What might a fully deschooled life look like to you?
A series on deschooling workshops
Week 3: Circling back to school and deschooling
This was the first week with all five families present. As some had missed one of the first weeks and one was coming for the first time we decided to circle back to some of the original topics; specifically looking at what a fully deschooled life might look like to help us sketch out what we might want to talk about further, but also as the what does modelling self-direction look like was such a rich conversation and left us with so many questions worth exploring also to touch on that.
Questions on school and deschooling
In pairs, what was your school experience? One person reflect back what were the things in common whilst the other partner reflects back what were the things that differed in your experiences.
Describe a moment in your daily life that already feels deschooled. How does that moment reflect your values around learning and autonomy?
The original plan was that there was going to be six people attending and so we could split into pairs and discuss our experiences, unfortunately one person decided they could no longer join us so I offered the prepared framework for the session above and asked how we wanted to proceed. However, the first question someone asked was what do you mean by deschooling?
Hesitant to offer a definition off the bat, I suggested that we proceed with trying the first question in two small groups.
What were the similarities and differences between our school experiences?
One of the similarities that we all shared was that we enjoyed most of our time there and that we could coast through most of it if we were seen as intelligent enough and played the game. But it was not until later that we started to question how frustrating school was. Later, as we got older, we started to be able to articulate to ourselves that school was authoritarian, that we had never been able to question anyone/anything, that there was so little autonomy, and that led to behaviours in later life such as people pleasing.
This observation led into the main difference in one pair that the authoritarian nature of school led to two very different responses, one overly compliant and one overly defiant. We discussed how this response is often a gendered one, those socialised female are much more likely to lean into behaviours such as people pleasing.
As I hoped we were able to take these observations and create a definition of our own of deschooling that was built around our shared experiences of school and life. We discussed how deschooling is a process away from those patterns and behaviours that exemplify adults behaving in ways that present themselves as authoritarian, where we lean into allowing young people to question and give them autonomy to control their learning and lives.
Describe a moment in your daily life that already feels deschooled
After creating a shared understanding of what deschooling is we moved into answering this question. First we agreed that obviously there is no end point to deschooling, that we are probably always going to be on this journey and that any examples we give will not be the end point of success. We are looking for examples that represent a tangible shift in perspective taking.
This discussion centred heavily on food as an instance of deschooling; I think in part because when it was first suggested by one person it was clear that this was a topic that all of us had shifted our perspectives on since our first child was born in some way. The themes that came up were either around giving young people autonomy (highlighted green) and the challenges, difficulties or adult level concepts that can limit us giving autonomy or that we have to hold in tension because we are the adults in the relationship (highlighted red).1
It seemed that baby led weaning often leads us to recognise the great benefit in instinct with regards to food. But also that instinct is not the only thing that we have to let go of and trust, we also have to recognise that children are learning:. One person said: Yes, give them ice cream for breakfast but then sometimes there needs to be an understanding that sugar upon sugar will lead to a specific bodily response.
I recounted that on a recent stag do I had an ice cream for breakfast because I could, so what gives me the right to never let my children have ice cream for breakfast too?
A major theme throughout this discussion was the need for conversations. Conversations to allow for them to explore food in ways that you might not think will be beneficial to them long term, but they have the right to have the autonomy to try that out and learn that themselves, once in a while. And as much as you might take any of the green boxes and ensure that young people don’t take them to the extreme through conversations it is equally as much conversations that are required to temper those things that are ours as adults to hold: if you eat all the ice creams on the day of purchase we can’t just go out and buy another half dozen tomorrow.
How we navigate those conversations depends in part on us, them, our relationships, their journey and multitude of factors. It felt, to me at least, that there was definitely some alingment, and possibly some misalignment between some of us in the room, but as I was hoping from these workshops it never felt anything but interesting and fruitful and non-dogmatic.
We also touched at some point on the notion that that school is an institution of capitalist logic and so it was interesting to hear the perspective of someone who recognises that logic and in response tries to orientate their life around their monthly cycle, aware of the different moods and energies that they flow through throughout the month and how they should create patterns in time that respects those: Some parts of the month we are more outward facing and some more inward facing as a family.
We ended this week here, but asked what would we like to discuss next week. Someone raised that the discussions that we have had have been really useful but would like to understand how to put some of these theoretical discussions into practice in their home and/or lives.
The questions that we ran out of time for were as follows:
How do you balance your own self-directed learning with the needs of your family? Are there ways you’ve compromised or made it work?
What would you like to do differently to better model self-direction, and what support or changes would make that possible?
We agreed that these questions would lead nicely into a discussion on a deschooling/unschooling praxis to help our understanding of and practice of self-directed education.
It seems challenging to sit here and write about these workshops and find the balance between transcribing as much of the hour long rich discussion we had and keeping the notes brief but still capturing the detail. Perhaps the comments can open up space for further information if people would like to learn more about what we discussed. Though I hope the comments can be as much a starting point for new questions on these topics.