Un/Homeschooling

Lesson 3: Deschooling Philosophy

Conversations with Relatives

“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” - Ivan Illich, an educational philosopher born in Vienna, Austria in 1926, author of Deschooling Society.

Concerned friends and relatives, most conventionally schooled themselves, may worry that your homeschoolers will have limited learning opportunities, will lack social experiences, or won't be able to get into college or adapt to work life. It’s sometimes amazing how much interest others take in our children. You may be able to dispel these worries by sharing the wide variety of learning opportunities available to homeschoolers, the real-life social and learning experiences available through your community, and the fact that homeschoolers do attend and succeed in college and work life. But, if your answers don’t convince them, try not to worry about it.

"People will say 'How will they learn algebra in the real world?' Is there algebra in the real world? If not, why should it be learned? If so, why should it be separated artificially from its actual uses? 'Why?' should always be the question that comes before 'What?' and 'How?'" - Sandra Dodd, radical unschooling advocate.

The learning our children do is supposed to prepare them for the real world. Shouldn’t they get that preparation from the real world? Of course algebra, etc., exists in the real world. Why else would we need it? How does the obviousness of this point escape so many people?

Fears arise from things we don’t understand, things we have little or no knowledge of or experience with. Most people were conventionally schooled. It may be that you don’t doubt that your child will learn all she needs to know to grow into a competent adult, but that you’re afraid of having to prove that to someone, friend, relative, or school official.

It is nice when your friends and relatives support your choices, but the most important thing is that you believe in those choices. Be confident in your responses to the fears of others if you choose to respond at all.

School officials can be convinced that your unschooler is learning what the official thinks she should learn (or is told she should learn.) You just have to put her knowledge in a form he can understand. I’ll give you some ideas for doing that in a later lesson.

Officials and others are used to test scores and grades as proof of knowledge (even though it’s not.) You actually know what your child knows. Be confident about that.

As your children get older, they themselves may worry about their academic achievements as they feel pressure from schooled peers or relatives, and with no grades with which to measure their achievements. If this happens you can help your children, and yourself, by going over school academic standards and identifying the content of those standards as subjects your children know about and others that are potential new interests should they wish to pursue them.

World Book offers a typical course of study for kindergarten through twelfth grade, generalized across North America, http://www2.worldbook.com/wc/browse?id=p... You’ll find that public school children are covering topics from oral hygiene to animal classification to democracy, all subjects that your children will likely become interested in at some point. You can also use this curriculum information to present to concerned relatives, if you wish to do so, to show that your children are indeed being exposed to topics covered in public school.

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