May 19 (edited) • General discussion
Deschooling: The Step Nobody Talks About
When most families make the leap into homeschooling or unschooling, they spend a lot of time thinking about what they are going to do. What curriculum to buy, what their schedule will look like, how they will cover all the subjects, whether they are doing enough.
What almost nobody talks about is the step that needs to come first.
Deschooling.
What It Actually Is
The term was coined by philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1971 book Deschooling Society, but the concept has been expanded and lived by unschooling families ever since. In its simplest form, deschooling is the period of transition, for both children and parents, during which the deeply conditioned beliefs about what learning is supposed to look like begin to loosen their grip.
It is the process of unlearning the idea that learning only counts when it looks like school.
John Holt, one of the earliest and most influential voices in the self-directed learning world, observed that children who leave school often need significant time to simply decompress before their natural curiosity begins to surface again (Holt, 1964). The stress response that school can create, the performance anxiety, the learned helplessness, the association between learning and evaluation, does not dissolve overnight. It needs time, safety, and the consistent experience of not being assessed in order to begin to heal.
A commonly cited guideline in the unschooling community is one month of deschooling for every year a child spent in conventional school. There is no peer reviewed study behind that specific number, but the principle it points to is well supported: this takes longer than most people expect, and rushing it undermines everything that comes after.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Here is what catches most families off guard.
Deschooling is not just for the kids.
Parents who grew up inside the conventional school system, which is almost all of us, carry an enormous amount of internalized belief about what education is supposed to look like. We were assessed, ranked, scheduled, and rewarded or penalized for compliance for the majority of our childhoods. That shapes us. It shapes what we instinctively reach for when we feel anxious. It shapes what we interpret as progress and what we interpret as falling behind.
So when a newly homeschooled child spends three weeks doing nothing but drawing, or building things, or watching documentaries, or just playing, a parent who has not done their own deschooling will feel the panic rising. They will start reaching for workbooks. They will start wondering if they are failing. They will import the anxiety of the school system right back into the home, without ever meaning to.
Researcher Peter Gray describes this beautifully. The parents who struggle most in the early stages of unschooling are not the ones whose children are struggling. They are the ones who have not yet made peace with how different this is going to look (Gray, 2013).
What Deschooling Actually Looks Like
For children it often looks like a lot of apparent doing nothing. Sleeping in. Slow mornings. Long stretches of play or creative work. Resistance to anything that feels like a lesson. This is not laziness. This is a nervous system coming down from a prolonged state of stress. This is curiosity beginning to remember that it is safe to exist.
For parents it looks like sitting with discomfort. Resisting the urge to intervene. Learning to read engagement and depth as evidence of learning rather than looking for output and coverage. It looks like doing your own reading, finding your own community, slowly rebuilding trust in a completely different framework.
It is genuinely hard work, even when it looks like nothing is happening.
How You Know It Is Working
You will start to notice things you were not looking for. Your child absorbed in something for hours. A question asked out of pure curiosity with no prompt from you. A skill developing quietly in the background that nobody assigned. A lightness in the home that was not there before.
And in yourself, you will notice the anxiety loosening its grip a little. The moments between worry getting slightly longer. A growing capacity to watch your child play without mentally converting it into curriculum.
That is deschooling working. It is slow, it is nonlinear, and it is completely worth it.
A Note to Families Who Are Just Starting Out
If you are in the early weeks or months of this and it feels chaotic and uncertain and nothing like what you imagined, please hear this: that is normal. That is the transition. It does not mean you are doing it wrong.
Give your children time. Give yourself time. Resist the urge to replicate school at home before you have had a chance to imagine something different.
The learning is coming. It is just clearing the path first.
References
Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.
Holt, J. (1964). How children fail. Pitman Publishing.
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harper & Row.
Roots Before Wings is a free community for families raising curious, creative, connected kids. If you are in the middle of deschooling right now, you are in exactly the right place.
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Deschooling: The Step Nobody Talks About
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