Understanding the basics of unschooling
You need to DEschool for one month for each year you were in school.
If you have a master’s degree, it might take two years before you’ve gotten rid of schoolthink. If you didn’t finish high school, you should plan on maybe a year or less. And it’s just a rule of thumb—-sensitive people tend to take longer to rid themselves of the damage done by school. Folks who kind of blew off school to begin with take less time.
DEschooling is allowing yourself time to forget about school—-to start making school a part of your past—NOT your present or future. Think of it like summer vacation that never ends.
It’s the time you spend getting rid of words like “educational” and “workbooks” and “should” and “must” and “texts” “schoolyear” “back-to-school” and “assignment”—-you know, “schoolspeak”. Banish these words from your vocabulary.
It’s also the time for you to start seeing value in what school denigrates—like TV and video games and mudpuddles and staring into space. To see value in skateboarding and horseback riding and knitting and making that same exact mark in the middle of the 500th piece of paper! It’s seeing —-and SEEKING—value in what your child finds interesting.
UNschooling, on the other hand, is knowing that these things have just as much value. Unschooling understands that workbooks and coloring books are the same. That TV and books are equal ways to take in information. That blowing buubles in milk is just as scientific as a laboratory experiment. Unschooling is understanding that connections are made daily—sometimes big ones and sometimes little ones—-but that those little dots WILL connect sometime in the future. Unschooling is knowing that our brains’ capacities are limitless—and that we keep on learning until we die—and that NO one knows better than we do what we need to know and when.
DEschooling is hard. Really hard, because we’ve been brainwashed to devalue what is not “educational”.
Unschooling is much easier (AFTER you’ve deschooled) because it just makes sense. It just takes a while to get to level of understanding!
So basically, you’ve misread or misunderstood DEschooling and UNschooling. DEschooling is a process to get rid of schoolthink and takes as long as it takes. UNschooling is living your life as if school didn’t exist. We unschool ALL the time.
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“Deschooling” is the process of ridding yourself of school baggage. As a rule of thumb, some people have suggested that it takes about 1 month for each year of school. During the “deschooling” transition period, some people find that it seems worse before it seems better. My children have never been to school and my own deschooling was so gradual I didn’t pay attention to how long it took.
“Unschooling” is what we are doing and what this list is about.
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Yesterday I read a story in the newspaper about an 18 year old artist currently exhibiting in the Boston area. She was so obsessed with coloring as a youngster that at 2 years old her mom stopped buying coloring books, hoping she’d play more with dolls. At 5 years old, she remembers that they took her coloring books away.
At age 9 she was showing paintings and now she is internationally known.
If anyone is interested in reading the article it is at
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/artsCulture/view.bg?articleid=72628
It really brought home to me the importance of trusting my children to be doing and learning what is important and essential to them and how great it is to own my worries as just my worries and celebrate them. I’m glad this young woman was not discouraged and obviously at some point, her parents started supporting her art, but oh how easily that gift could have gotten squashed!
