Deschooling is a term invented by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. The word is mainly used by homeschoolers, especially unschoolers, to refer to the transition process that children and parents go through when they leave the school system in order to start homeschooling. It involves children gradually transitioning away from their schoolday routine and institutional mentality, redeveloping the ability to learn via self-determination, and discovering what they want to learn in their first homeschool days.

Process

The amount of time this process takes can vary, depending on the type of person the child is and how much time they spent in the school system. The process may affect the behavior of different children differently. Especially in the first days of deschooling, it is often the case that children mainly want to recover from the school surroundings and therefore will generally sleep very long and refuse any kind of intentional learning and instead search for substitute satisfactions like watching TV or playing video games, very similar to the behavior during early school holidays. Further in this transition process, children may feel bored or may miss the daily structure,

Background

Deschooling is credited to Ivan Illich, who felt that the traditional schooling children received needed to be reconstructed. Illich believed that schools contain a "hidden curriculum" that causes learning to align with grades and accreditation rather than with important skills. He believed that modern schooling is focused on growing schools as an industrialized system, Therefore, they wanted to "denounce the monopoly that traditional education institutions held on education and learning."

See also

  • Deschooling Society
  • Anti-schooling activism

References

  • Deschooling: How Long Does it Take?
  • Deschooling on www.homeschool.com
  • How to Transition from Public School to Homeschool on Wikihow