💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ps-pirro-deschooling-our-stories.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:28:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Deschooling Our Stories Author: PS Pirro Date: April 5, 2011 Language: en Topics: unschooling, deschooling, compulsory education, self-directed learning Source: http://pspirro.com/2011/04/05/deschooling-our-stories/
My feed reader is my personal daily news. Everything in it is something
I find stimulating enough to invite into my life on a regular basis.
It’s the stuff I want to read.
The stuff I don’t want to read but others think I ought to read – stuff
about Libya and Scott Walker and the federal budget, for example — seeps
in on its own, so it’s not like I don’t have a clue what’s going on. I
just don’t let it on my feed. It takes some vigilance to avoid becoming
a sponge for all the crap put out into the world.
Anyway, two thoughts came together in my mind as I read through this
morning’s feed. One had to do with deschooling, the other with stories.
The deschooling thing came up on Sandra Dodd’s daily blog,
, which I love for the very reason that it’s so often a launching pad
for ideas and connections. In today’s post she writes, “Deschooling is
needed much more by parents than by children.”
We’re the ones, after all, who were immersed in the school experience
from the time we were small. We’re the ones who have lived for decades
in a culture where school is so firmly entrenched. Even unschooler
parents who were raised outside of the school system aren’t impervious
to the dominant schooly culture. Stuff gets in, it gets absorbed, and
when it presents itself in our lives, and in our thinking, we have to
have the presence of mind to, as Sandra puts it, “wrestle with it,
encapsulate it, and forget it.”
Which leads me to this notion of stories.
We all have them. We all have a personal story and a meta story, the
first comprised of the things we tell ourselves about who we are and how
we got that way, the second about what the world is like and how it got
that way. In my reading this morning I was reminded that our stories and
our schooling are intimately entwined.
The launch point was a
Dear Sugar column at the Rumpus
, in which Sugar was deconstructing someone’s interpretation of events
and inviting them to change the story they were telling themselves about
their situation. As I read, I scribbled in my journal that one thing
unschooling asks of us is that we reconsider our stories.
One story our culture tells is that kids don’t know anything.
I’ll never forget the interviewer on that
Good Morning America unschooling segment
laughing at a teen unschooler who described an unsatisfying school
experience, saying, “You were in second grade! What did you know?”
Another story our culture tells is that there is a specific body of
knowledge all kids need to master within a certain time frame, and that
body of knowledge can only be delivered through school.
I’m sure you can come up with lots of schooly stories you’ve absorbed
over the years and have (perhaps) since rejected. But even when we
overtly reject them, these stories can still inform our thinking,
because stories are rooted not in rationality, but in emotion, and
emotion has such enduring power. Stories we’ve absorbed about how things
are can live for a long time in our subconscious, carried like a dormant
virus. This is one reason why we can so fully embrace life learning only
to find ourselves suddenly worrying over the paper-math skills of our
kids.
Our kids can be a big help to us here. My unschooler daughter runs into
schooly meta-stories all the time, but her personal story is a
life-learning one, so she has less difficulty spotting the stories that
don’t align with her own experience. She recognizes their falseness
right away.
Me, I suspect I’ll always be deschooling, uncoupling links made long
ago. I still carry unfounded assumptions, and I continue to absorb
unwanted stuff in my life, sponge-like, even when I’m vigilant. My
process of deschooling means I have to wring out the damn sponge, not
just once, but again, and again, and again.