Is It Possible to Completely Deschool in Our Society?
Oh, I love it when I happen upon a non-homeschooling blog post that talks about deschooling in a real, and thoughtful way.
Two fantastic insights worth talking about :
1) Is it possible to deschool when working in a school? And by extension, I ask, is it possible to deschool in our society, where everything is structured by and for people who grew up in school?
2) Is is possible to deschool kids in school? Giving students the freedom to make their own learning paths is not met with welcome arms or smiles. It’s met with fear and being very, very uncomfortable. We have to start when children are young before they are conditioned to only be comfortable when a teacher gives them specific tasks and benchmarks.
I am still deschooling. Even after writing a book about it, and after years of writing on this blog, I’m deschooling. I was in public school from pre-K through grad school. And then question then is, should I deschool? I think it’s a good thing, but, is it? Because if I completely deschool, where would that put me in relation to the rest of the culture I live in?
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The Teaching Company
I worked in a very small school for many years where we actually talked about “deschooling” kids - many of our students were refugees from public school - kids who had been bullied or had spent years not quite fitting in academically, socially or both. Some kids came to us with some nasty behaviors they’d acquired from public schools.
At the time, before I had kids, I thought that school of 30 kids was as close to homeschooling as you could get without actually homeschooling. Just the other day, another homeschooling mom made that exact comment to me. But now that I’m homeschooling my kids, I don’t feel like they’re the same at all. Even the students I taught who attended our school for seven years weren’t anywhere near as deschooled as my own kids.
On the other hand, I often worry that my own kids will miss out on some of the good pieces of school - especially the skills required for being in a community. Also, many of the things I hate about school are the same things I hate about life in general - having to jump through other people’s meaningless hoops to get where you need to go. While school makes you do it in spades, it’s still something you have to know in order to get by successfully in the world. Does being deschooled mean you don’t learn those things?
Anyway, thanks for this…
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