Deschooling Yourself - Part 3: Source Material

I am a reader by nature, or maybe by nurture (as in, I learned my school-lessons well, perhaps a little too well.) My first instinct, when confronted with a problem, is to read.  Then I talk to others investigating and walking the same path or asking the same questions. Then I read some more. I have been accused of over-thinking, and as I grow older I often agree with those critiques of my habits of learning. But I am, at almost fifty, unlikely to eschew reading about a subject to help me in my investigations of life, learning, and love.  With that caveat in mind, what follows are some books to read and some videos to watch to help you get into an deschooling mindset.

Please note: I am not listing reading/movies here to convince you to homeschool or unschool in a particular way or for a particular reason.  What I am outlining here is a collection of thought-provoking reads (and watches) about how school (and the mindset around school) creates habits in all of us that are debilitating to a life fully-lived, to enthusiastic and joyful learning, and to a basic freedom from other people's thoughts about how we construct our own life. I am also giving you opportunities to explore options to a life lived dominated by school. This list is not complete by any stretch of the imagination. It is merely a list of things that jolted me forward in my deschooling path at one point or another in the last fifteen-ish years I've been on this path. These are works *I* have been reading, people *I* have been following, but should not be considered some sort of definitive list. This is just one person's guide.

Classics on Schooling
Author: Ivan Illich
Book: Deschooling Society, (1971)
It is really hard to describe who Illich was, other than insanely intelligent. Seriously, just read his Wikipedia entry if you want to be intimidated by someone's intelligence.  He was born in 1926 (d. 2002), spoke more languages than most Americans will ever hear in their lifetime, traveled widely, lived and studied in Europe, the US, and in Central and South America, and never saw a cultural institution that he couldn't rip apart at the seams. His book, Deschooling Society, should be at the top of your reading list. I once spent six months or so reading all of his major works. You cannot go wrong doing this. Here are some pithy quotes.

Author: John Taylor Gatto:
Books: Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992) & The Underground History of American Education (2001).
John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing us Down was the first book I read when I was pregnant with my firstborn and considering homeschooling as a path. He had been a "Teacher of the Year" for New York State at one point, so his street cred was pretty high in my book. The man knew school with all its warts from the inside out.  Dumbing Us Down confirmed all of my instincts about my habits of schooling.  His second book, The Underground History of American Education, is a scathing look at how compulsory schooling was set up in this country and why. The "why" is the interesting part. And you won't look at the function of school in our culture again in the same way. It is a "red pill or blue pill" moment.

Author: John Holt
Books: How Children Fail (1964); How Children Learn (1967); The Underachieving School (1969); What Do I Do Monday? (1970); Freedom and Beyond (1972); Escape from Childhood (1974); Instead of Education (1976); Never Too Late (1979); Teach Your Own (1981); Learning All the Time (1989); A Life Worth Living (1990)
John Holt had roughly the same lifespan as Ivan Illich. And if you have to pin-point one person who has made the biggest impact on the homeschooling/unschooling movement, I would have to say John Holt is that person.  He expands his critique of schooling and moves the conversation to observing children, advocating for children, and seeking understanding about how humans learn, rather than just critiquing the institutions. The books do become rather reiterative at times (I've read them all), but if you only read three of them, read: How Children Fail, How Children Learn, and Learning all the Time.

Contemporary Critiques of Schooling
Author: Peter Gray
Book:  Freedom to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
Blog: Psychology Today:  Freedom to Learn
Peter Gray is a psychologist who specializes in the effects of schooling on mental health, primarily focused on the role of play in learning (and how reducing play has consequences.) He has famously called schools "prisons," and has done some interesting studies on unschooled children. His work is very thought-provoking, evidence-based, and ethnographically grounded.

Author: Ben Hewitt
Book:  Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World
​Blog: Ben Hewitt.net
Ben is the most fun you'll have anywhere reading about how kids learn when they are completely free in their environment. Ben is a seriously talented writer. His two boys have almost an unlimited ability to define how and when they learn, roaming the land in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Reading this book, I had daydreams of moving to Vermont and setting my kids free in the same way. I still dream about it. And his descriptions of his home life, his observations, the seasonal work of being a farmer, what his children do with their time, and how it all weaves together to make a life worth living is inspirational and provides an alternative to the life most of us live. His other books are great too. Read them as well. For the short version of his book, read this article from Outdoor Magazine:  We Don't Need No Education

Author: Nikhil Goyal
Book: School's On Trial.
Full disclosure. I have not read this book. It just came out, but everyone is raving about it, so I'm adding it to the list.

Modern Critiques of Culture**
 
Author:​ Daniel Quinn
Books: Ishmael, My Ishmael, The Story of "B"
If ever there was a book of fiction that could acutely detail our failing cultural story, this one is it. It lands the nail right on the proverbial head.  Ishmael is such a "must read" that we read it out loud in my family (when my kids were big enough to understand it) and talked about what it means together. My son then went on to read My Ishmael (which is written for a teen audience) on his own. Reading Ishmael is another "red pill or blue pill" moment. 

Author: Charles Eisenstein
Book:  Ascent of Humanity
Website: Charles Eisenstein.net
This book  will undermine your belief in the dominant thinking that undergirds every cultural institution: history, technology, education, math, economics, medicine, biology, cosmology. The destruction (and re-construction) is so complete that it remakes your interior world. It took me six months to finish; I had to keep setting it down to ruminate on parts that were so shattering to me. (For a point of reference, I blew through the entire corpus of Game of Thrones in under three months…) He has a few other books that are crazy-good as well: Sacred Economics, The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible, and the Yoga of Eating.

​Author: Gabor Mate 
Book:  Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, co-authored with developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, (2004)
​Website:  Dr. Gabor Mate.com  
Gabor Mate is best known for his work on addiction. But attachment theory is the baseline of where his interests lie; attachment (or lack there-of) and how it effects neurological development in children, and the impact that development then has on adults. But attachment, while it changes and morphs after early childhood, is still an important feature in child development through the teen years. Mate's book, Hold on to Your Kids, really struck home with me. I wanted to explore attachment theory in later childhood, since attachment theory had been such a profound influence on how I chose to parent my children when young. What this book helped me see was that deep parent-child attachments are normal even in the teen years. Not just normal, but very important. Our entire understanding of tweens and teens is skewed and mistaken, and we are compounding problems upon problems in our young people. This book will make you revisit your ideas about the idea of "teens" and what is normal. 

Author:  Wade Davis
Book: The Wayfinders
​Website: Wade Davis.com
Do you want to value indigenous ways of knowing and learning? This book will expand your mind in ways you didn't even know it needed to be expanded. And it will make you cry for what we have lost.

Movies and Videos to Watch

• Schooling the World - if you watch one movie… this one should be it.  It undermines the idea that western-style education is a force for good, planet-wide. 
• Class Dismissed - I am honored to know the film-maker of this film and call him a friend. What happens when you take your kids out of school to your family life? To learning? Here are some families with stories that help you see the alternatives out there.
• Hack-schooling Makes Me Happy: Logan LaPlante is a teen who took charge of his schooling. He based his schooling on the idea that he wants to be happy,  and steps off that platform into learning. Inspirational for the whole family!
• Do Schools Kill Creativity: Ken Robinson's critique of schooling is about creativity and how school stifles it in children. His Ted talk is one of the most-viewed talks in the whole site. Quite a feat.
• The Truth about School:   Summarizes what John Taylor Gatto said about school, but in video form.

​
People & Ideas to Ease Fears Around College and the Early Adult Transition
To begin, get a copy of Grace Llewelyn's Teen-age Liberation Handbook. Read it with your teen. That's your first resource.

So many people don't follow this homeschooling path because of fears about their children's ability to get into college. People feel if they homeschool or unschool they will be unprepared for life and unable to function in college or even get in into college the first place. First of all, I know MANY homeschooled/unschooled teens who have gone on to college. If your teen wants to go, the path is open to them. I don't want to belabor that point, but your teen might actually be MORE desirable to colleges as a homeschooler if they are academically minded in the first place. 

What if they don't want to go to college? Or aren't academically minded?

There are SO MANY alternatives to college as well, and every single day I seem to hear about a new one.  Here are some various alternatives and beautiful collaborations springing up, available to young people. Many of these are known to me because I know the creator. There are so so so so many I don't know. This is just a sample.

• Noodle around Blake Boles' website and you'll see many different, interesting options for self-directed teens.  
• Learn about how higher education is changing in new and interesting ways. What might be relevant today probably isn't going to be much longer.  
• Youth Initiative Program is a holistic education in Järna, Sweden that gives college-aged (to age 28) young adults a chance to explore their fullest potential and take initiative towards a better world. I know several people who go there every year to act as mentors and collaborators with YIP. It seems like it would be a fantastic alternative to college, and not an SAT in sight.
• Tons of places like Transition Lab are popping up all over the world. 
• Does your young person want to start a business instead of college? Check out Mycelium in Asheville NC.
• Warriors without Weapons in Brazil helps engage young people in community work, community organizing, and the power of action. Learning in this way is worth, in my mind, 100 college educations. I have every intention of sending my kids to this when they are older.
• Manish Jain, the founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India, has an unschooling university (Swaraj) in India. He advocates for place-based education.  He also has a rather impressive assortment of  written/on-line resources of his own around "the culture of schooling" here as well as here. No really…check it out. Swaraj is only for people who speak Hindi,  as is right and good since it is in alignment with Shikshantar's values of place-based, de-colonized education. People come from all of the world to learn what Manish, his wife Vidhi, and their team are doing in order to replicate it elsewhere, in other places, on the planet. They are truly inspirational.

I'm quite sure I have left many many many places out. Feel free to add other resources in the comments and together we can elevate the possibilities for our young people everywhere.
 
This is part 3 of a 4 part series. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here.

Image Credit: Pete/ Flickr Creative Commons.

** I wanted to add that my cultural critiques don't include things like Marx or writings on anarchy, environmental critiques of cultures, as well as archaeological/anthropological writings on the subject not because I am in ignorance to their existence, but because I don't wish to a) write a book on the subject, and b) delve into political/philosophical debates.