The slippery slope of unschooling

Jumping off the deep end and never looking back.

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Home education can be a slippery slope.

You can go from removing school from your radar, even temporarily, to beginning to question all sorts of apparently unrelated things, to realizing that you’re now unschooling and powerless to stop it!

How does that even happen?

Okay - I know some of you jumped right into unschooling with your eyes closed, trusting it would work.

That was not me, though.

I was reading John Holt way back in 2011, pregnant with my first child, but when we finally started giving home educating a go (many years later, having tried school), I wouldn’t have called us unschoolers.

I was intellectually sold on unschooling, but I wasn’t actually practicing it.

Like, my brain understood the principles of it, but I wasn’t emotionally on board, I wasn't relationally on board, and the reality of our lives was simply not that.

I’ve always been a little envious of families who went seamlessly from peaceful parenting into unschooling without hesitation, morphing gracefully from one to the other like it was the most natural thing.

I mean - who knows if they even exist? (Perhaps this was you?)

I’m a deeply feeling person but I’m also very rational - I like to break things down and fully understand them. I’m not impulsive and I’m not willing to go on trust alone. I do not just blindly trust. I want to trust with eyes wide open, and I want to lean into a tiny bit of doubt because I believe doubt can be a useful indicator, can be essential to critical thinking.

So when we started homeschooling, I obviously made a schedule. Obviously. With like, times and subjects and stuff. I mean, what else does one do?

It was a tight schedule, and it lasted all of a week, maybe? I’ve written a bit more about our deschooling journey here. And I have more deschooling resources in this post.

From the moment we discarded the schedule, we have slowly, cautiously slipped further into what I would describe as unschooling, and more specifically as consent-based, self-directed education. As life without school, AND life as if school was not even a thing.

Some big realizations helped me do this.

They did not come all at once. There are some big things I probably have yet to truly tackle and deal with. But so far, 4 years in, I can share some of the BIG IDEAS that led me down the slippery slope towards the deep end of unschooling (yeah, I would say we’re completely off the deep end at this point.)

Here they are, in no particular order.

You are absolutely qualified and entitled.

If you are a connected, loving parent then you are probably your child’s biggest supporter. There is literally no-one else in the world who is more invested in caring for, accepting, loving and cheering for your child. You are absolutely the right person to be guiding them through life. You are qualified AND entitled.

I’ve written more about this here:

Who are we to refuse free schooling?

But I also want to add that not only are we absolutely entitled to be our child’s guide as they grow up, but our child and young person is absolutely entitled to participate, and often take charge of, their own life and learning.

Not only that, but we are QUALIFIED to guide our child. We are qualified because home education, and especially child-led homeschooling or unschooling, is in no way like teaching children in school.

In fact, there is very little about teaching in schools that can be applied to educating your child at home, especially if you’re unschooling.

So many ex-teachers have talked about all the things we were taught and essentially had to question and unlearn in order to see our children for who they are, and truly follow them and their needs.

I was lucky enough to train as a Montessori educator, and so I feel like I did have a foundation of respect and “following the child,” but even so there were so many aspects of managing a classroom of children that were utterly irrelevant to, AND IN FACT GOT IN THE WAY OF, living life with my own kids.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you are somehow not qualified, and that if you aren’t a certified teacher then you have no business “teaching” your children at home.

Teachers are literally the least qualified people to speak on homeschooling - because they are so utterly immersed in the idea that schooling is the one right way, that they cannot be objective about home education.

Listening to a school teacher’s advice on homeschooling is like asking a zookeeper to tell you about animals in the wild: they don’t know, they are not the experts on that.

Home is not school, and parents are not teachers. It is an entirely different environment, and an entirely unique relationship.

This is a super encouraging piece by Sara MacDonald (of the blog Happiness is Here) about why you don’t need to be a teacher.

Consent is more important to me than most things.

Quite apart from all the talk of curriculum and what children “should” know, there is one crucial thing for me that I keep going back to and it’s this: my entire relationship with my children, and the way I want to show up for them and in the world in general, centres on consent: our right to inhabit our autonomy and make free, informed decisions. And in turn respect other people’s right to do the same.

That’s it.

So if by pushing a certain agenda, or pressuring my child into a specific activity, I am violating their ability to exercise consent - it’s going to be a big huge NO for me.

Unschooling is more than an educational approach.

I won’t go deep into this but I’ve written a post about why, for me (and I know this is not for everyone) unschooling goes WAAAAAY beyond being an educational approach. You can read more here:

My child matters more than any pedagogy or program.

They know themselves best. And I know them pretty well.

Relationship will always come before pedagogy.

When I feel doubt and worry about us not doing what we’re “supposed” to be doing, I also come back to this: there is no one truth or one way or one model of how children learn.

There is no one definition of what education is.

We get to co-create education, to re-imagine it for ourselves. There is no one authority that has the monopoly over what education means or should be.

It’s all connected.

Learning about systems and connecting what we do with the questioning of, and pushing back on, systemic discrimination and oppression has motivated me to stay the course.

I find that if you’re only into homeschooling for yourself, then that’s fine, but you don’t really have bigger values to keep you grounded and committed - whereas when I started locating what we do in our lives to what I’d like to see in the world, everything changed.

I was now in it for much broader, systemic change.

I would continue to be in it regardless of how my children choose to live and learn.

If it’s colonial, I don’t want it.

A friend of mine once said this to me (you know who you are!), and I think about it often.

I know it sounds a little drastic, but hear me out.

This doesn’t mean I literally discard anything that smacks of colonialism (and consequently patriarchy and white supremacy, since they’re all connected).

If it meant that, then I’d be opting out of.. well, a lot of what my own culture values because my entire culture is patriarchal and colonial (think Roman Empire!).

That’s not what I mean (although I DO opt out of a lot of things!!)

What I mean is, I’m pushing back on the assumption that Classical education is THE BEST education. It’s only a tiny sliver of everything my children could possibly be knowing and learning.

Only the other day my daughter asked me whether I thought Shakespeare was “the world’s greatest playwright” (she read or heard this somewhere) and we got into a really good conversation about how Euro-centric that statement even is, how we Western people think we’re learning about “the world” when in fact we’re learning a very whitewashed, Euro-leaning fraction of all the literature, mathematic, history and more that there is to know. We believe Shakespeare is the best without even knowing or understanding plays and literature from other continents - and we’ve somehow managed to persuade much of the world that this is true.

And also, why are we always trying to assess who or what is “the best”? That, to me, is also about whiteness.

So.. when I think about my children possibly having “gaps” I think, gaps for whom?

The entire “gap” conversation revolves around the assumption there is ONE, SINGLE body of knowledge everyone should know - this is a colonial, white supremacist patriarchal construct (and illusion, frankly).

And I reject it.

So what I’m saying is that I’m actively seeking historically marginalized voices - so in terms of my own culture that would be women, young people, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrant or minority groups, secular voices, and others.

I don’t necessarily ignore or reject mainstream culture or history, but I’m just aware that a lot of it is in fact mainstream BECAUSE so much else has been erased and written out of history and culture.

My children will be exposed to mainstream culture regardless, because it’s so pervasive, so why not seek out the voices that tend to be ignored or silenced?

Living as if school didn’t exist, as opposed to living in opposition to school.

I wrote a whole post about it, here’s a bit of it:

If we go on the premise that what we are doing - living without school - is rooted in millennia of doing that exact thing (except it was just called living, back then), then school just doesn’t enter into it.

We aren’t living without school, because school just isn’t even part of what we’re doing.

We’re living as if school had never happened. We’re just living.

You might point out that that’s impossible, because school HAS happened, and schoolish ideas are part of us, and to actively live without school we need to almost live in opposition to schoolishness. And yeah - I think initially, we do.

But I also think we can get to a point where we have stopped trying to be the opposite of school, and we are just being what we want to be, regardless of school.

It was a huge shift for me: basically picking up schooling and moving it outside of my range of vision, metaphorically speaking, and instead just living life. Just living life!

What a concept.

And it leads neatly on to..

Just doing our own fucking thing.

Excuse my language here, but freeing ourselves from societal narratives does mean we get to do whatever the fuck we want. And when I say that, I don’t mean it in an individualistic way - I mean it relationally. We get to build relationships however we want, we get to form groups that do whatever they want. We get to not celebrate stuff or celebrate stuff.

In my world, doing whatever I want is not following societal narratives when they make no sense.

So if you’re out there and sold on capitalism, replicating patriarchal systems and benefiting from them, believing we live in a culture of scarcity where you need to work to prove your worth and you’re only as good as what you produce, I have news: you are not doing whatever you want, you are not free.

You are the opposite of that: blindly conforming, doing exactly what our capitalist patriarchal society demands of you.

Getting free means you are, as Akilah S. Richards writes, “shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people's agency over our time, body, thoughts, and actions” (this is her definition of deschooling and in many ways, deschooling is how we get free.)

We are not raised to think and act relationally, and everything changes when we do.

This is perhaps one of the most profound things I’ve been grappling with. Our entire society and as a result our parenting and schooling paradigm is one of comparison and competition.

In much of the Western world, we are not encouraged to conceive of things relationally - as rooted in relationship.

We are instead raised to think individualistically - about our own behaviour, our own struggles, our own interests, our own successes and achievements. Often, these are compared and pitted up against those of others. We begin to conceive of living as a Game of Life where we either win or we lose.

We simply are not raised to think of ourselves as in relationship with everyone and everything around us, and as one part of a broader whole. We aren’t encouraged to see our actions as part of a bigger picture - it’s always about how can I, individual person, make a difference instead of how can I act in relationship with others and the place I live in to communally make things better.

All the books we read, the movies we watch, the narratives we consume - are about how one, amazing and special person, made a huge difference. We zero in on individuals and ignore connections, relationships, communities.

I am not an expert in this and I am still learning to zoom out, and look at things less individualistically, and more relationally.

But I can see how when we see education, and unschooling, and living life with our children as relational rather than about individual goals or achievements - it begins to take an entirely different shape.

I would love to hear from you what made the biggest difference to your slide into unschooling.

What was the big revelation for you?

When was the moment it all clicked?

What was the thing you read or heard or realized that made it all make sense?

A few more things I’ve been upto that you might wanna check out.

• I was on the Sage Family Podcast, chatting to Rachel Rainbolt about Consent - what it is, why it matters and the many complex ways we strive for it.

• Every week I share a Day in the Life over on my IG account. I take you through the rather low expectations vibe of our home and how we try to center consent and self-direction. Join in if you feel like it!

• I am still calling and writing to my representatives to urge for a ceasefire in Gaza. You can too.

• Together with several youth advocates I am signing a letter/petition to call for ceasefire and humanitarian aid, from a perspective of the rights of children and young people. You can sign too at this link!

Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful week ahead.

Fran x