As an unschooling mother of two girls ages, 11 and 17, I consider myself very fortunate. I have been able to be at home with my children for almost 18 years. I have witnessed every stage of development the girls have experienced. These different experiences have been lived out while traveling and living in so many different places. With my husband working in the hospitality business we have lived everywhere: Orlando, Chicago, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Coral Springs, New Orleans, and Alabama. All of these adventures, as we like to call them, have been happy, sad, scary, crazy but more importantly, real life lessons. Our children have been living daily in a real world with people of all different ages, financial situations, religious practices, familial partnerships, and of different ethnic orientations. They can carry on conversations with elderly people, young people, surgeons, nurses, lawyers, car salesmen, librarians, policemen, taxi drivers and just about any individual out there because they have lived in the real world and not closed up in a classroom memorizing nonsense that they wont remember by the following week.

The economy today is a very difficult place for so many individuals to live. With the price of gas, the increase in food cost, and the loss of homes, jobs, and health insurance, our family has lived it and witnessed it unravel. Let’s face it, for the majority of homeschooling/unschooling families, a strict budget has been created. My husband and I for example decided 18 years ago to rid ourselves of our two new cars and downsized to one. (We now have two). We stopped eating out and buying things that were not necessities. We made a commitment to each other that the two of us would do whatever it took to have our children raised in a loving and nurturing home and that they would not be put into a daycare program. We both feel that the home should be a place where a child feels loved, wanted, and not feel that their parents can’t wait for them to go back to school. Because of our philosophies with unschooling, our children have been living in the real world and not behind a fence where they are controlled and told what they must learn. They should never be rushed to bed or feel stressed over homework. A child should be playing, reading, painting, volunteering, and feeling the world around them and not be pushed out each day into a world of walls, lines, bullies, test, and restrictions.

With unschooling, we have grown as a family in more ways then we have ever expected. My oldest daughter has such a beautiful outlook on the world that surrounds her. She feels sad when she sees a homeless person on the side of the road. She wonders what their story is, where they are going to sleep that evening, do they have children, and how are they going to take care of themselves if they get sick. She has learned this past year when my brother, Michael, became fatally ill and did not have health insurance, that worry had kept him from going to the ER because of cost. He almost died because of this fear. She witnessed the process in the hospital with the health care administration in regards to a treatment plan. His medical recovery was going to be very different from that of a patient that had a high priced private insurance plan. She learned through this exposure how to treat wounds, change an colostomy appliance, and she actually volunteered to sit through instructions with him so he too would understand how to take care of himself once he was sent home. She learned that surgeons could be very nice and would let you help them with minor procedures in the hospital room by simply asking. (handing tools, and up close observation). She was treated not as a young person that shouldn’t be exposed to such tragedies, but was treated respectfully because she explained that she was a life learner and wanted to see what was going on. My daughter Autumn could speak for herself and did not feel inferior to the highly skilled professionals that were surrounding all of us each day while we lived in the hospital for over a week. These doctors, surgeons and nurses were people, and she did not think that she was not allowed to ask questions. She felt equal because as an unschooling family we believe and instill in our children a confidence to seek all answers and to question everything if we are not certain of the situation, regardless of who the persons age. (The photo used in this article is my daughters in the hospital with my brother)

I truly feel that if we as parents can live with our children, conscientious of their wishes, doubts, choices, fears and challenges, that so many wonderful other self discoveries will take place. Like pealing the skin off of an orange, there is so much inside each child that is good, loving, and natural. With our travels we have encountered so many different cultures, lifestyles, and challenges. By not participating in the public school system, we have allowed our children to live in the real world. We have not spoon fed our children the stories about college degrees and jobs. Our times have changed in regards to our educational choices and availabilities. It’s time to take back our children from the old methods of ‘schooling’. It’s time to be honest with our children and let them know that they do have other choices then the cookie cutter factory called school. That as a free thinking person they can decide on their own what they want to become when they grow up and not be dished out some recipe that a test dictates to be their special trait.

I would like to leave you with a couple of quotes from one of my favorite writers, John Taylor Gatto:

“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.”

“Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect.”

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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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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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It is common knowledge that our educational system is in dire straights. Children graduate high school without knowing how to read while students are driven to violence by the brutal social climate of school. In “Instead of Education”, John Holt gives us practical, innovative ideas for changing all that. He suggests creative ways to take advantage of the underused facilities we already have. Reading this brilliant educator revolutionizes our thinking about what schooling is for and what we can do to accomplish its true goals.

“Be clear about this: Instead of Education, although less widely known than his more famous titles, is John Holt at the top of his game. If you are one of the millions of walking wounded still staggering from your own encounter with forced institutional schooling, and trying to spare your own kids from its damage, this book will be your guide and a good friend”.
- John Taylor Gatto, Former New York State Teacher of the Year

“John Holt was a prophetic voice in the educational wilderness who vividly explained why our system of schooling often frustrates genuine learning. He made this quite clearly indeed in his groundbreaking work Instead of Education. It is as radically relevant to the educational challenges of our generation as it was to his”.
- Ron Miller, Ph.D. Author of Free Schools, Free People

Read more and purchase

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