Confessions of a Natural Learning Newbie: Part 2, How We've Gone About the Work of Deschooling

One of the most difficult aspects of our natural learning adventure has been deschooling.

Deschooling is the process of changing the way you think about learning and education. It's moving away from the idea that learning only takes place "in school" and/or by the methods traditionally used by schools.

I didn't initially set out with a natural learning mindset. In addition to having attended public school for 13 years myself, we began our homeschooling journey using classical materials so we certainly have a lot of experience with curriculum, textbooks, workbooks, etc. But this last school year life just seemed to be constantly getting in the way of our schooling...it felt like we never had time to sit down and really hit the books and I was really stressed out about it. I remember praying and praying and praying some more and I kept getting the feeling that in answer to my prayers God was telling me to relax, relax, relax. (Easier said than done.)

So after many months of God pointing me in the same direction I finally began the task of deschooling. The first step was to deschool myself and Wonderful Hubby. We read books...

• Learning All the Time by John Holt


• Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling by John Holt


• The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith


• Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves by Alison McKee


• The Unschooling Unmanual

We discussed what we knew about our kids, their strengths and weaknesses, what we knew about ourselves and our own educations, how we learned best as kids, what we remember about school, where we failed and where we enjoyed success. We finally began to see life through the lenses of natural learners.

Once we felt comfortable with this new mindset we stopped using the term "school" to describe what we did all day. If we happened to have time for a workbook or if we happened to be using a text book we called it "book work". We wanted to the kids to start thinking about their education as something that was happening all day every day, not just when we were "doing school".

I also stopped recording and referring to our learning by subject. When you break it down into math, reading, writing, social studies, etc., where do you put things like; helped Grandma move or watched Dad fix the leaky pipe under the sink or helped make and pass out fliers while looking for our lost cat? These things are educational and were part of our real life but they don't necessarily fit into the little subjects my record keeping book provides me with so I went through the book and crossed out all the subject labels. Now I just record what we do as it happens and without worry of where it fits.

A few months into all of this now I will say that I've found our toughest "deschooling" task to be learning to trust each other. I have to trust them to learn with out my constant badgering and they have to trust me to let them say no when I suggest an activity they aren't interested in. J is doing fine and is very curious about learning. W on the other hand is going about the whole thing a bit more cautiously. I really pushed him in the beginning and he doesn't really believe yet that he has the freedom to say no.

Little by little we're getting the hang of living and learning in a natural way. The boys still ask "Have we done school yet today?" and I still have moments of panic and wish they would engage in activities that are more obviously academic. But we're getting over it and learning to value each and every moment we're given.



Confessions of a Natural Learning Newbie Part 1: Mom Finally Learns to Relax