By The Green Parent
12th May 2022
Unschooling isn’t a method, it is a way of parenting (and living life) through trust.
THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT THE WORLD SO DESPERATELY NEEDS
Lucy Aitkenread is mama to two free-spirited children. The family live in New Zealand
I’ve counted myself as unschooler for almost a decade now. It was while we were visiting a Forest Kindergarten in the Black Forest of Germany with our daughters (aged three and one at the time), that I realised that children could be trusted to learn. Even that they might thrive being the masters of their own kingdoms! I was reading a John Holt book I’d randomly picked up in a charity shop at the same time. The combined experience of reading his words and witnessing thirty self-directed toddlers created some kind of alchemy. Until that moment I’d been a firm believer in school as a common good, but there, landing like a thud in my body, I understood that our children wouldn’t go to school.
And I’ve spent the subsequent years trying to grasp the reasons why this is the most important decision we’ve ever made. It has affected both me and my children in manifold ways but also, I believe, has an impact on the wider community. Here’s why!
We are creating an environment where our children are free to be exactly who they are, to learn in ways that fit them perfectly. My hope is that they won’t have to unlearn beliefs about their own worth or their own ability to make good choices.
I believe kids are born with a strong inner compass and trust in themselves and if we can help this remain intact they will live healthy and fulfilled lives. We are supporting them to access the pathways they need to do the work they want to do. Right now, my eldest, Ramona, aged ten, wants to run an Animal Sanctuary with attached spa facilities for humans and a recycling centre. The first in the world of its kind!
At school, I was collateral damage. One of the kids that couldn’t keep up with the teaching methods, I found subject upon subject almost fatally boring. I felt stupid and misunderstood for most of every day until I turned 17. I disassociated from my body, did things that helped me remember I was alive.
Unschooling has been a huge part of my healing. The environment I’ve created for my kids has been for me too. I have come back home to myself, my need, my body, my inner compass.
“We are creating an environment where our children are free to be exactly who they are, to learn in ways that fit them perfectly”
I had to shapeshift hard to fit with what school wanted of me. And it hurt. These days I am unfolding, rewilding, trusting myself and finding that I have a core of goodness here at my centre.
I now understand that school isn’t a common good at all, but oftentimes a tool that perfectly serves the “powerarchy” - a term coined by Melanie Joy to capture the current meta-system of patriarchy, supremacy, capitalism and other hierarchies.
It’s all there in our formative years - an expectation that the biggest and most powerful know best, can overrule. That there is a right way to be and a wrong way to be, that life is about competing, getting on top, being pushed to the side if you aren’t deemed valuable. We come to expect separation - according to our abilities, or age, or gender. We learn to perform the separation as we judge and evaluate our peers. We begin to separate ourselves from our own bodily needs, our own natural curiosities. We move slowly from the paradigm of connection we are all born within, to a paradigm of separation. Sure, this paradigm is present in some homes from birth but we learn this en masse from the age of five.
Through school we have institutionalised disconnection. And it’s marched us steadfastly into a social and planetary crisis. We desperately need to reclaim connection, to come home to ourselves, each other and our world. Unschooling is one of the ways we are doing it.
RESOURCES
GET SUPPORT
Last year Lucy supported over 500 families who joined the unschooling online course and coaching membership, Disco Circle - discolearning.com.
“Together we are befriending our fears, growing our community-building skills, updating old limiting belief systems. With a monthly workshop and a seriously brave and alive online community, Disco Circle might just be the heart-work that will keep your unschooling sustainable and joyful.”
LISTEN Adele’s Revillaging podcast and blog can be found at adelejarrettkerr.com
FOLLOW @black_world_schoolers on Instagram
READ How Children Learn by John Holt and The Unschooling Manual by Jan Hunt
