Unschooled, 2024 version.
Why we need to deconstruct everything, like everything, for real.
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Hello friends!
There are a few new people here and to you I say this: I’m so grateful you are taking the time to read my words.
I’ve been reflecting on what our life unschooled will look like in 2024, and I wanted to share some thoughts.
First off, I think this will be a year of truly breaking things down and deconstructing.
It’s become somewhat of a truism to say that as unschoolers, we question everything. And the truth is, we don’t actually.
We questions some things - schooling, the ways children learn, parenting practices, who children are and what they deserve.. and so often it ends right there.
And while the word unschooling is now painfully over-used and sort of means nothing and everything all at once, I’d like 2024 to be the year I reclaim it.
Because to be unschooled is so much more than un-schooling, though. It’s so much more than removing our children from the school system, doing the opposite of school, living in opposition to school. It’s also an un-doing of all the ways we have been schooled, inside and outside of school itself!
It is rejecting the way we have been schooled to believe certain things and behave in certain ways. It’s really about peeling off our schooled beliefs and assumptions one by one, and busting them open to reveal the core of their schoolishness (Akilah S. Richard’s word (I believe!), you can read more about it here; also Iris Chen writes about how schoolishness affects her parenting; and there seems to be a new book coming out about it too - I’m curious about it because it seems to define it differently)
The definition I stand by is Akilah S. Richard’s, which goes like this (I’m paraphrasing): schoolishness is the practices and beliefs seen as truth by adults, but that are usually rooted in convention, binaries, an “I know best” mentality, adult supremacy and a sense of preserving The Way Things Are.
So, un-schooling is also about rejecting schoolishness in every sphere of our lives. It’s about challenging assumptions and constructs (everything is a construct, after all!), and about naming the bigger systems at play and the ways we can opt out, resist, push back.
Un-schooling, and living a life unschooled, is about calling out schoolishness wherever we go. Not only in actual schooling institutions - but in our entire society that has schooled us to think and behave in certain ways.
It is about recognizing we too, are schooled - perhaps even more so than our children. We have been schooled and remain schooled, until we begin to un-school.
What else is 2024 bringing?
For me, it’s also going to be about calling out the single narrative.