Ohhh, I fully embrace the deschooling journey now that I’ve spent time in it. At first, I saw deschooling as a probation period before we could really start Unschooling. I saw it as a list of issues I needed to learn how to let go of ASAP so we could get on with our Unschooling life.
Not only was I not able to do this, neither were my kids. It takes time to adjust. We’d try giving more freedom, I’d let up, then feel the urge to clamp back down. When we started deschooling, my oldest was in a part time theatre arts program, and we found it impossible to completely deschool. That, and a couple other reasons kept us one foot in our conventional lifestyle, and the other in deschooling. I, quite frankly, could not let go until we had a place to cocoon in, to have a place to completely retreat to and to hold our process. And that place finally came when we were able to move back into our newly renovated home that we moved out of for close to a year. Moving back into our home, coupled with our states stay at home orders during the Covid pandemic has been the perfect recipe for deschooling success for us.
So, back to my own question! What is deschoooling? When described by other unschoolers, it is generally seen as a concentrated time at the beginning of starting out this new parenting/learning style, to give parents and kids a chance to pause and reset. In parents and adults, it manifests as questioning our beliefs, asking the tough questions about why we think, believe, act in a certain way, particularly around education and learning. For kids it tends to look like a lot of down time. For both it can be uncomfortable and unsettling to not have a framework to automatically fall back on when interacting with the world.
When I first started deschooling, it felt like a big to do on my list, that I felt pressure to get right. So, what a perfect opportunity to deschool my beliefs around that! Why did I have it in my head that in order to get to stage B, I first had to complete stage A? Because that’s how our educational system works, right? In order to read big words, you have to start with smaller words. Before 2nd grade concepts you have to start with 1st grade concepts. Before you learn multiplication you have to know addition. You can see this pattern over and over the way classes are taught in grade school, and most college classes as well. And there are some good reasons, I’m not disputing that. But what happens when we create a learning environment where the timetables for school subjects become arbitrary? What if there were no subjects?! We see natural learning unfold!
Learning and life in general is not linear. But boy, are we taught to believe this in so many ways. Likewise, deschooling is not something to check off a list; it’s a way of being in the world that softens our beliefs enough to let in other possibilities. It’s as individual as you are, as your kids are, and as your family is. There are general ideas about how long this intense deschooling time might last, and that’s a month for every year of schooling. That’s a lot of months for us parents who likely made it through all 13 years and maybe more. I’m halfway through that typical timeline, and recently I decided to ditch the idea that I am halfway through deschooling, because I know they’ll always be aspects of deschooling happening throughout the rest of my life. Might as well embrace it and enjoy the view while I’m here.
At one point early on I was already fretting about how I was deschooling. Was I doing it right? Should I be doing more? Less? And what took me so long to get here anyway? I was hard on myself. I had to deschool around the process of deschooling. I like to imagine deschooling as the coziest, plushiest lounger you can possibly imagine. You’re in the perfect position where your whole body is able to relax without feeling the stress of tight muscles or everyday anxiety. Once you are in a state of calm, the information can come in and you have a comfortable place to watch thoughts and new possibilities unfold right before you. It’s not always this straightforward, but I feel like I can move through my “stuff” easier if I can get to this comforting place.
