What Does Deschooling Actually Look Like?

by Beverley Paine, Sep 2022

Deschooling is a thought process as much as anything else, it's challenging our assumptions about what we think education is and how it happens. So it's not so much something we 'do', it's changing our beliefs and thoughts.

This is true for kids as it is for parents.

From early infancy kids are primed to think that school is natural and necessary. It takes A LOT to undo this kind of pervasive conditioning. Even kids that grow up in families where school is not the norm, never been in a childcare setting or preschool, know that school is a HUGE part of childhood and that it is 'normal'. This is a big deal. It takes an enormous societal effort - called 'socialisation' - to convince kids and families that school is 'normal' human behaviour.

So, for kids, the practice of deschooling is simply living, getting on with life, without school. Without the influence of school, or the things that make school a school. Educating without school, as if schools didn't exist. For kids, that usually looks like playing, helping with the chores, going out, doing interesting and not-so-interesting things, hanging out with other people for lots of different reasons.

Helping them undo the conditioning that school is 'normal' can look like hanging out with other home educating families, going to the museum and simply looking around rather than filling out worksheets, reading a book without needing to write a book report, writing when they feel like it rather than to demonstrate that they know how to.

The longer a child has been at school the harder it is for them to relax into life without school - they have been primed to have expectations of themselves, to define success in particular ways, to see learning as a series of segmented and sequenced steps provided to them that they need to follow, rather than an unplanned journey of exploration and discovery. Deschooling for a child whose been at school for some years will involve helping them rebuild their confidence and self-esteem. For some it might mean supporting them learn how to play, discover and explore again, re-ignite their natural curiosity.

For us parents it can be hard too. We need to learn to 'see' and understand the learning that is inherent and present in our kids' life already, without the school books and assignments and grades. And because we are accountable to our children we need to make sure we're meeting their learning needs as those arise, finding ways to help them learn, facilitating and organising opportunities, accessing appropriate resources and materials. For those that need to report annually as part of the home education registration process, we may need to translate everyday life in edu-speak, match what our children are doing and learning to the state curriculum. The more practiced we become at that, the easier it is to see how effective life without school actually is.