For many of us that went to school, we learned that “learning” required a time, a place, and a ton of homework. For me it was a negative experience and I loathed the weekly ritual. Our “free-time” was either scheduled, earned, or usually from some form of a reward either for our good behavior or for selling boxes of candy to raise money for the facility. Never a time chosen by ourselves when we wanted this break or rest. Fortunately, both of my children, Autumn and Chloe, are natural- learners. Over the years, they both have taught themselves most of what they know, either from library books, websites, weekly field trips, and living life NOT behind a fence for 35 hours a week. They even have their own ebay business just for kicks. While living side by side with the girls, and by allowing them to pick and choose their activities, my old “schooling ideas” thankfully have become a part of my past.

Being able to seek what is enjoyable for us to learn about is so important. Watching and evolving with my children as an unschooling parent has been such a rewarding and educational experience and continues to be a way of life for myself. By allowing myself to let go of my old institutionalized methods that I attained from attending a private school and a public school, and by having very disciplinary type parents, I have rediscovered that learning is a fun part of life, not a required activity to achieve a grade. While Autumn and Chloe are such different human beings with completely different likes and interest, unschooling has allowed each of them to evolve into such interesting and happy people. Thankfully by researching and learning about deschooling, my participation in this phenomenom called unschooling would never have been attained if I hadn’t deschooled along with my children.

I would like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite unschooling pioneers. John Taylor Gatto, from “How public education cripples our kids and why.”

“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

written by Kimberly Sharpe Slage

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They’re all those things…and more.

In “What is an artist anyway?”, Tera Leigh has this to say;

“Being an artist is about more than just creating original work or mastering every skill! It pervades every facet and moment of our life. If you’ve ever rearranged your furniture, you used your artistic ability. If you’ve ever painted a white room a different color, you’ve change and created”.

Pay attention to the moments in your life when you are creating, and remember to acknowledge it. You are being an artist. Creating something makes you an artist. It really is that simple.

Tera again;

What if you just decided to call yourself an artist? Right this second, pick up a tablet of paper and write: I AM AN ARTIST on it. If it makes you laugh or feel nervous write it over and over and over until those feelings diminish. If you have struggled with defining yourself as an artist, those feelings will not go away overnight. When people in your life question you about it, you will feel those old doubts creeping back up. You will have to continue to work at it but like anything else in life, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

 

Here is a quote that I love from Nina Wise, from the book “A Big, New, Free, Happy Unusual Life”;

“You already know everything you need to know to live a big, free, happy, unusual, enthusiastic, and amusing life. Creativity is an inborn aspect of being alive. All you need to do is relax and let it out. And if you do, you will find yourself, without the slightest hint of effort, dancing in your living room, singing in the car, writing poetry on cocktail napkins, and noting the dinner plate is a perfect canvas for a painting made of food.”

Also, from the same book;

“I’ve been told the story of a six-year-old girl who asked her mother where she was going one afternoon. The mother replied that she was headed for the university to teach her students how to draw and paint. “You mean they’ve forgotten? her daughter asked, amazed.

I never felt like an artist. Not until recently anyway. Not until I started unschooling my children and deschooling myself. Not until I had a daughter (Jacqueline) who would accept nothing less than being an artist because she draws comic strips and being a writer because she writes stories.

My daughters and I have been creating Artist Trading Cards for several months now. ATC’s are miniature works of art that are the same size as a baseball card. How you create them are totally up to you. There is no right way or better way. It’s up to you. You can draw, paint, collage, melt wax, use metal, ribbon…the only limit is your imagination.

Creating these cards has given me a whole new perspective on what it means it create art and what it means to be an artist. Who would have known it could be so much fun when the pressure is not on you.

YOU are an artist. Don’t save the word artist for “other people”. It belongs to anyone who creates.

Originally posted by Joanne 12/31/2006

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For those who’ve never heard of deschooling, it’s the process one goes through after leaving an institutionalized schooling environment. Your child has probably their natural desire to learn squashed and will need time to recover from that. With a parent’s help, they can gain back most, if not all of what they lost and begin to see the world as a place where learning is enjoyable and all around us.

So, what can the parent do to help? We have to work on changing our own preconceived notions about education, learning and school. I hear about many parents taking their kids out of school, recreating the same forced learning environment at home, only to have it come to a crashing halt with the mom feeling like a failure and the kids being miserable. Maybe, if they would have given themselves, and their children, some time to deschool, it would have turned out different for all of them.

My husband Billy & I started reading John Taylor Gatto even before removing our children from school. That was the start of my deschooling. I started to become aware of my thoughts on public school, real learning and education. And I started to question those thoughts. Thoughts that I had always accepted, without question because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

I had been a “good” student (except in high school when all hell broke loose), meaning I did what I was told and made good grades. I wasn’t picked on, I had friends and got along with the teachers. But it was the thoughts about real life and real learning that I got from school that did the most damage.

I remember having to take a cooking class in junior high school. I hated it and got a very low grade on my report card. There it was, in black & white…I failed at cooking. Surprise, surprise…today, I hate cooking and have no confidence in my ability to cook something edible. (Although this serves me well because Billy does 99% of the cooking-lol). Someone, who never met me, decided it was time for me to learn to cook, and because I wasn’t interested at that time and found it boring, I was labeled “poor” in cooking. I never gave it any thought until I started deschooling. It wasn’t like it crushed me when I got my report card. Rather it confirmed that the reason I must have found the class boring was because I wasn’t good at it.

I began questioning why we, as parents, allow the school system to continue having control over our children when the school day ends. I’ve had teachers give me weekly lists of things for my children to do at home. I’ve heard many parents tell their kids “You can’t go out (or play) until you do your homework”. Suppose I want to do something with my family and homework is interfering with that? Why are they telling my children what to do when they’re in their own home?

I questioned why we’re expected to live by school policy at home. There had been many times when my children come home, the day before the standardized tests, and let me know that the teacher told the class to tell their parents that they need to eat a good breakfast the next morning. And then hand me a list of what exactly the school’s version of a good breakfast consists of. Why does the school system think they can dictate what parents and children do at home? Because we let them do it. Yes, WE LET THEM.

Once these thoughts started swirling around in my mind, there was no going back to my old way of thinking. I also started to become aware of other people’s thoughts about learning and education. Soon after I removed my kids from school, we ran into a friend and her son. It was close to the end of the school year and the mother asked if we “take a break for the summer”. I explained that we learn all the time and that learning is all around us. I went on to say that it would be like taking a break from breathing. As they walked away I heard her say to her son , “See, they have to do school work every single day, even in summer!”.

*sigh*

I recall a parent, of a schooled child, asking me how my kids do P.E. being they’re not in school. Who in their right mind would depend on the public school system for physical activity? It’s as if physical activity is only a subject, to be taken just at times that the school dictates. Ridiculous!

I also did a lot of reading during that first year of deschooling. My two main sources were the message board at unschooling.com which are now closed and Sandra Dodd‘s site. I read almost everything on both sites and I could feel my thoughts and perspective changing as I read more and more.

Although that was back in 2004, I feel like my deschooling is a work in progress. I’ve learned so much about myself that it became more of a spiritual awakening than anything related to school. School-speak seems like a foreign language to me now. I see what REAL learning is everyday with my children.

It looks nothing like school.

*originally written in 2004: updated in 2008*

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1. Give yourself some time to deschool.
Letting go preconceived notions about school and learning is a gift you can give yourself, and your children. My own deschooling is a work in progress and the more I see unschooling first hand, the more I question what I once thought about education and learning.

2. Expect a period of deschooling from your children.
It’s been said that one month per every year of school is common. As I said in a previous post about deschooling, “your child has probably their natural desire to learn squashed and will need time to recover from that. With a parent’s help, they can gain back most, if not all of what they lost and begin to see the world as a place where learning is enjoyable, and all around us”.

3. Let your children feel your energy and passion for life.
Light a fire for learning in yourself and let it burn bright so they see it! What are your interests? Is there something you’ve always wanted to learn? Do It! Let them see YOU learning and living life to the fullest. Be curious. Be interested in life.

4. Don’t make the mistake of duplicating at home, what you didn’t like about school.
Sometimes we just automatically repeat the same patterns, without even thinking about it, just because it’s all we know, it’s what we’re used to or it’s what we’ve always done. Replace school with a full and interesting life. The public school system can not compete with that. They can’t even come close.

5. Don’t make cookies to teach math.
Make cookies because they taste good.

*originally posted in 2007*

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I’ve had some posts saved from various boards/e-mail groups over the last couple of years topic of deschooling for parents. I’ll divide them up into two parts.

1. Each time another long-held assumption fell away, my reaction was, “Oh! Wow! NOW I see more clearly.” It was the strangest thing. As those layers peeled off, one by one, the world got so much bigger and brighter!

2. I want learning to be a lifestyle, not just some thing we did for several hours out of the day.

3. As teenagers, my two kids educate themselves pretty much the way adults do. They read books, ask questions, try things out, practice and practice, look things up, seek out experts, search the ‘Net, etc. In other words, they pretty much copy what they’ve seen us do! It’s a far, far cry from what’s happening down at the local high school.

4. Public school doesn’t work at home mainly because it puts mom in a different role than what she was called to be. Now all the sudden, mom is not the nurturing MOM but a TEACHER complete with lesson plans, and a timer. This change in roles blows kids away. They have a hard time accepting it and this is why moms see their kids becoming intolerable.

5. I had to start looking at our lifestyle. I saw that our home was not conducive to learning and that “learning” and “life” were two separate things. “Learning” only happened during those dreaded school hours. No wonder my son was bored and unsatisfied. I was presenting an erroneous picture of how true, natural learning
is supposed to be.

6. I will never, ever forget the day I realized (I mean REALLY realized, all the way down to my toes) that every single curriculum in the world is drawn up by a human being just like me! There ARE no meta-people out there with a special genius for deciding what everyone should know. I live on the Earth just like those curriculum planners do, and I’m every bit as smart as they are! Now THAT’S empowerment.

7. I like the idea of, as a parent, following your own interests, because (1) you’ll be setting a GREAT example, (2) your enthusiasm will, to a large degree, be contagious, and (3) you’ll quickly see how one interest often fans out to include many “subject areas.”

8. Children who have attended school frequently require a considerable amount of time to recover their innate curiousity and desire to learn, particularly if school was a negative experience.

9. Instead of focusing on whether or not your child is learning, during the detox period, focus on shaping your home into an environment in which it is easy to learn new things.

10. Most of us were taught at school to see a false dichotomy between “learning” and “fun”.

11. The main goal of education should be for a child to learn HOW to learn, to become an independent learner and a lover of learning,

Check out Sandra Dodd’s deschooling page for more thoughts on this topic.

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The message? I believe it’s two-fold.

1: If someone had to bribe me to do something, my first thought would be “It must be unpleasant if you have to bribe me to do it”. When my daughter Shawna was in school, they were always trying different bribes/rewards to make her read more. It wasn’t working and the more they tried, the more she hated reading. “We’ll give you candy if you finish that book!”. She read the book, but stopped when they candy ran out. “We’ll give you a prize”. She read for the prize and then stopped when the prizes ran out. They didn’t realize (or didn’t care) they were sending her a message that reading is so horrible that she would only want to do it for candy and prizes.

I’ve always enjoyed reading and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my kids to enjoy it also….but only if they wanted to.

Fast forward to right now. The years that she has been out of school, she’s had the freedom to read if she wants to. There are no bribes. Just shelves and shelves of interesting books for her to read, when she’s ready and if she chooses. Nowadays, she reads for 3-4 hours a day, because she enjoys it. Ask her what her favorite activities are and reading is always in the top three. It took about a year of deschooling for her to get to that point. It took me backing off and letting go. It took me trusting her. If I forced her to read, how would she ever have the chance to do it on her own? How would she ever know if she enjoyed it, if she wasn’t given the chance to?

One of her friends came over last summer (a schooled friend) and my daughter was very excited to tell her about a book she had just read. Her friend said “You have to read in the summer??!!” My daughter was confused and caught off guard. Her friend went on to ask “What are you getting for reading that book?” My daughter said that she read the book because she enjoyed it. Her friend looked at her like she had two heads.

2: Food and candy were often used as bribes when my girls were in school. Pizza, chocolate, candy and ice cream were used time and time again to get the students to learn something that the school assumed the students would not want to learn on their own. I believe this sets them up with an unhealthy view of food. If a child has their candy controlled and then used as a reward, how else will they react other than trying to eat as much as possible when they have the chance? You see those kids at birthday parties, standing by the chips or candy, eating as much as possible. I’ve had children come to my house and finish a whole bowl of m&m’s that were meant for everybody. It’s sad. Don’t schools (and parents who do this) see that their giving that candy or pizza too much power?

Not only do I never use food as a bribe, my girls don’t have their food controlled. It didn’t happen overnight though…it took lots of discussions and modeling on my part to get to this point, but I now have two daughters with a healthier outlook of food than most adults I meet.

When we first adopted them, my middle daughter was that child hovering near the chips at a birthday party. She was the one who gorged herself on candy in fear there would be no more. So when a parent says “If I let them, they’ll eat candy all day”, I agree because if a child has their candy controlled and doled out only as rewards, yes, they will try to eat as much as they can get. Can you blame them?

But…if children are given the freedom to learn things as they come up naturally in life, there’s no need to bribe them with the promise of a reward to force them to learn something when they’re not ready. I believe that rewards motivate students to get rewards, not to learn.

PS: We’re almost done unpacking here at the new blog. If you help us tell others that we’ve moved, you could win an amazon.com gift certificate! Just a way of saying thanks!

*originally written in 2006-updated in 2009*

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