drawn to living on and caring for the land. They
came separately to Humboldt County, settled in the area
on different homesteads, and met through the local community’s
work on forest preservation. Robie came to the area already
an activist in many peace and social justice causes, in
which she continued to be active, and both she and Gil were
involved in the local environmental work. Gil has two grown
daughters by a previous marriage, who lived with Gil and
Robie until their late teens, and were not homeschooled.
They have one child together, their son Teamo.
Of all Robie’s commitments, perhaps the strongest
and most passionate is to homeschooling, or, in their case,
unschooling. Homeschooling, once the norm in this country,
has been practiced continuously since its inception. After
compulsory schooling was imposed in the 1850s, it was most
often rural families who continued to homeschool because
of the difficulties of sending their children to distant
and often poorly equipped schools. However, since the 1970s,
increasing numbers of urban and rural families—an
estimated 1 to 2 million children currently—are homeschooling,
some for religious reasons or other strongly held beliefs,
many because their children fail to do well in school, and
some like Robie and Gil, because they reject the whole idea
that any institution can educate children in a way that
is actually beneficial to them.
Homeschooling can involve classes, lesson plans, and a
formal education that closely mimics the grade levels in
the conventional school system. Unschooling, however, depends
on these things scarcely if at all. It is the profoundly
radical concept of trusting a child’s natural ability
to learn to guide his or her education.
