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What on earth is Deschooling?

In my research on home schooling and how I should go about it, I came across the term deschooling and I was confused. Going down this rabbit hole, I felt like a lot of the information I came across it was quite vague and now trying to implement it in our lives, I can see why!


So far as I can tell deschooling is a time period after taking your child out of school in which you do not push any type of homeschooling onto your child. You do not attempt to actively educate them in anyway, you just let them be. It's like the summer holidays but normally for much longer. Homeschoolers and advocates says that for each year your child was in school, you should 'deschool' for a month.


This means that I should leave Levi to do whatever he wants for 2 to 4 months (depending on if I should be deschooling from nursery as well, should I?). In this time, I should remove all formal instruction from his day to day life. Relinquish any control I may have or wish to have on how he spends his days. If he wants to sleep, he sleeps. Reads, he reads. Whatever it is he wishes to do, we should let him do it. Obviously, we have places we need to go or as a family decide to visit so he'll be coming along. But, in essence all bets are off. Well, I'm freaking out!

Deschooling for the parents is also something I came across but I didn't find a lot of information about how to go about doing this! I am a product of the school system, I want detailed instructions please!!!


What I found out on what parents should be trying to do is that we are trying to get to grips with what we think school should look like and how we have learnt and what the school systems teaches us and LET IT ALL GO. Just enjoy hanging out with your child and let everything else fall away. Oh my, easier said than done! I feel like this time is going to take some serious self analyse, self reflection and self development. I have not been taught to learn on my own, I have no idea way to start when it comes to this...people often pedal "you gotta put in the work" but I've never been taught how to without someone holding my hand every step of the way. So, I feel out of my depth. Learning to be "out of control" is definitely a new one for me!


Thinking about how our days are going to change, it actually looks pretty easy. We don't have a huge amount of structure to our days anyway, particularly the weekends, so I can't imagine how hard this would be for other families who do all sorts of extra-curricular and who organise their kids schedule to the ninth degree. But, even so, I am two days in and finding it difficult. Levi doesn't do any extra curricular because he never showed any real interest in doing any and we weren't about to push him. He was already shattered from school. We did do swimming for about 10 months but it just wasn't working for us, something to revisit now we actually have time in our days.


I would say that we had a schedule though, a bedtime, a mealtime...however our main issue with deschooling is that we keep suggesting ideas for how Levi should spend his day but in a way that makes Levi feel like he should be doing those things, steering him away from things we don't really want him to be doing.

Letting Levi suggest something and us just saying "Yes" then letting him just explore that idea and develop on it without us pushing our own ideas, not easy.


I feel like this is an underlying feeling of needing or wanting some form of control or worrying that your child is going to get bored or even worse do activities you don't want them! Like sit on a game console all day. Shock, horror!


Day 3 of deschooling and I can both see and feel how difficult this is going to be for us!

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