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A Journey to Unschooling

Mary Hickcox

Unschooling is a term that John Holt coined in the 70s, after years of extensive research regarding how children learn and what was causing them to fail. He determined that totalitarian school pushes many children to fail via a fear inducing sub-society, where school as structured seemed to slow the learning process in most children. 

One of his strongest beliefs was that children did not need to be forced into learning, that they are always learning, yet anything that resembled the rigid structure of school was actually counterproductive to their success.  The theory has resonated, thus unschooling, or life-learning led by the child's interests, was born. 

When I first heard about unschooling 8 years ago I thought it seemed crazy.  I thought all the things that some of you are thinking right now.  What about socialization, grades, college?  My children need to go to school to be “on track” with everyone else.  It seemed lazy and neglectful, and I couldn’t imagine going against the grain in such an “extreme” way.

Flash forward to today and you see a very different philosophy in my home.  I have spent the past 6 years homeschooling my oldest son.  We have since had 2 more children, traveled with them extensively, moved to a foreign country, and experimented with almost every type of homeschooling you can imagine.  Then I discovered the mind-opening experience that is unschooling, and now I can’t imagine living my life in anything but this “extreme” way.


My oldest son started out life in a mainstream fashion. He attended 2 years of preschool and then went on to half-day Kindergarten. We lived in a wonderful small town with an excellent school system and were lucky enough to get an award-winning teacher for his Kindergarten experience. She was fantastic, but through her own admission she could not provide the experience that she felt the students deserved. It wasn’t a bad experience but we wanted more for our son. What more did we want? For starters, more room for independent thought, creativity, an ability to question things without being in “trouble” -- and the freedom to run our household without the demands of the school system intruding.

The nagging question that remained was what could I, as a parent, do? After talking to that very same teacher, and a lot of soul searching, I decided to withdraw my son from school. She not only encouraged this; she was almost as enthusiastic about the idea as I was. I found that there were many philosophies to choose from within the realm of homeschooling. Since I was still caught up in the “school” mentality, doing a canned curriculum at home is where we started.  We tried this in many different ways for 3 years when I realized that we solved some of the issues but not all of them.  Simply put, we were not enjoying it as much as we thought we should and thought more freedom and independence may be the cure.

At this point I opened up my mind to the thoughts of unschooling and started reading book after book about it.  I realized that I needed to throw away conventional thinking and open up my mind to the possibility that what I thought of as learning may not be the only path to knowledge.   My discovery took place because of pioneers: Holt, Gatto, Kohn, and Sandra Dodd.   They all showed me, through their writings, a new reality that I will forever be grateful for.

Reading books and opening my mind were the first steps in the process of de-schooling that Wikipedia defines as: “The mental process a person goes through after being removed from a formal schooling environment, where the school mindset is eroded over time."  This step is vital for the entire family, but for the parent it can be very difficult.  Parents have far more baggage in regards to school, as well as the added feeling and stress that we are responsible for our children's education and ultimately their future.  I struggled with what seemed like an ingrained need to conform in some way.  After all, I did go to public school and in his book Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto says “we are schooling children to merely obey orders…” Although I was a bit rebellious in school, I was still conditioned by societal norms and allowing myself to break out of the box is where I struggled most on my journey to unschooling.

Ivan Illich first coined the term "deschooling" in a controversial book called Deschooling Society, published in 1971.  In this book he enlightens his readers to the fact that “universal education through schooling is not feasible."  He goes on to explain that the institutionalization of education means an institutionalization of society as a whole.  And that until we change the way we view education we won't be able to change the way all institutions function.  There is a corrupting impact at the institutional level, but it is particularly damaging to society when this happens in schools; and it is happening in schools as we speak.

Another big hurdle for me was in understanding that authentic learning happens all the time.  I have realized over the past few years that you really can’t stop someone from learning no matter what you do or don’t do.  My middle child has never been to school or even attempted anything remotely resembling school; yet, at 7 he can read because he wanted to and he was developmentally ready to read.  Although if he was not ready there would have been no pressure put on him to be on to be "on par" with others his age.  Through simply living our lives he has learned numbers, adding, subtracting, percentage, fractions etc.  How?  We play war, poker, exchange money, let him do some shopping; all of which are necessary and fun for him, so he has learned it.  School puts our children in a box and many times real life cannot be discovered within it.  I would prefer my children to spend their time independent and free of that box, in the real world.

Everything my kids do shares an equal value because they are always learning, whether it is a walk in the jungle, building a chicken coup, playing video games, or reading a book. We love that our children have a say in what they want to discover.  We offer them ideas and show them various paths to knowledge, but ultimately it is what interests them.  Don’t we all learn better when it is something pertinent in our lives?  I know I do and I know my kids do as well.

Deschooling is an ongoing process and something I will be actively doing for many years to come.  It has profoundly changed me as a person and there is no going back inside the box.  It reaches beyond schooling and into our lives on every level.  There is a new intensity of respect, equality, independence, and unconditional love for all members of the family.  We now know what authentic learning is:  It's experiencing life without structured learning, and we are all happier for it.

Author Mary Hickcox is an unschooling advocate, mother, and life guide to three sons (11, 7, 3).

Recent Article by Mary Hickcox:
4 Reasons to Change the Way We View Education

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4 Reasons to Change the Way We View Education

Mary Hickcox
Activist Post

The way in which we view education has a lot to do with our past; how we grew up, societal influences, and the way we were schooled ourselves. It is the legacy that we pass on to our children. Tragically, the current way our education system is engineered, it appears our children seem doomed to be unsuccessful.

We live in a time where our schools are failing, our children are unhappy and overworked, and the current system becomes more obsolete every year. Something needs to change if we want our children to be happy, and our country to be successful, once again. The system we have now was built on a fault line and it has become increasingly evident that the cracks are growing exponentially. It isn’t too late to change that model.

We could talk about how to improve schools, maybe more money or less political involvement, but in the long run those are not the things that stand in the way of our children’s futures. What stands in the way is an archaic mindset build on false education and an inability to look past the norm. With our country in a dire economic situation with mass joblessness and stifled innovation, it is time to step outside of the box that public education has put us in to find solutions.


1. Our schools are failing miserably:That's not to say that some students do not do well in public school and end up happy, but statistics do not lie. At an annual average cost of over $10,000 per student, the U.S. is lagging behind countries that don’t spend half that much. Money does not appear to be the problem, so throwing more into a broken system is just adding fuel to the fire. No Child Left Behind has been a total failure, where states are suing the federal government over this catastrophe. NCLB puts extreme emphasis on tests -- as if still trying to churn out worker bees -- yet, the U.S. ranks far below most industrialized nations. We seem to be wasting money letting political agendas decide what is best, rather than the parents or teachers who know what children need.

Unsettling Education Statistics

• Students are not faring well on national assessments. The most recent NAEP assessments indicate that less than one third of U.S. fourth graders are proficient in reading, mathematics, science, and American history.
• More than half of low-income students cannot even demonstrate basic knowledge of science, reading, and history.
• U.S. eighth graders ranked 19th out of 38 countries on mathematic assessments and 18th in science.
• U.S. twelfth graders ranked 18th out of 21 countries in combined mathematics and science assessments (Source: The Heritage Foundation)

History shows that modern-day schooling started with the Industrial Revolution, but many still refuse to accept that the people who funded its inception did not have children’s education as their main priority. Men like Rockefeller and Carnegie wanted good obedient workers to take the jobs they needed filled. They didn’t want free-thinking students to reach their potential; they wanted a large dumbed-down class, just disciplined and smart enough to show up on time and work their factory jobs.

John Taylor Gatto, teacher for over 30 years, NY Teacher of the Year, bestselling author, and homeschooling supporter, states: “The secret to American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, nor is it supposed to. Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and their families….that is why it is compulsory.” This is a system set up for all the wrong reasons, and it is a system whose goals were set deep inside of ulterior motives and still are today. Maybe schools are not the best places for our children to gain knowledge.

2. Our children are unhappy: Our children are unhappy, overworked, and not learning what they need in order to be successful. The first thing that needs to change is how we define that word success. We hear it all the time used as a measure of how our children are doing in life, but what if the way we define success has been wrong all along? What exactly are we as parents supposed to focus on? Is happiness even on the radar screen when success is discussed?

It seems most parents these days get so caught up in competition that they can forget that our ultimate goal should be our children’s happiness. Who's to blame them, as we are all conditioned to survive in the rat-race dog-eat-dog economy. But this ultra-competitive model seems to make school an unhappy place, as a record number of children are now on mood-altering drugs to handle their pressure-cooker lives. It is a place where strangers with corporate-government mandates are controlling the minds and bodies of our children.

We cannot expect our children to be free-thinking independent adults if they are kept under lock and key, segregated by age, fully controlled by rules, and forced to learn a federally-mandated curriculum. It is an institutional and cold conditioning of the mind. Americans have been taught to think of the word success as being dependent on excelling at school, but it seems societal success is more dependent on knowledge -- and the two are not synonymous. If we can change our thinking about success then it can equal happiness -- the ultimate human success.

In 2007, for the first time, UNICEF did a study on the wellbeing and happiness of children in 21 industrialized nations. The US and UK, two of the wealthier nations on the list, came in dead last. This alone should raise some eyebrows and prove the point that our children are not happy, and that more money is not the answer to the problem.

Another study was conducted in 2009 by the American Psychological Association to survey stress levels in children; they found some alarming information. To start, it showed that stress levels in adults and children have risen dramatically over the past few years, but even more upsetting is that parents seemed mostly clueless to the fact that their children were stressed at all. What were the main issues causing stress in children? Worry about grades, about getting into college, and family finances top the list. These problems are causing children to experience headaches, nausea, and trouble sleeping. If our goal is happiness, the school system is again, a failure.

3. School has become obsolete: The last 10 years has seen more technological advancement than in the entire century before. All of the world's information is now literally available in the palm of our hands. Almost the entire world’s wealth of knowledge is accessible through the Internet and integrated into our everyday life. Small improvements have occurred to incorporate this new lifestyle, but not nearly enough to catch up with the rest of the world. In fact, some researchers suggest that students would be better off with self-directed learning using the Internet, because we all learn better when it is something that we are interested in.

The current system is repetitive, memorization and test driven, and downright boring. It’s a place that resembles prison where, “Very little of what is taught is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is actually used," as John Holt states in How Children Learn. Couple that with the fact that 50% (technological knowledge) of what is learned in the first year of college is worthless by graduation, and you just have to ask yourself: What is the point? And can’t we do better than this? Our children not only deserve better, they require better in order to compete in a market with nearly 10% officialunemployment.

College seems to be less cost-effective every year. Rising college costs put our children in insurmountable debt due to the lack of viable employment. Tuitions have skyrocketed in the past few years (Harvard University is now $60,000 per year). To make matters worse, universities are now making kickback profits from credit card companies, while graduates aren’t even able to find jobs. With over 1/3 of college graduates now taking low-skill jobs, and over 65% graduating with crippling debt, it is now legitimate to question if college is the right path to put our children on.

4. The wrong people control the system for the wrong reasons: “The education system was deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace 'manageable.'" -- Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, Sr. Policy Advisor for the US Dept. of Education, and whistleblower on government activities to deliberately dumb our children down.

She also notes that the system is set up to make good consumers, as well as standardize people to keep them predictable and easy to control. Does this sound like something you want to support? Do we really want our children controlled and held back in life?

The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 were the first steps toward a large government role in education. What people failed to realize was that the money from these Acts became obligations to play by their rules and it continues today. Because the Feds were financially supporting the schools, they could control what was taught, thus bringing another facet of American life under their control. This is proven again and again when we see how difficult they make it for people to choose alternative education options for their own children.


It is clear that the purpose of school has become to serve corporations and government. This is evidenced most recently when we learn that BP played a role in writing the environmental curriculum in California. I think we all can agree that public schools should only serve the taxpayer's families and their children's best interests -- not the corporations that write the curriculum. When the day comes that the people in charge make families (and not greedy corporations) the priority then maybe, just maybe, our children will be learning what is really important, rather than learning how to serve the very people who set up this failing system.

Conclusion
In a time when our economy desperately needs more innovators, how can we change education to expand the potential of each child? It seems we must do some things we did NOT learn in school: Question assumptions about education; think for and believe in ourselves; speak up against what we know is wrong; and challenge what we've been taught to believe is right. It is each parent's right and responsibility to decide the best way to guide their child to maximum human potential.

It seems that our modern world provides all of the tools to support a child's natural curiosity to drive their own education. Homeschooling and unschooling may be the most powerful form of revolt against an establishment which is terrified of individuals that question authority and refuse to be good little worker bees. John Holt said it well: “To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves . . . but most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” We also must begin to trust our own abilities as parents to guide our children toward happiness and independence, not to blindly trust the failed government standards that have resulted in anxiety and stress conditioning.

It is time for all of us to look outside the box for solutions to our education system to ensure our children's happiness -- this should be deemed the ultimate success.

Author Mary Hickcox is an unschooling advocate, mother, and life guide to three sons (11, 7, 3).

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