Un/Homeschooling

Lesson 3: Deschooling Philosophy

Schooling and Teaching

“The term education provides the larger context of schooling. It gives a broad definition of what is good, of what every person ought to know to become a legitimate member of society: it is about shaping another person. Education is not a process that supports self-definition. It is precisely intent upon the opposite: the design of others.” - Matt Hern, author of Deschooling Our Lives.

Because most of us experienced learning in a school setting, we don’t view learning as the satisfaction of our natural curiosity and the pursuit of our interests, but as a discipline that we must do to accomplish some future goal. Instead of seeking the enjoyment of every day, we look toward that future goal that once achieved will finally make us happy. How many of us have reached that goal (college completion and a career) that promises happiness? Do we want this to be the aim of our children’s lives?

”Instruction is the transmission of one man’s information to another (one may instruct in the game of chess, in history, in the shoemaker’s art). Teaching, a shade of instruction, is the action of one man upon another for the purpose of making the pupil acquire certain physical habits (one teaches how to sing, do carpentry, dance, row, declaim). Instruction and teaching are the means of culture, when they are free, and means of education, when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is exclusive, that is, when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary. The truth presents itself clearly and instinctively to everybody. However much we may try to weld what is disconnected, and to subdivide what is inseparable, and to subordinate thought to the existing order of things–truth is apparent.

Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another for the purpose of forming a man such as will appear to us to be good; but culture is the free relation of people, having for its basis the need of one man to acquire knowledge, and of the other to impart that which he has acquired. Instruction, Unterricht, is a means of both culture and education. The difference between education and culture lies only in the compulsion, which education deems itself in the right to exert. Education is culture under restraint. Culture is free.“ - Leo Tolstoy, an educational philosopher born in Russia in 1828 who founded a school at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana.

School becomes the center of many children's lives. Should it be? I remember lamenting, especially in the wintertime, that I spent nearly all of the daylight hours indoors in an artificially-lit high school classroom. When I finally got home each evening, I spent hours on homework, often until bedtime. Even clarinet practice which had been fun when I started at age eleven, felt like unwanted work. My fellow high school bandmates and I were ranked and graded on our musical talent. The pressure was on. I did not see the topics that I covered in school through curious eyes. I didn’t want to do the work, so I disciplined myself to hold on to what I was expected to learn for only as long as I was required to remember it.

Read what some winners of Nobel Prizes have to say about school, http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_sc...

Many of us still define ourselves by our school failures and successes. For example, I've carried the belief that I am not good in math because I received a ‘C’ grade in the last math course that I attended. That ‘C’ was the reason it was the last math course I attended.

“Our first task is to realize that an ‘uneducated’ human being is nowhere to be found. But today, all too often, an ordinary schoolboy treats a first-class carpenter as if he were an ignorant boor. The carpenter may be a man of maturity and experience, a wise and skilled workman, who is of real service to his community. But simply because he cannot read or write, the ‘educated’ boy treats him as an inferior.” - Vinoba Bhave, an educational philosopher born in the Indian state of Maharashtra in 1895, identified by Ghandi as his spiritual successor.

I was a straight-A student, an honor student, but also a truant. By my own choice, I did not complete high school and so did not receive a high school diploma. Instead, at age 16, I visited the local community college and easily passed the GED test (a high school equivalency certificate.) I then considered myself free to pursue real life. My sister left school during the ninth grade to homeschool herself with no assistance from our mother. She easily passed all state-required tests, and eventually the GED test.

I am still sometimes worried to admit that the last high school grade level I completed was tenth (even though I went on to college.) I continued to receive high grades in college, and to be a truant. I did not receive a college degree although I attended for many years. Instead I opted for a vocational degree with the hope of finally entering the real world. Because I didn't receive a college degree, I don't often mention the years of study that I did at the college level. In our culture, credentials often hold more weight than observable intelligence. Does my incompletion of primary and secondary schooling, my lack of a diploma and degree (though not of knowledge), lessen your opinion of me?

“Refusing schools is a real possibility for everyone, which in no way limits a person’s options for the future. It is possible not to go to school and still go to any university, any college, any training institution, to get any job and to go anywhere. It is my experience, in fact, that unschoolers tend to be more confident, more motivated, and better able to make solid personal decisions than those who have been schooled for most of their natural childhood.” - Matt Hern, author of Deschooling Our Lives.

I can now see my escape from high school as the liberation that it was. Although I fumbled for a few years in the college system, I found that I couldn't commit myself to an expensive course of study, the whole of which didn't make sense to me for satisfying my particular interests. I later found a combination of other ways to learn what I wanted to know, and I continue learning in my own way from people who know what I want to know and are doing what I want to do.

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