Some Unschooling Truths
It feels like it's been a long time since I've written about unschooling. Sometimes I share snippets of our unschooling world over on Instagram but honestly, I'm just not motivated to write about unschooling much anymore. It may be that I've reached a place where unschooling just makes sense and I'm not too hung up on the details because it's working for us right now, but I think there's a bit more to it that's worth exploring.
During the early deschooling days, it felt like unschooling methodology and practice consumed 99.9% of my brain. I thought about unschooling constantly: it's implications on my kids and family, how to convince well-meaning-but-concerned parents and grandparents that this is legitimate path in life, and especially how unschooling practice unfolded into the rest of life. As I was piecing together this new way of life, it felt really helpful to put my thoughts down into words to validate what we were doing and that was really a huge part of why I started this blog.
Most days, I can now say that I feel super confident and even on the days that I waiver, I can't imagine living our lives any other way. We're about four years into this journey, so I know there's more deschooling and undoubtedly more hurdles that we'll meet on our path but I'm not constantly worried and stressed like I used to be.
What's more, though, is that in this confidence, I'm now also comfortable saying that unschooling isn't the end-all or be-all for every child or every family. I can recognize that this way of living isn't going to fit for everyone, and that doesn't mean that other paths are less awesome, less anti-oppressive, less anti-capitalist than we are. There are millions of ways to live a good life and unschooling may be one of them given the right conditions. Or it might not.
Our unschooling practice has changed and grown and morphed so much during the last four years as we have tried to find balance, confidence, and peace. Sometimes it's been wildly bumpy. Some days it still is. Bumpiness doesn't mean that unschooling isn't working for us - it just means that we're living life, navigating these challenges and opportunities together. Sometimes we do things that look kind of schoolish. Sometimes we break through consent and boundaries to meet each others needs. Sometimes it's really fucking messy. No one is perfect. That's okay.
The truth is that I feel myself leaning away from the term unschooling partially because of the association that comes from other dogmatic unschooling practices and people that I don't agree with and partially because I want to leave room for us to shift and flow into whatever lifestyle works well for us as a family without feeling like welcoming change would be the same as admitting that "unschooling doesn't work".
It's wild how dangerous that phrase feels - that unschooling might not work for us. During our unschooling journey, I feel like I had to be so incredibly firm in my undying belief that unschooling ALWAYS WORKS because I had to convince not just myself, but everyone else around me that what we were doing was the right thing. I had to be 1000% confident because any room for doubt would leave cracks in the armour, creating space for uncertainty. Everyone else was already so convinced that unschooling was going to ruin our lives that I needed to be so over-the-top confident as to make up for their deep, deep doubt. Even though I had no idea if it would work. Even though I did have so many doubts. That kind of mind-fuckery does a number on your well-being.
These days I think that being honest about the challenges we are facing just makes more sense. I'm not going to pretend that everything is always amazing. No one's life is always amazing and projecting that false reality doesn't do anything good for anyone. It's okay for us to struggle through different parts of life - that's not the unschooling - that's just existence in late stage capitalism. 🤷
And guess what: people are always going to doubt what we're doing. There's nothing that I can do to stop that. But when I look at my little fam, when I see us together on the days where we are thriving and even on the days where we struggle, I wouldn't change a single thing. I'm 100% confident in the path we're on, whether you want to call that gentle parenting or unschooling or consent-based education, I'm fine with all of it and I'm happy to let go of the labels if they don't suit us anymore. I feel like we're at a point where we've built a solid foundation of trust, and as long as we have that trust, we can tackle the challenges head on together.