De schooling is divesting from the School Fixated Society – both its mythology and practice.
It is about deprogramming our minds but it is also about removing compliance with the myths of School Fixated society.
Deschooling examples:
Over the last twelve years of unschooling my children I’ve been on a massive deschooling adventure! it doesn’t just apply to learning but to everything. See Deschooling Our Bodies for a deschooling example. But also, here is one about time:
De schooling Time:
15 years of schooling on average, in our most formative developmental phase – we were on a tightly kept schedule, never in charge of decision making.
Schooled thinking, patriarchal, linear thinking – all have influenced our perception of time in a way to create pain and struggle in our every day life.
This schooled thought results in:
- Feeling like we dont have enough time to do what we need to do such as self care
- Feeling hounded by rigid ideas about what time children should wake/ eat/ sleep
- Feeling that we are always late for something
- Feeling bound to keep everything on schedule
- Can’t ever relax because there’s so much to do
- Can’t do relaxing or joyful things because i should be doing more deserving tasks.
- Questioning our children’s pace for skills and competency development
By investigating where these time wounds come from we can choose new concepts of time:
- Time as it was experienced by our ancestors, and still is by indigenous folk -as non-liner. As relational. As cyclical.
- We can consider time as not being a resource, but being present. A series of present moments. Nothing more, nothing less.
- We can consider how we are liberated by us refusing to be URGENT.
And by how we choose to talk about time, not as something we are running out of or that makes us feel stressed and busy.
Overtime we can begin to live by this liberated view of time, and not the schooled myths about time. How’s that for a deschooling example?
The great deschooling FAQ
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- What is meant by deschooling?
Deschooling is getting rid of “institutional wisdom” we inherited from school, and instead getting back in touch with our wisest truth. Author of Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich says ““Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”
Why is deschooling important?
I would suggest deprogramming our minds from schooled thinking is an opportunity for everyone to get back in touch with their own creative genius! But it is especially important for home educators. If we want to be aware of the dogma and programming we are passing on to our children, we need to be willing to peer inside and go on a deschooling journey. Deschooling for parents is an opportunity to raise children with our chosen values and not the baggage of inherited beliefs.
- How long should you Deschool?
It is said it takes one month to deprogramme from every year of school. So for a child who’s been in school for two years, they may take a whole summer before they are back to themselves. For those of us who studied right through to Masters and PHDs, that is a LOT of deschooling!However, in my experience, you can deschool swiftly if you are ready to really stat asking questions and rewiring your thought process. It’s not for the faint hearted!
- What is the difference between unschooling and deschooling?
Unschooling is a lifestyle where families choose to live without school, curriculum and teachers. Deschooling is the healing work everyone is invited to do, to get the institutionalised thinking out of their brain.
What is meant by deschooling society?
Deschooling Society is a brilliant book by Ivan Illich. A quick summary of Deschooling Society for ya: a damning rhetoric about the damage of institutionalised thinking on our society. He says ““School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.”He proposes both an end to compulsory schooling, but also the liberation of our minds from schooled thought.
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- What is meant by deschooling?
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