De-schooling. If we choose to Home Educate, it happens to the best of us whether we like it or not. You can face it deliberately, or you can realise it’s happened after the fact. Either way, there can be difficult times and emotional wrenches in store as you leave your old ways of thinking behind. One thing is for sure – you’ll never be the same again!

It can be painful to let go of a shape you’ve held for many years, even if you don’t want it anymore.

What is De-Schooling Anyway?

That’s all very well, but what exactly is de-schooling? De-schooling is not a way of teaching or an educational philosophy. It’s a mental, almost spiritual (I believe) process that needs to happen before we can really find our Home Educating stride. It refers to the work of untangling the threads in your mind where ‘school’, ‘education’, ‘learning’, and other cultural expectations have got mixed together and confused. After de-schooling, you will know when you are operating from truth, and when you are making choices based on conditioned biases you accidentally picked up as you lived your life. What is the accepted way of doing things is not necessarily the best way for your family in your exact circumstances, and de-schooling happens as you encounter all the places where the accepted ways don’t fit your family and values.

As you move toward the midpoint of the article, this paragraph provides an opportunity to connect earlier ideas with new insights. Use this space to present alternative perspectives or address potential questions readers might have. Strike a balance between depth and readability, ensuring the information remains digestible. This section can also serve as a transition to the closing points, maintaining momentum as you steer the discussion to its final stages.

De-schooling Is Like De-stressing

Think of de-stressing, and how you might approach it. The aim might be to do something completely different to what caused you stress in the first place. You can run yourself a bath, pour a glass of wine and hide in the bathroom for an hour. BUT – if you’re watching the clock, or you can hear the dog whining for a walk through the door, you will still be stressed. This is one of those processes that can’t be forced or rushed. It will happen in its own sweet time, but you can make choices to help smooth the path.

There are other times when you’re almost forced to de-stress. Moments of crisis when everything comes to a head – you realise you just can’t carry on the same way and that something has to change. What you once saw as an essential task is suddenly thrown off your to-do list in the name of self-preservation. 

De-schooling is a bit like de-stressing. Sometimes it happens when we do something that looks completely different to ‘schooling’. Schooling happens to us gradually, stealthily, and it takes a long time to break that mindset down. Some people are more ‘schooled’ than others, and inevitably, it’s going to be a longer journey for them to move away from this kind of institutionalisation.

Sometimes a crisis will prompt a move towards a more de-schooled mindset. Often, us parents will cling to ideas of what we ‘should’ be doing for far too long, even when they are damaging our relationships with our children, and causing tears and arguments. 

My De-Schooling Journey

I started my Home Ed journey thinking that I didn’t need to de-school much. After all, I had chosen this philosophy because I saw problems in the system. I was already there, right?  I thought, if anything, it was my kids that needed to get out of their habits of sitting down facing a teacher and clamouring to be picked as ‘golden child’ on a Friday. But oh, dear reader, how wrong I was. 

Despite the fact that I’d chosen to Home Educate for philosophical reasons, my schooled mind revealed itself in many ways, some subtle, some not so subtle. And it took YEARS for me to feel that I’d finally let go of my schooling. Even now it still rears its ugly head, and I think it always will, as our family weathers different life stages.

The Fear of Being Caught ‘Not Ready’

The most obvious embodiment of schooling was my irrational fear that SOMEONE (the postman, a door-to-door salesman, my Mum…) would knock on the door in the morning and find us – oh, horror of horrors – not ready. Ready for what, I didn’t really know. But it was enough of a fear for me to chase the kids to get up and dressed by 9 am every morning, even if we had no plans. 

An Epiphany (One of Many)

I remember having an epiphany (small in the scheme of things, but massive at the time) while my daughter played on the PlayStation. I was slightly uneasy about this non-educational activity happening in school hours, but I was trying to hide my unease behind a brew and a grimace. After all, I had read that some Home Edders allowed unlimited screen-time, and I was trying to be open-minded. 

As I watched, my daughter (who was galloping through the Wild West on a stolen horse) flashed up the map screen and within a second or two steered in a completely different direction, heading off into the desert at full pelt. What are you doing? I asked her. Heading for the trees, she says, then I’ll go another few miles south, get to the railway line and turn left till I see the church. Home’s near there. Oh, I said, and everything clunked into place.

When I had dragged the kids out to do some orienteering in the local park, I’d been a bit disappointed. They weren’t as pleased as I thought they should be when we found THE FINAL WOODEN POST. They complained about being cold and argued about who should hold the dog. They asked if we could go home yet. I felt like they weren’t cooperating with the fantastic education I was trying to bestow.

Watching R play, I realised that it isn’t about me. I can’t make them learn. They’ll learn when they’re good and ready, perfectly planned educational activity or not. So from that moment on, I tried hard to watch closely –  to see when and how they were learning. That lead to my own learning about Zen and Unschooling, but that’s a post for another day.

What De-Schooling Actually Gave Me

Today my kids stay in bed until long after the local kids have settled at their school desks, and I don’t feel any anxiety at all about the way we are living and learning. I’ve had lots more moments of revelation since that day, and I’m much further down the de-schooling path than I was eight years ago. I’m wiser now, too, and I know the process might not ever be complete. I’ve seen the evidence for myself of what my kids are accomplishing without formal lessons, and we have settled into unschooling as what works for our family. But get this, my kids aren’t aware that we are unschooling. Because, like de-schooling, that’s a me thing. They are just living their lives, as humans were meant to, and for them, the learning just happens. For me, however, I needed to de-school to fix all the insecurities that schooling had given me. 

Learning to Flow

Only after de-schooling can you stop wasting time and energy trying to change the direction of your kids’ learning. For young humans, learning is like a river, constantly flowing. Stand in front of it and try to push it in a different direction, and you’re just going to end up a wet, exhausted failure. But learn to flow alongside them and you’ll be white-water rafting, having the time of your lives together. 

De-schooling is about your own river. It’s about breaking down the dam you didn’t even know you’d built from all the times you had to stop learning and go to class, put your pencil down for a bell, do as you’re told, listen to the teacher. Every time you internalised an expectation or one of someone else’s standards, you added a brick. Breaking that down takes time. They say a month of de-schooling for every year of school you attended. But i think it can take much longer, especially if your childhood valued being a good student and academic success over curiosity and creativity. 

It can be painful to let go of a shape you’ve held for many years, even if you don’t want it anymore. But one day, you’ll say something completely casually, maybe about your child choosing not to do GCSEs, ‘…because, you know, they’re so limiting!’ – and you’ll catch the person you said it to looking bemused. And you’ll realise just how far you’ve travelled from the mainstream. You no longer think like the majority. You’ve de-schooled and you’re riding that river. And your kids? They’re just living and learning the way humans always have.