Deschooling Time

School schedules give the illusion that life should be divided into 50-minute increments. It's nonsense.

Our culture has this "hour" and "half hour" thing that is as unnatural and arbitrary as can be. It has to do with clocks, not with people. It has to do with salaries and billing.

Be wary of scheduling and measuring, while deschooling.

Sunrise and family

Those who went to school (and that's over 99% of those reading this) have based half their lives, give or take a decade, on school's rhythm and labels and categorizations. When things like "the school year"

are as much a part of a culture as "family" and "sunrise," it's a radical departure to consider that maybe one of those three is unnatural. For many people, it disturbs the fabric of their lives. Some people's life-fabric is already kind of rumply, or they hated school and are glad to consider alternatives, but for those orderly folks who have life all neatly arranged in their heads, who do more accepting than questioning, unschooling is a disturbing thing.

SandraDodd.com/interview
photo by Sandra Dodd

Note to self:
MOVE THESE TWO ELSEWHERE... the subject is changing.:-)

Someone wrote that she had been unschooling for ten years but still sometimes struggles. First I sent her the link to avoid struggling, but I wrote this:

Unschooling DOES change as kids get older, and more deschooling for the parents might need to be dealt with as a child reaches an age or stage where the parents have strong memories of success, or failure, or pressure, or fear. It's normal. 🙂 Breathe, instead of struggling. 🙂 Be glad it's so much less expensive than therapy and can have even better results! 🙂

SandraDodd.com/healing

Nikki Zavitz, in an interview with Pam Laricchia. You can hear that part at this link, I hope. If you lose the queue, it's called "The Lantern" in the show notes there. It's at 43:27.

I always had this visual for unschooling for me, I picture it being this big giant house and it’s got like a million rooms in it. And there’s closets and doors everywhere. And for me, I’m walking around this house with this lantern and the lantern is unschooling for me. And I have to open up doors and shine the lantern and look under the beds and look in the closet and I’m finding all these new, dusty, things that have come from my life that have created these uncomfortable feelings and these scary eerie feelings for me. And the unschooling is the light, walking through shining light on it, considering it, asking questions, and eventually, more lights are on and the closets aren’t as dusty anymore, and the rooms are more open and freer to go in and out.

I’ve always pictured my unschooling journey like that because, and then everybody’s house is different. Everyone has a different unschooling house, and I just love that visual for me, I’m always picturing it like that. Like, ‘Oh, I found another room that I have to look in and I haven’t been in this room yet. I’m going to just step my toe in this room and then step back out and maybe I’ll come back again later,’ and I just love that.
—Nikki Zavitz
video, queued up and here is the full transcript

Time, clocks, history

Living in moments

Recovering from schoolishness