How to deschool

The process of unlearning limitation.

When it was first conceived, a factory seemed like a perfect way to think about educating children. 

Break the process of education down into digestible bits, the thinking went, and we could educate every child in the country for a fraction of the effort of local education. Like the Model T, children could be cranked out of the assembly line school system, ready to begin their careers as factory workers themselves. Synergy. 

But, as we know from our mass-produced products, the factory removes the "soul" from the objects. And by "soul," we are referring to a very real phenomenon known to science only as "emergence." Basically, some things are more than the sum of their parts. The Gestalt. Like a frog, when you break it down into its parts, it quickly stops being a frog, and there is no way to put the frogness back into the parts once they are disassembled. For another (less gross) example, no amount of IKEA furniture will be as valuable as a chair crafted by your grandfather’s hands.

And even if you didn't go through a factory school setting, you are still feeling the effects of its influence. It permeates our media and culture: endless books and TV shows are written about and around it. We are collectively obsessed with this beast as it slowly devours our humanity. 

What should we do to escape the mentality proliferated by the school system? Will we accidentally pass the mindsets down to our kids? How should we counteract the influence it has in our lives? 

The answer to all these questions is deschooling. 

What is deschooling (and how do you do it)?

Deschooling is the conscious process of undoing what school has done to our brains. 

It's learning a few key skills to counteract the massive weight of our collective forced education program—a few good habits to break the bad ones.

Being active in learning

The practice of hand raising to go to the bathroom, for example, is probably a holdover from the military —  which expressly wanted to demean and diminish the individuality of the soldiers so they could be rebuilt in the image of the collective unit. That's good if you need an unthinking killing machine —  bad if you seek a curious and happy child. 

Of course, that's just one example of the practices designed to diminish kids. Don't think that we're making things up or exaggerating them. Schools were explicitly designed to demean students and reduce their sense of free will.

The good news is if you can practice having little or no free will, then it stands to reason that you can practice the opposite. 

People previously in prison often struggle with the same issue when released (surprise, surprise), and sometimes therapists will have them do things to “de-incarcerate” their minds and habits. Simply moving objects around the house by choice helps return a sense of freedom to the former inmate. He needs to be physically reminded that he is an active participant in life, not a passive prisoner.

Deschooling is the same. You can practice being active by making choices of your own free will. You can have your kids do the same. 

Not waiting for permission

Students feel they have no control over their lives. After they spend years with their literal hand in the air, they wait around with their figurative hand up, hoping for an authority figure to show up and tell them exactly what to do. 

The glaring problem there is that the only way to become a useful person in the world is to consciously step out beyond what you have "permission" to be doing. To make or do something worthwhile, you have to step on a few toes along the way. 

As the old saying goes, “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.”

Practice doing things without permission and encourage your kids to do the same. Just make sure to take responsibility for the outcomes so you can learn from them.

Questioning authority

Kids are asked to memorize huge swaths of information, most of which is not interesting or useful and a good portion of which is downright outdated or incorrect "because I said so." 

Kids who bother to put up a fight are punished so harshly that they either drop out or just learn to keep their mouths shut. That probably explains why many breakout thinkers, founders, and inventors are college dropouts. 

We all have a tendency to defer to authority. Some of it certainly was instilled in us by the school system, and some of it is just human nature. Either way, we have to learn to trust our own sense of the world and teach our children to trust theirs. 

That doesn't mean "trust your gut, not experts." It means that you are obligated as a human being to listen to what your intuitions say about the world and then to directly test, for yourself, whether or not they are true. That's the only way to become the sort of person who can tell fact from fiction. We need those kinds of people.

Otherwise, we all become passive observers of a world run by "experts," who use shame to convince us to stop trusting what we sense to be true about the world. People who can’t think for themselves are easy to control.

What are the assumptions of the school system?

Learning for real-life outcomes

School introduces a sort of mini, artificial "world" inside the world, making tests and grades the centeral measure of that world. If you score high on the tests, then you are succeeding in the mini world of standardized school. 

This works as long as we're assuming that any given test is an analog to the world itself. But, of course, we know that's almost never the case. 

Tests can be gamed and cheated. People almost exclusively learn to the test and avoid committing anything to their long-term memory, which defeats the purpose of the test. Effectively, tests give high scores to people with large short-term working memories. While that is a mildly good predictor of success in life, it is not a great predictor, and it leaves a lot of types of talent unrewarded and makes a lot of children needlessly anxious. 

As adults, we don’t just magically stop this behavior we learned over the years in school. We subconsciously treat meetings and projects like schoolwork and tests, often saving them for the last minute and doing the bare minimum, even if they could be career-making or life-changing. 

Of course, not all procrastination can be blamed on the school system, but being trained to take tests that only matter in the context of the classroom certainly hasn’t given us a positive relationship with preparation. 

To get over this conditioning, we have to look to the real world for our results. 

We shouldn't allow ourselves to feel good if we score high on an IQ test. We should instead feel good if we go into a negotiation with our boss and get the raise we hoped for. We should feel good if we resolve the conflict of our family dinner night. We should reward ourselves if our kid learns to cook a family recipe. 

None of those things can be graded, but they are a hell of a lot more important. 

Giving full-hearted effort

In school, doing more than enough to pass is unequivocally a wasted effort. There is no reward for going above and beyond. An A+ for 5 hours of study is more valuable than an A+ for 10.

In life, however, people are rewarded exponentially for going above and beyond. For example, if you work 10% longer hours, you get paid 40% more. Each little inch beyond "good enough" has outsized returns. School catastrophically fails to teach this.

We need to completely internalize that the world responds positively to only our full-hearted effort and that doing something "to get the grade" is a total waste of time anywhere but behind the walls of a classroom.

Deschooling empowers people to stop waiting for life to begin and to start co-creating a life as it unfolds. 

School tries to make you into a factory robot – and we have real factory robots now. 

It’s time to deschool and relearn our humanity. 

Thanks for reading, 

Taylor + rebelEducator team

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