How to live as if school doesn't exist

PART ONE.

Some time ago, I wrote about the ways I’m shifting from living without school, aka unschooling, to living as if school doesn’t even exist.

I am not the first to say this.

Akilah S. Richards has spoken and written about about moving from “schoolishness” to self-direction. Wendy Priestnitz has written about living as if school doesn’t exist, and moving away from terminology that includes the word school.

In the past year or so, my children and I have leaned into existing in the world as if the institution of school, all its trappings. and the schooling culture that accompanies it, literally does not exist.

This is not a quest for perfection, because perfectionism too, is part of schooling culture. It is simply a radical reframe of the values and goals that matter to us, and those that do not - and a recognition of where and how they originate and thrive.

My children are champs at this; me, I’m most definitely still working on it.

The social conditioning is deep. From the moment a child is born, they are also born into a specific narrative of what their life will look like, how they will learn, how they will behave, what will be rewarded or punished, what success looks like.

Some of the first questions people ask my childre are, What grade are you in? and Where do you go to school? Some of the most common statements are about what they will be when they grow up, who they will be partnered with, or what they have achieved lately. A lot of the talk about children revolves around their accomplishments - how gifted they are at music, what they performed in, the competition they won, the high school they go into, the grades they got in exams.

Turns out, you can live without school, and still be beholden to schooling culture.

untigering

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Now that I have an almost teen, it’s all, But she’ll have to go to high school. And maybe she will choose to. But the point I’m making is that we have created a very fixed story of education and career success, and this story revolves firmly around the institution of school and higher education, and the achievements of our children and how they compare to this story of success.

We struggle to even conceive of education without schooling of some form. We struggle to conceive of career success without the kind of education that involves schooling and college. We struggle to visualise our child’s future without factoring in what they are accomplishing.

And we massively fail to recognise the way schooling and higher education are increasingly becoming entangled with neoliberal capitalist agendas (more on this another time!) and the maintaining of the status quo.

So, if you feel like wading out there into the deep, here are 5 ways we live as if school were not a thing, as if we couldn’t care less about it, as if it didn’t even exist.

It will look different for you, of course, But perhaps in some ways will look similar.

Focus on living; learning happens anyway.

Often, even as unschoolers, we focus so hard on learning. And of course learning matters. I observe the way my children learn, I care deeply about their interests and the ways I might support them.

But for me, unschooling is not a pedagogy, it is not an educational approach.

But I also recognise that a lot of the learning they do, especially as they get older, has little to do with me. I’ve noticed that on the weeks when I’m super involved and coming up with ideas and activities, there isn’t a lot more learning or better learning (plus, who is the judge of better? not me. We should embrace learning neutrality!) than on weeks when we just live.

When I say just live, I mean that my focus is on engaging with our life, with ideas, with people, and with place. That’s living to me. The children don’t always want to join me, but I model ways in which I live my life fiercely and fully, and I hope this will rub off.

If we assume that all humans are learning all the time, that we don’t have as much control over learning as we think we do, that it’s a multi-way process of co-creation and exchange, that it can look a hundred different ways - well, then we can also assume that living and learning are intertwined. When one is happening, so is the other.

And because we have so many worries and pre-conceptions around learning, and because learning has become hard to detangle from our ideas of schooling, why not focus on living instead?

prntgdcolonized

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The key is relationship - nothing happens without it.

People don’t learn when they don’t feel safe, and one of the key drivers of self-direction is relatedness: a sense that you are known and held in supportive relationship.

I have to remind myself over and over again (because I forget, constantly!) that what matters most is that my children trust me, that they know I have their back, that they know I am there when they need me. I have to remind myself that solidarity with young people, and partnership with them, is at the root of living without school.

While there is an apparent emphasis on collaboration, when push comes to shove the work that really matters in a school context is the work we are able to do alone, under pressure, without asking for assistance. The message is that our goal is independence and self-sufficiency, that life is a zero sum game. That is not the kind of world we are going to need, nor is it the reality of the world we actually live in. We are interdependent whether we like it or not, and knowing how to build and maintain relationships is not only playing to our strengths as humans (we are wired to connect) but essential for everyone’s needs to be met.

fareofthefreechild

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Understand schoolishness, and actively decenter it.

“Schoolishness” is a word coined by Akilah S. Richards, which points to all the ways school and schooling have permeated our mindsets, our values, our systems and our lives as adults. Moving away from schoolishness means moving into self-direction.

Richards defines schoolishness in this way: “Conventional practices that are rooted in binaries, and generally accepted by adults, but rejected by children and teenagers, either overtly or covertly. A living out someone else’s goals or narrative of how and what we should be. Schoolishness models an authoritarian approach to adult-child interaction as well as respectability ideas rooted in adults’ innate superiority in knowledge.”

Understanding that our adult practices are rooted in domination, in an “I know best” mentality, means we actively name schoolishness and work to remove it from our interactions with young people. This will involve naming and recognising adultism, and digging deeper into the ways children are marginalised and stripped of their rights both at home and in society. It will involve questioning what we have always taken to be the way things are done, and figuring out what to keep and what to let go of. It will require taking ownership over our own lives: reclaiming our time, our values, our goals, our sense of self and our autonomy, our right to belong.

Ultimately, it will mean we recognise that it’s all made up, that everything is a construct! (I’ll never get tired of saying this.)

We need to recognise that absolutely everything we understand to be the truth, is actually heavily socially constructed. This doesn’t mean we dismantle everything - but it does mean we begin to see how a lot of the ideas we assume are true, are products of the culture we live in. And we can choose to adopt them, change them, or let them go.

This expands into us starting to question the way our systems operate, and the reason they even exist in the first place. It means we may begin deconstructing ideas around children, parenting and schooling, but we don’t stop there - we begin to see it’s all connected.

alliance4sde

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Remove arbitrary metrics, decide what really matters.

It’s so easy to compare and measure, because often that is our first recourse when it comes to deliberating whether our children are thriving. We ask ourselves things like, Are they at the ‘right’ level of reading/math?, Are they physically where the average child their age is at?, Are they developing ‘normally’?

What all these questions involve is measurement against constructed metrics and comparison to others. We look at other children our child’s age and compare. We measure and assess and evaluate our child in as many ways as we can, to see if they are meeting society’s arguably often arbitrary standards - because the average child is in fact no actual real child.

I’ve written elsewhere about the adult gaze on our children, and Carol Black mentions the effects the evaluative gaze of schooling (which can be present inside and outside of school, as long as schooling metrics are being applied) on our children’s interests, performance and sense of self.

Focusing our attention away from where our child is at compared to other children and stepping away from arbitrary metrics means we can shift our attention to the things that truly matter to us - which will be different for every family.

In our family, this means that we bring connection, co-regulation, collaboration, consent and my children’s thoughts, feelings and opinions to the centre of our lives. Are their needs being met, according to them (not me!)? Do they seem content with their life? Do they have connections and interests both at home and out in the world? Is their bodily, mental and emotional autonomy being respected? (All of these questions are valid for the adults, too!)

These are all things that matter more to me, and to my children, than any measurable outcome such as their level of reading, their skill in a sport or musical instrument, their academic or other form of excellence. This isn’t to say that doing well at stuff doesn’t matter, or that I don’t look out for any extra support my child might need; it only means that what matters more is the foundational stuff that allows my children to figure out what they enjoy, pursue it when, how and to the extent they desire, and know that their sense of self does not depend on their achievements.

badschoolbadschool

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Seriously question power hierarchies, everywhere.

When there are imbalances of power, there is the potential for harm, violence, abuse and oppression. We see this in families all the time, between men and women, adults and children. We see this in the workplace between bosses and employees, out in the world between those who hold more privilege and power, and those who hold less, and of course in schools between those at the top of the hierarchy and those at the bottom (always, inevitably, children, the youngest often being at the bottom of the pile.)

Paulo Freire writes on the ways that power operates within society, and the ways it is used to create dynamics of domination and oppression. Naming adult oppression of children means, to paraphrase Freire, that we recognise it and dismantle it not for our children, but with them. What if we decided to co-construct parenting with our children? To take down the inherent hierarchy within the parent-child relationship, and build something that looks more like partnership? To stop doing parenting, and start living alongside our children?

These questions are all ways to move away from an ever-present source of hierarchy and power over in children’s lives: schooling.

While I recognise that some children do just fine in school, that some enjoy it, that some have to attend whether they like it or not, this doesn’t change the hard truth about school: it is inherently a coercive institution because it can only operate through domination of adults over children. This domination is most obvious when it comes to attendance: children often have no choice but to be there. And this form of domination is woven into most other aspects: curriculum, schedule, school rules, teacher-child relationships.

All of these aspects can only be enforced because of the existing hierarchy of power within school, and society at large. If adults and children had an equal balance of power, schools would look very different because they would have to become places children actually choose to attend, and enjoy being in. Perhaps there would be a multitude of different formats and settings, because there is no one child and no one way all children wish to live and learn. Perhaps there would be nothing like what we call school now - we wouldn’t have to live as if school didn’t exist, because perhaps it wouldn’t!

I’ll leave it at that, for the sake of writing a short(ish) post! Part Two coming up soon!

Meanwhile, let me know your thoughts and what else you think living as if schooling doesn’t exist looks like!

Fran x