What school is doing wrong.
And also some of what it's doing right. All in one podcast.
The beginning of the end of schooling, for our family, was online learning.
In March 2020, as people began to realise Covid had arrived in our city, the school my children were attending switched to online learning basically over one weekend, and at the same time the pre-school I was working at did the same.
It was my chance, our chance.
I had never been a fan of school. I was reading John Holt while pregnant with my first child, we called ourselves unschoolers when I didn’t send P to nursery at age 3 and then didn’t send her to school either at age 5.
But then.. life got in the way. We moved a lot. I was exhausted. My second child had complex needs we were only beginning to unravel. Heck, we all had complex needs!! I was also getting sick with a cancer I wouldn’t discover for at least an entire year.
I don’t need to justify why I sent my kids to pre-school. But I mention it because the reality is that I didn’t really want to do it, but I also felt like it was the only way I was going to regain some of my self in that moment. I felt like I was failing my eldest, and I needed a break from my youngest.
But nobody needs a reason or a justification. Life under capitalism is fucking hard and we do what we need and want to do to make it work.
Anyway - back to online learning in the spring of 2020. It was an utter drag. My son just point blank refused (he was 5 so it was kind of ridiculous to expect him to be into it), and my daughter, who had previously loved school, loved her friends, was adored by the teachers.. well, she tried for a while and found it soulless and missing everything she had enjoyed about school.
It was our chance, and we took a leap into homeschooling. I don’t want to sound like I’m thanking Covid-19; I’m absolutely not.
But since it was happening, it felt like my chance to do something I’d started off doing and that I’d had to veer off course from. I was well enought by then, I had a community, supportive (homeschooling!) neighbours and friends.
This week I finally got around to listening to Odessa, a podcast about how the pandemic affected a high school in Odessa, Texas. Or at least, that’s what the podcast says it’s about but because all I do is look at things from an unschooled lens, I think the podcast is actually about the way schooling makes no sense and is just structurally flawed. And the way the pandemic brough this into stark focus.