Deschooling

This month's blog carnival topic is deschooling, the letting go of schoolish ideas and expectations so that unschooling can truly unfold and flourish in your family. Normally, when people discuss deschooling, they are talking about the kids....kids who have been in school, taken out and unschooled. How do they make the adjustment to the freedom, the life without bells, the sense that they will be told what to do, when and how to do it...? Well, in this post, I will talk about my own deschooling process, too (which is still going on, by the way!).
Our family has been homeschooling since Fall of 2003. Fran was 7 and Will 5. I was pregnant with Catherine and had just officially quit my job as a public school teacher (although I hadn't been teaching for two years) and was working part-time as the Co-Director of a Volunteer program. Life was good. Although the idea of homeschooling was a little daunting to both me and my husband, we jumped in with both feet! Well, the first few months were full of "writing in journals" and math pages and projects and, and , and......so hard to let go of my teaching background and need to manage the learning! I had definite ideas of what the kids should be learning and how they should be learning it. I thought that play should be saved for when they were finished with their quota of "work" for the day....just as it had in my classroom. However, the fact that I wasn't managing thirty kids, some with severe behavioral issues and many with differing learning styles, made it seem too rigid and contrived to be handling my own kids in the same way. Added on top of that was the fact that the more I pushed for what I wanted, the more I saw two results: one was the misery on the kids' faces and dislike of the subject matter I was pushing, and two was my oldest daughter's need to please "me" and so doing something, only out of her obligation to me, not to please herself. I began to feel pretty quickly that my relationship with the kids as their Mommy was being superceded by my need to be their teacher. Yuck!
Luckily (for everyone involved!), Catherine was born at the end of October and unschooling began to unfold. I was happily busy nursing and caring for the new baby, the kids were bonding with her and helping me to change countless diapers. The kids played alot, we read books together, went for family hikes, got involved in Scouts, and focused on loving the new baby. I found unschooling on the internet, and have found much inspiration from the women who run the groups, taking lots of time and thought to put my fears to rest. I guess I wasn't prepared for the layers of school that had infiltrated our lives and the unconcious controls that I had on my kids......
Fast forward three years to today: We have another new baby: Grace just turned a year old. We are all happily living without school, without lessons, and with kids who are free to make their own decisions, with a lot of conversation and guidance from us. There are still some issues (for me): like the expectations of others, and the pressure that I feel sometimes to "measure up" to X or Y child. But for the most part, I see the kids beautifully growing and learning every day, alongside us, and our lives just keep getting better. Our focus on our relationships first has brought us so much joy. For us, everything else seems to fall into place when the realtionships are our priority. The kids' interests are broad and deep, their friendships are good, and most of all they love being home and together as a family. And amidst all of this, they are learning more about life than anyone could ever have imagined.