Unschooling is how the imagining is brought to life

I will be the first unschooling parent to tell you that I do not promote unschooling, nor do I claim it is perfect or ideal, or even the right thing for everyone.

In fact, at times it feels a lot like stumbling blindfolded through a maze, not really knowing what I’m even doing there in the first place.

The times I have second-guessed myself are so many I have lost count. The times I have considered calling it quits could probably be counted on both hands.

It is a vastly imperfect project, for the most part because the world isn’t built for it.

Our entire society is structured to allow as many adults as is humanly possible to access work, and for most people that means physically going to a workplace, and so inevitably that means our children also need to go somewhere: and that somewhere is school.

There is no roadmap for those of us who don’t want to follow that trajectory, nor for those of us who cannot.

Those of us who choose to subvert this pattern, or who are pushed to by our children or by circumstances, are inevitably, at least in some ways, pulled to the margins of society. We end up not having access to the places that form the centre of communities, school being one of them.

If we also don’t have access to a large homeschooling community, then it can feel incredibly isolating and less than dreamy.

And this is what I mean when I say that unschooling is perhaps ideal on paper, but not in practice. In practice, it can feel extremely flawed.

Not only because of the practical aspects, but also because it can feel like a personal project at times, something we are doing from the privacy of our own home, disconnected from others and society at large.

Like, is unschooling actually a movement?

For years I have felt torn about not engaging with the public school system. But I want to make a definite case for the way that unschooling can, in fact, be a revolutionary act. In her essay Solidarity with Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley argues that unschooling can be a way to enact a “revolution of deschooling,” and as such to detach the individual from the pervasiveness of schooling

She also believes it isn’t a solution for most of us, and I supposed this is where we diverge. To be clear, this is not a critique of Lane-McKinley’s essay. We agree on most things, and I appreciate her work deeply. Fundamentally, we want to get to the same place - the dismantling of the school system. We are just choosing a different path to get there, and that is okay.

So let me take you down the path I have chosen.

McKinley mentions the Gaza Solidarity Encampments that arose in several universities during 2023 and 2024 as a powerful example of teacher-student solidarity, and of a potential way people within the school system could fight to destabilize and revolutionize it from within.

I sat with this. I guess I wanted to give the idea of bringing the school system down from within, by mobilizing adult-child solidarity, some thought.

It is true that youth activism within schools and universities has often been at the forefront of change, some of which I wrote about here, but this hasn’t always resulted in large-scale change in actual schooling, or in anything that looks remotely like what Ivan Illich envisioned when he wrote about deschooling.

In fact, much of the examples of youth autonomy we have come from children exerting their sovereignty outside of the confines of school, or in ways that boycott school or temporarily disrupt school, but don’t necessarily work to make long-term changes in the way we do schooling. We do also have a rich history of student activism that has occasionally made changes in the way schools operate, but that so far has not actually disbanded school as we know it.

Student activism within schools has so far not achieved deschooling. We might describe deschooling as a complete decentering of schooling from our worldview, our life, our work, and our conceptions of who we are and what success looks like, as well as a stripping away of the impact that schooling has had on society, our institutions, our relationships and on our communities. (There are various definitions of deschooling, and this one is only one of them!)

It seems to me that engaging with the school system is unlikely to end up dismantling it; at the very least, it is not enough on its own. And to be clear, when I talk about dismantling school I don’t mean that there would be nowhere for children to go. I mean that there would be places for children to go that would be accessible and free and rooted in anti-oppression. As such, they would be nothing at all like school; they would not be school. They would require a radical deschooling of society.

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Lane-McKinley, like me, does not think reform is desirable, because what we need is so beyond the reach of reform: it is an overhaul of the very concept of education, it is a deconstruction of the way we view children and child development, it is a decolonization of education, it is a deschooling of our minds and of the ways we are in relationship with one another.

I supposed I am skeptical of how we are going to achieve all of this by engaging from within a stale, oppressive system that is also full of people who are resistant to change.

I am also skeptical that teachers and children will unite and overthrow or take apart the institution that has up until that point, paid ones’ wages and educated/oppressed/attempted to brainwash the other.

McKinley states that solidarity is impossible inside the boundaries of school and schooling, and I wholeheartedly agree. Which is why I believe the school system cannot be brought down from within: because a pre-requisite for the bringing down, is in fact solidarity. A pre-requisite, is deschooling. And how do you deschool if you are entagled in the school system?

How do teachers deschool, while on the schools’ payroll? How do children deschool while having to go to school each day, do homework, sit exams? Not to mention the existing imbalances of power between teachers and students within the K-12 system, which add an extra layer of challenge.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, only that I think it’s a rather arduous path and one that I don’t have a ton of hope for. Perhaps others have more patience than I do.

And so, we unschool because unschooling is how we dream of what is possible. I hold tight to the poet Lucille Clifton’s words that, “We cannot create what we cannot imagine.” (Or at least, they are attributed to her but there is actually no proof she said or wrote them. It doesn’t matter to me.)

It is how I wake up in the morning, and imagine something radically different that looks nothing like school, that looks like living as if school did not exist. We unschool because it is how the imagining is brought to life. How else are we going to build a new education, if nobody imagines it first, if nobody is trying it on a smaller scale?

How else are we going to re-imagine relationships between adults and young people if nobody is waking up in the morning and partnering with their children as if the idea of schooling never existed? Or, as if it does but they are actively working to strip it of its hold on us?

In her books, Mariam Kaba talks about not only abolishing harmful institutions but also, at the same time, building the kind of world we want to live in. That is how I see unschooling: it is a creative act. And as such, it is needed.

And also, we don’t unschool alone. Unschooling also means unschooling in community. As unschoolers we can build self-directed spaces where adults and children collaborate and young people engage with their community. My unschooler goes to one of these and it has been such a wonderful experience for her. And no, it is not perfect, of course. But someone woke up one morning, and imagined it, and created it, and now it’s full of young people and adults partnering with one another, and that is pretty special.

Unschooling does not have to be a home-based project. Or, it can be home-based AND ALSO community-based because the two things are not separate, the two things can overlap and co-exist and the boundaries between them can be porous.

It can be a movement for social justice, a movement to build a better education for our children, to create spaces where adults and young people exist in non-hierarchical relationship. This is actually happening in real time.

Is this actively abolishing school? Yes, and no. No, in the sense that school still very much exists. But also yes, in the sense that if we continue to build accessible alternatives, school might start to wither away, we may need it less and less.

I am all about the slow and steady.

The other part of this is that some of us out here unschoooling, don’t have a choice. There are children who cannot access school for a variety of reasons - they are disabled, or neurodivergent, or bullied in school, or perhaps they feel unsafe in their local schools because they are marginalized, or trans, or have mental health struggles or their school cannot provide adequate learning support. There are so many reasons that children and young people are unable - not unwilling - to access school and forced to home education, or unschool. I have spoken to parents of Indigenous children who cannot learn be safe in school, of Black or brown children who cannot receive adequate education or care in their local schools. It is not always a choice.

The other piece of this, is our children. It is them going to school or not going to school. Whether I believe it is the ethical thing for my child to engage in school, and whether I believe the best way for me to deconstruct education is by engaging with school, is irrelevant if my child has voiced their desire, their need, to be educated at home, or to be self-directed.

And vice-versa, right? Whether I believe that unschooling is the way forward is irrelevant if my child decides that they want to go back to school.

Our adult considerations over whether we are doing enough to combat the oppression of schooling is much less relevant than our child’s actual decision about how and where to spend their days.

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Either way, whether we unschool by choice or not, we are here and we are bringing forth something new, a different way, a new vision for a better world.

Perhaps my argument is less well constructed, less well argued, and more emotional. It comes from talking to parents about their children’s experiences of school, and spending time alongside my children and other young people living without school.

But I do think that unschooling, or home education that is rooted in consent and self-direction, can be a movement for social justice and collective liberation. (I am making a distinction between this kind of home education and homeschooling in general, because I think there is a huge difference between home education that centres youth autonomy and collective care, and homeschooling that prioritizes parental rights).

We often believe it needs to look a certain way for us to be unschoolers and also be involved in a movement, but actually I don’t think it does. All we need to do is look outside of ourselves and our nuclear family: I am literally the most imperfect practitioner of this, but I just keep going.

And I want you all to know there is space for us all; those of us engaging with the school system and pushing back from within, and those of us creating new ways outside of it. We need us all.

I don’t think school will come crashing down, but I do think it might slowly crumble. And when it does, some of us will know exactly what to do because we not only imagined its absence, but we spent years living as if it didn’t exist.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting my work. This is a newsletter that lives and breathes entirely because of your kind donations, and I am so thankful! I can write and make everything free to read because of you.

Keep your eyes peeled for my March reading post! March is going to be all about care work, I’m excited!