Here’s something you may not want to know about eating insects, but we're going to tell you, anyway: you already are. That’s because food manufacturers are legally allowed a certain number of “defects” in their products, which includes insects. For instance, an 8-ounce handful of raisins might contain up to 35 fruit fly eggs, and 240 “pests” are allowed in each 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli (what we want to know is: who’s doing the counting?). “OK, fine,” you say. “I never liked raisins and broccoli all that much anyhow. I’ll just eat chocolate instead.” In which case, you should know that a chocolate bar is allowed eight insect parts. And no, you don’t get to choose which ones. 

Truth is, this isn’t really such a bad thing, because insects are loaded with the vital macronutrients of protein and fat. And tasty? Whoo-eee, yes. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried grasshoppers fried in soy sauce. Did you know that 80 percent of the world’s population eats over one thousand species of insects? Well, now you do.

While the majority of bugs are perfectly safe to eat, there are a few precautions you should take if you decide to eat insects yourself. Don’t eat any insects that are brightly colored; in general, such coloration is a warning to predators that they’re toxic. Avoid hairy bugs; there may be stingers nestled in the fuzz. Also avoid any bugs that have a potent smell (except, paradoxically, stinkbugs).

Whenever possible, you should cook your insects before you eat them, since they may carry parasites or harmful bacteria that won’t survive cooking (this is true of all meat, by the way, so don’t think there’s anything particularly gross about insects). Besides, cooking improves flavor and makes the nutrients more digestible.

There are loads of edible insects out there, but we are only going to speak to the ones we have actual experience ingesting and didn’t find utterly disgusting (like the earthworm our son chewed up and swallowed when he was eight and had just read How to Eat Fried Worms.)

These five tasty tidbits are easy to find, nutritious, and have tastes that could plausibly be acquired. We encourage you to give them a try—or at the very least choke them down when you’re really hungry. And if that’s not convincing enough, just imagine the look on your friends’ faces when you casually pop a grub in your mouth and start chewing.

Grasshoppers

Grasshoppers are extraordinarily protein-rich and you can collect them pretty much anywhere.

Catch ’em: Grasshoppers are easiest to catch by hand in the early morning when they move more slowly. Sweeping a butterfly net across the tops of tall grass is pretty effective.

Eat ’em: Remove the wings and legs, skewer them, and roast over flame. Dry roast them with a splash of soy sauce at the end, fry them up in garlic butter, or make them into fritters. .

Crickets

Crickets are super nutritious and taste pretty darn good.

Catch ’em: Crickets can be caught by hand, but they are fast. You can get them to come to you by burying a plastic container in the ground and baiting it with a piece of ripe fruit. Leave it overnight and in the morning your breakfast will be hopping. Look for crickets in damp, dark places: under rocks and logs are good bets. Also look in tall grass, in shrubs, and in trees.

Eat ’em: Crickets have a subtle, nutty flavor, almost like popcorn. Roast them, then salt them or season them with spices (or both), and eat them whole as a snack. Other options? Chocolate-coat them, or throw a handful into rice.

Grubs

Don’t act surprised, you knew it was coming! Hey, grubs (which are really just the larvae of insects) are easy to find and they don’t exactly scurry along.

Catch ’em: The best place to find grubs is in rotting logs. Use a stick or a rock to break the wood apart and sift through to find your morsels. You can also try searching under rocks and leaf litter.

Eat ’em: Grubs can be eaten raw, but as with all of these little treats, it’s better to cook them first. Skewer them lengthwise with a stick and cook over an open flame until the skin is crispy.

Wood lice (also known as pill or potato bugs)

This critter is actually a terrestrial crustacean, not an insect, which is maybe why they seem to taste a bit like shrimp.

Catch ’em: These guys don’t move too fast, either, so it’s easy to collect an abundance. Turn over rocks and logs and sift through dead leaves: you’re sure to come across some.

Eat ’em: Boil them in water. They can carry nematodes, so be sure they're thoroughly cooked. When they’re done, chow down.

Ants

Ants are everywhere, easy to catch, and actually taste good.

Catch ’em: Scan the ground for a few minutes and you are likely to find one. They hang out in groups (called an “army”), so where you find one there are sure to be more. Many, many more. Finding an anthill is an efficient way to get a whole bunch. it will soon be covered in ants and you can shake them off into a container. Put them into a container of water while you’re collecting so they don’t get away. A few hundred make a nice snack.

Eat ’em: Again, you can eat them raw but it’s better not to. If you do, make sure they’re dead or they might bite you while you are trying to bite them. Put them on a baking tray, salt them, and roast them in the oven at 225 degrees until dry and crispy. Different ant species have slightly different flavors, but most have varying degrees of ascorbic acid in them, lending them a slightly lemony flavor. (An ant-like lemony flavor, that is).

Once upon a time, people learned the most awesome and useful things. They learned how to find wild food in the fields and forests, how to shelter themselves with nothing more than sticks and leaves, how to maintain a knife and hatchet, even how to build a fire without matches or a lighter. They learned these skills from those who came before them, and they passed them along to those who came after. It was just the way the world worked.

Keeping these old skills alive is critical to maintaining our connection to nature, and that right now, in an era of rapid climate change and the ongoing loss of wild places and creatures, this connection is more important than ever. Because if we don’t feel connected, it’s hard for us to truly care.

These skills and others in our book cover a wide range of difficulty. Some of them you can tackle alone, and some might require the help of a parent or friend with a bit more experience than yourself. Don’t be shy about asking for help; a big part of the fun is working on these projects with others, sharing in the mistakes and the triumphs, finding solutions together, and creating a sense of community around working with wild materials. And chances are, if it’s one or both of your parents you’re working with, you might be able to teach them a thing or two.

Ben and Penny Hewitt’s will be published in April by Roost Books.

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By the time my eldest son, Fin, turned six, the age at which he might reasonably have been expected to enter the public-­education system, my wife, Penny, and I had long since determined that neither of our children (Fin’s brother, Rye, is three years younger) would darken a schoolhouse doorway. As if this wasn’t recalcitrant enough, we’d also decided to pursue a self-directed, curriculum-free educational style known as unschooling. This meant that at the age when most American children are busy memorizing the alphabet, our sons were running wild in the fields and forests surrounding our rural Vermont home, belt knives and bow drills at the ready. Like many of our contemporaries in the unschooling movement, we placed our faith in the freedom and trust that more-­formal learning institutions are ill-equipped to provide. The result, we assumed, would be a degree of curiosity and resourcefulness that no school could equal.

I wrote about my family’s educational path in a 2014 essay for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű called “We Don’t Need No Education,” and then in my book . I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the publication of our story, but I know I didn’t expect what I got. My inbox was flooded with e-mail from readers in at least as many countries as I have fingers, and I fielded calls from producers at the BBC, the National Geographic Channel, and CBS’s 60 Minutes, to name a few.

Obviously, I’d hit a nerve, one rubbed raw by a growing but still largely unspoken dissatisfaction with compulsory standardized learning, accompanied by a collective groping toward a satisfactory alternative. Could my family’s grand experiment be the answer, or at least part of it? Could my free-ranging sons really learn all they needed to survive and even thrive in an increasing complex and technology-driven world? Should Penny and I be revered or brought up on charges of negligence? I soon realized I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and quick as we could, we returned to living the quiet life we’d led before our brush with mainstream notoriety. This included the running of our small farm, the continuation of my freelance writing career, and yes, the unschooling of our two sons, by then 12 and 9.

Over the intervening years, I’ve been asked repeatedly for updates, and mostly demurred or answered in only the vaguest of terms. Partly this was due to an increased sense of protectionism around our boys during their blossoming adolescence, and partly it was rooted in my feeling that people were hungry for a particular type of affirmation that I could not provide: the assurance that despite their atypical education, my sons would prosper in the modern world.

I still cannot (nor do I care to) offer such affirmation. They are now only 16 and 13, still kids after all, albeit of an age when the oncoming headlights of adulthood loom large and the awareness of those new respon­sibilities can feel overwhelming. But then this is true of any child. Come to think of it, it’s true of most adults I know, including myself. As children, we tend to view adulthood as some sort of self-actualized plateau; as adults, we tend to view it as a double-loop roller coaster operated by a drunken carny.

I’ve learned a lot over the past four years, much of it informed by my sons. I’ve watched as Fin’s interest in music has become a driving force in his life, leading him to seek out an apprenticeship with a master guitar builder and, ultimately, to part-time enrollment in a public school with a unique student-led program that has them composing songs, booking gigs, touring, and recording. Fin loves the social opportunities school provides, along with the chance to immerse himself even more completely in music. And while it was initially difficult for Penny and me to see him walk through those doors, there is no denying that the life of my unschooled son is richer for the public-education system. Many times I have had to remind myself that just as I encourage others to challenge their assumptions regarding education, so too is it healthy to challenge my own.

Rye continues to be mostly unschooled, with just a bit of sit-down math thrown into the mix. He still spends the majority of his days in the woods. He remains a committed practitioner of traditional skills, as well as an avid hunter and trapper. (Indeed, the very morning I sat down to write this piece, I awoke at 3:30 A.M. to drive him to the field where he’d scouted wild turkeys the week before; four hours later, I picked him up, along with tomorrow night’s dinner.) His skills have evolved to the point where he now mentors younger children. He is saving for a truck, working part-time at dairy and vegetable farms and at a maple-sugaring operation down the road. I suspect that once he turns 16 and is granted a driver’s license, it won’t be long before we watch his taillights disappearing down our driveway. He talks of big-game hunting in Alaska and the allure of Idaho’s Sawtooth Range.

I want to make one thing clear: we never set out to rewild our children, at least to the extent that I understand rewilding to mean an emergence of body, mind, and spirit within the natural world. Truthfully, we sought only to provide them the opportunity to fully inhabit their childhoods and their learning, in whatever ways felt most enriching. The fact that much of this occurred in the woods had at least as much to do with geographic circumstances as it did with philosophy. This is not to say that we didn’t have hopes and aspirations for our sons; of course we did. And still do. They’re our children, after all.

But I’ve come to believe that modern parents too often do a poor job of distinguishing between responsibility and control. Which is to say, it is our responsibility to provide a base level of material, intellectual, and emotional support for our children, along with experiences that will enrich their lives. But we cannot control the outcome. Perhaps our children will develop into the capable, compassionate, and successful (however we define success) people we fervently want them to be. And perhaps, in ways that may be disappointing or flat-out painful, they will not. Almost certainly, their interests and lives will evolve in surprising and delightful ways.

With the passage of time, I have become increasingly aware of a particular sort of irony that runs rampant in the unschooling and rewilding communities, which are joined at the hip by an ethos of freedom and self-­reliance. We choose a more liberated approach to our children’s upbringing at least partially out of a well-intentioned desire to ensure the development of specific qualities: curiosity and courage, resilience and resourcefulness. We want to instill a strong sense of place and a connection to something larger than themselves, something that helps them understand the world is not solely the domain of humankind.

In and of itself, this desire is not problematic; I doubt there’s a parent alive who doesn’t want their child to develop specific qualities. It’s when we link these qualities to a particular outcome that we begin to lose our way, that we conflate responsibility with control. I know that Penny and I have been guilty of this. Perhaps, in ways I don’t yet fully understand, we still are.

You can want all the freedom in the world for your children, and you can do your best to provide it. But what they do with it? That, my friend, is simply not up to you.

Ben Hewitt () is the author of .

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In early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of late summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the boys’ bedroom window, the leaves on the maples are just starting to turn.

School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly. Faded and frayed thrift-store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts with knife sheaths. In each sheath, a fixed-blade knife.

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the ground-level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour, a yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working-class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some other project: tillering a longbow of black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve caught. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge, and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

Or maybe the boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.

Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?

There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.

It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.

If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.

The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.

It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was , a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.

Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, , he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”

Holt died in 1985, having authored 11 books on child development. But along with veteran teacher John Taylor Gatto, author of , he popularized a movement. Well, maybe popularized is a tad generous; while it’s generally accepted that unschoolers comprise about 10 percent of the 1.8 million American children who learn at home, hard numbers are scarce.

In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a , 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website . “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”

I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.

And it can happen anywhere; these concepts are not the sole domain of rural Vermont hill farmers living out their Jeffersonian fantasies. Kerry McDonald left a career in corporate training to unschool two of her four children in Boston, though her husband, Brian, still works as a technology consultant. “The city is our curriculum,” says McDonald. “We believe that kids learn by living in the world around them, so we immerse them in that world.” Their “classrooms”—sidewalks, museums, city parks—may appear drastically different from those of my sons. But the ethos remains the same, that a child’s learning is as natural and easy as breathing.

Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.

To the extent that I hadn’t demonstrated these qualities previously, the arrival of my 16th birthday provided ample opportunity, rooted in two events of great and lasting importance. The first, of course, was the acquisition of my driver’s license. This came with a craptastic Volkswagen Rabbit that my mother had driven for the past half-dozen years and sold to me for $200.

The second was the quiet arrival of Vermont’s minimum dropout age. More than three million American teens leave school annually, a number that makes up about 8 percent of the nation’s 16-to-24-year-olds. Dropouts comprise 75 percent of state inmates and 59 percent of those in federal prison. They earn, on average, $260,000 less than graduates over their lifetimes.

My 16th birthday came on November 23, 1987; by the end of that day, my freshly minted driver’s license was cooling in my wallet. And by the midpoint of my junior year, I had pointed that little Rabbit, already bearing the scratch-and-dent evidence of my negligence, out of my high school’s parking lot for the last time.

The irony of my dropping out can hardly be overstated. At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins—was employed by none other than Vermont’s Department of Education. My mother graduated from Iowa’s Grinnell College and was a substitute teacher. My family’s immersion in structured education was total. It wasn’t merely the medium through which my parents made their way in the world: it provided the means to support their children, one of whom was now flipping the proverbial bird to the very hand that fed.

It might lend a degree of credibility to my role as my children’s primary educator if I could report that I dropped out of high school for reasons of virtue, perhaps to pursue a rigorous course of self-directed study in thermonuclear engineering or to dig wells in some impoverished sub-Saharan village. But the truth is, I left public school because I was bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.

Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom. Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell.

Peter Gray knows just how I felt. Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who wrote the 2013 book , is unsparing in his criticism of compulsory education. “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,” he says. “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is. School deliberately removes the environmental conditions that foster self-directed learning and natural curiosity. It’s like locking a child in a closet.”

What kids need instead, Gray contends, is exploration and play without supervision. It is this that allows them to develop self-determination and confidence. If he’s right, current educational trends are not promising: in 2012, five states voted to increase the length of the school year by no less than 300 hours.

Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like , the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.

Sending our children to a Waldorf school was never an option for us, if for no other reason than tuition, which can run as high as $30,000 a year. But when Fin turned five, the age at which we deemed it necessary to introduce some structure to his days, Penny and I sought to integrate aspects of the Waldorf curriculum into his learning. We purchased reams of thick craft paper, along with pastel crayons and watercolor paints. Penny arranged a small “schooling” station at our kitchen table, under the assumption that our firstborn would sit contentedly, expressing his innate creativity even as he learned the rote information necessary to navigate the modern world.

It was, to put it mildly, a flawed assumption. Fin chafed at every second of his perceived captivity. Crayons were broken and launched at innocent walls. Pages of extremely expensive paper were torn to flaky bits. Bitter tears were shed, even a few by our son. It was an unmitigated disaster.

It was also a watershed moment for our family. Because as soon as we liberated ourselves from a concept of what our son’s education should look like, we were able to observe how he learned best. And what we saw was that the moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand: an excavator that not only rotated, but also featured an extendable boom; a popgun fashioned from copper pipe, shaved corks, and a whittled-down dowel; even a sawmill with a rotating wooden “blade.”

In other words, the moment we quit trying to teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.

In my early twenties, having passed my General Educational Development test and endured two semesters in Vermont’s state college system, I lived for a time in a $75-per-month bungalow just outside the bucolic Vermont village of Warren. This was at the apex of my immersion into bicycle racing and backcountry skiing, and I worked infrequently in a bike and ski shop, subsisting on the time-honored action-sports diet of boxed noodles, canned tuna, and expired Clif Bars liberated from the shop’s dumpster.

The bungalow was attached to a rambling, ranchlike structure that looked out over the valley; it was one of those seventies-era, quasi-communal homesteads that carried the lingering scent of sandalwood incense and the fetid body odor unique to heavy tofu consumption. A sign by the door read Resurrection City. Resurrection from what? I had no idea, and no one seemed to know.

During my yearlong tenure at Camp RC, as it was affectionately known, the main house was occupied by a single thirtysomething fellow named Donald who homeschooled his two young sons, Crescent and Orion. Or maybe he unschooled them. I do have a vague recollection of them sitting at a table, studying
 well, something. But, for the most part, the boys ran wild, exploring the surrounding woods. On weekends, Donald packed up his orange VW van and drove with Crescent and Orion to bike races and music festivals, where they hawked vegetarian burritos. By the ages of six and eight, the boys were prepping orders and making change.

I was blown away. And jealous. This was the childhood I wished I’d had, equal measures freedom, responsibility, and respect, with none of the rote soul-crushing memorization that had soured me on school. Sure, Crescent and Orion could be a bit wild—I once found the front bumper of my truck kissing a spruce tree that stood between the driveway and the house—but they were precocious and self-aware, brimming with confidence and curiosity. They looked you in the eye and spoke in full sentences. They were constantly running and laughing and playing. I’m not sure how else to put it except to say that never before had I known kids who so fully embodied childhood.

When Penny, then my girlfriend, came to visit, she noticed it, too. “Those kids are amazing,” she said. “I didn’t even know there were kids like that.”

Fin and Rye almost always wake up before dawn. We do not have an alarm clock, but early rising is our habit, ingrained over the decade and a half we’ve run our small farm. We tend to chores as a family: Penny heads to the barn to milk cows, I move the rest of the herd to fresh pasture and slop the pigs, and the boys feed and water their dwarf goats, Flora, Lupine, and Midnight.

By seven the chores are finished and we convene at the wide wooden table for breakfast—eggs, usually, and bacon from last year’s pigs. After breakfast, I repair to my desk to write and Penny heads to the fields or orchard. Fin and Rye generally follow their mother before disappearing into the woods. Sometimes they grab fishing poles, uncover a few worms, and head to the stream, returning with their pockets full of fish, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. Occasionally I join them, and these journeys are always marked by frequent stops, with one boy or the other dropping to his knees to examine some small finding, something I would have blithely, blindly stumbled over.

“Papa, look, wild onions.” And they’ll dig with their young fingers, loosing the little bulbs from the soft forest soil. Later, we’ll fry them in butter and eat them straight from the pan, still hot enough that we hold them on the tips of our tongues before swallowing.

Other times, they work on one of the shelters that they always seem to be constructing; their voices carry across the land as they negotiate materials and design.

“Fin, let’s put the door on this side.”

“Did you say ten and three-eighths or ten and five-eighths?”

“Rye, we need another pole on this end.”

These shelters are so prolific that occasionally I come across one I hadn’t even known existed, and I can see the evolution of the boys’ learning in the growing soundness of these humble structures. Winter’s first big snowfall no longer spells collapse; the boys have learned to slope the roof and to support the ridgepole at its center. They face the openings southward and build on a piece of well-drained ground. They use rot-resistant cedar for anything that will contact the soil.

Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them could operate the tractor and, in a pinch, drive the truck with a load of logs. They split firewood alongside us, swinging their mauls with remarkable accuracy. They are both licensed hunters and own .22 rifles and 20-gauge shotguns. They wear belt knives almost everywhere, oblivious to the stares of the adults around them, some concerned, some perplexed, and some, it often seems to me, nostalgic.

Our sons are not entirely self-taught; we understand the limits of the young mind and its still-developing capacity for judgment. None of these responsibilities were granted at an arbitrary, age-based marker, but rather as the natural outgrowth of their evolving skills and maturity. We have noticed, however, that the more responsibility we give our sons, the more they assume. The more we trust them, the more trustworthy they become. This may sound patronizingly obvious, yet I cannot help but notice the starring role that institutionalized education—with its inherent risk aversion—plays in expunging these qualities.

Our days do have structure: chores morning and evening, gardens to be turned and planted, berries to be picked and sold, all these things and so many more repeating in overlapping cycles. But even within these routines, Fin and Rye determine how their days will be spent. Often they disappear for hours at a time, their only deadline being whichever meal comes next. On their backs, they wear wooden pack baskets that they wove under the tutelage of a friend who also unschools her children. When they return, the baskets are heavy with the small treasures of their world and their heads are full of the small stories of their wandering: the moose tracks they saw, the grouse they flushed, the forked maple they sat beneath to eat snacks. “The bark felt thick,” Fin tells me. “It’s going to be a hard winter.”

Which brings us to the inevitable issue of what will become of my boys. Of course, I cannot answer in full, because their childhoods are still unfolding.

But not infrequently I field questions from parents who seem skeptical that my sons will be exposed to particular fields of study or potential career paths. The assumption seems to be that by educating our children at home and letting them pursue their own interests, we are limiting their choices and perhaps even depriving them. The only honest answer is, Of course we are. But then, that’s true of every choice a parent makes: no matter what we choose for our children, we are by default not choosing something else.

I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so later than is expected. They can add and subtract and multiply and divide. I can report that they do indeed have friends, some who attend school and some who don’t, and their social skills are on par with their peers. In fact, Penny and I often hear from other adults that our sons seem better socialized than like-aged schoolchildren. Fin and Rye participate in a weekly gathering of homeschooled and unschooled kids, and Fin attends a weekly wilderness-skills program. In truth, few of their peers are as smitten with bushcraft as they are, and sometimes they wish for more friends who share their love of the wild. But even this is OK; the world is a place of wondrous diversity, and they must learn that theirs is not the only way.

What if they want to be doctors? They will be doctors. What if they want to be lawyers? They will be lawyers. Peter Gray, he of the ‹belief that school is prison, has studied graduates of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, where “students” as young as four enjoy complete autonomy to design their own course of study, even if that involves no studying at all, and found that they have no difficult gaining entry to elite colleges, nor in achieving high GPAs. A home-based education, even one as unstructured as my sons’, does not preclude acceptance into a university; in fact, many colleges have developed application processes geared specifically toward homeschooled students, and while there are no major studies of unschoolers exclusively, homeschoolers are significantly more likely to take college-level courses than the rest of us.

“I look back at unschooling as the best part of my life,” Chelsea Clark told me between classes at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she was accepted on full scholarship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the university’s undergraduate program. “It was a huge advantage, actually. I had the confidence of knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t burned out on classroom learning like most college kids.” Chelsea was unschooled throughout her high school years in the small town of Dorchester, South Carolina.

Still, perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify.  are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly. They sit.

Inactivity is also bad for the brain. A by Georgia Health Sciences University found that cognitive function among kids improves with exercise. Their prefrontal cortex—the area associated with complex thinking, decision making, and social behavior—lights up. The kids in the study who exercised 40 minutes per day boosted their intelligence scores by an average of 3.8 points.

Yet the physical and cognitive implications of classroom learning have played minor roles in our decision to unschool Fin and Rye. It’s not that I don’t want them to be healthy and smart. Of course I do—I’m their father.

But, in truth, what I most want for my boys can’t be charted or graphed. It can’t be measured, at least not by common metrics. There is no standardized test that will tell me if it has been achieved, and there is no specific curriculum that will lead to its realization.

This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.

I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that.

Ben Hewitt’s new book is . He blogs at .

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1. Lots of support, very little weight—that’s the Vert Light’s recipe in a nutshell. Built on the same last as the company’s much burlier Vertigo High, the 20-ounce Vert Light actually weighs less than some of the low-cut hiking shoes we tested. But it’s much sturdier than all of them, thanks to its stiff leather rand (the piece that joins the sole and the upper), sturdy ankle support, and precise toe-to-heel fit.

2. Don’t hesitate to set out with a 30-pound pack. This boot can take it. The Vert Light’s nylon-and-polyester-weave uppers are remarkably abrasion-resistant—our test pair still shows nary a scuff or scratch. The sole also boasts a rockered profile that lends a lively feel. A note of caution: Although the slightly concave outsole grips well on soft surfaces, it felt a bit less sure-footed on slick and steep rock.

3. The Vert Light’s Cocona lining helped keep testers’ feet impressively dry on hot days. And with its breathable eVent membrane, three-quarter height, and ample tongue overlap, it was the most waterproof boot we tested, making it great year-round. One tester’s feet stayed bone-dry after plowing through wet, early-season snow all day. Note: It fits narrow-to-medium-volume feet best.

(20 oz)

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Fast and Light
Somewhere in your closet, there’s a pair of shoes you reach for more than any other, be it for hiking, knocking around town, or traveling. In this year’s test, that shoe was the Redmond. It’s easy to achieve a perfect fit, thanks to the asymmetrical laces and a piece of webbing that locks down your heel, and wide-footed testers especially liked the Redmond’s fat (and stub-proof) toe box. There’s enough support here for schlepping a good-size pack, and the sturdy construction will serve you well in the long run; after a month of hammering over trail and tarmac, the Redmonds still looked fresh. The suede-and-nubuck-leather uppers aren’t quite as breathable as mesh shoes, but that’s a minor quibble. 14 oz;

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Fast and Light
With all its various fabrics and plastic overlays, the Riot looks as if it was designed by committee. Even the “we want camo” guys were appeased; the outsole’s toe and heel are made with camouflage-patterned rubber. Thankfully, none of the aesthetics interferes with the Riot’s performance. On warmer hikes, testers found the mostly mesh upper to be surprisingly breathable, while its water-resistant coating did an admirable job of fending off light snow and cold mud during a late-fall hike in Colorado’s Indian Peaks. With its airy midsole and supportive insole, the (relatively) light Riot is still well padded and cushioned for all-day asphalt adventures. The overall fit is a bit roomy—more “take it easy” than “take it by force.” 14 oz;

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Fast and Light
We love that the Stumptown LT is made mostly from recycled materials. The only thing that impressed us more was its performance. At a wispy 11 ounces, it’s the lightest trail shoe that made the cut this year, and it quickly became a favorite of the flashpackers among our test team. “This shoe could almost pass as a trail runner,” noted one after returning from a four-mile run/walk. Still, thanks in large part to a deep, snug-fitting heel pocket, the Stumptown offers a degree of lateral support most running shoes lack. And its aggressive outsole made for confident tromping on slick surfaces. A word of advice: Despite its three-quarter height, it’s simply not sturdy enough for hiking with a heavy pack. 11 oz;

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Mountain-Ready
With its sturdy, full-grain-leather construction, Gore-Tex liner, and plush EVA midsole, the Ascend is far and away the burliest, most rugged boot to win our respect this year. It’s twice as heavy as the Stumptown but twice as supportive, too; it’s the only boot here we’d recommend for schlepping a heavy (40-to-50-pound) pack all week long. And we’ll admit it: In a market overflowing with flash, its old-school aesthetic won us over. It fit our wider-footed testers best—our most narrowfooted testers had trouble getting a snug fit—and it didn’t win awards for breathability. But on cool days and demanding trails, the Ascend delivered. 27 oz;

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Mountain-Ready
Can’t decide if the day calls for scramble or ramble? Vasque’s Equalizer is ready for either. There’s just enough cushioning for long slogs on the trail, but its lasting board makes the Equalizer’s midsole extra stiff and helps it excel on rocky moraine. The outsole is molded from one of Vibram’s stickiest rubbers, and the low-profile lugs are designed specifically for maximum traction on rock. With its reinforced toe box, tough synthetic-and-leather upper, and torsionally stiff construction, the Equalizer is the shoe you want if technical fourteeners are on your summer agenda. Our one reservation: Testers had mixed opinions of the unique dual-closure lacing system. Yes, it’s fast and offers cradle-like support. But it’s also a bit dorky and cumbersome. 16 oz;

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Mountain-Ready
The Bushland’s understated good looks, combined with its snug fit and low-profile but seriously grippy Vibram outsole, made this our pick for days that had us pounding both dirt and concrete. Among the shoes featured here, only the Vasque beats this capable scrambler on steep mountain flanks. But unlike that shoe, this one doesn’t scream “I’m wearing an approach shoe!” Plus, thanks to its more pliable rubber outsole, a deep and supportive heel cup, and a cushy synthetic-and-cork footbed, it’s more comfortable and surefooted when the trail levels out again. 15 oz;

Bonus: A good portion of the shoe, including 70 percent of the footbed, 50 percent of the upper, and 30 percent of the outsole, is made from recycled materials.

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