I read this sentence the other day and it stopped me in my tracks. I paused and re-read it over and over.
Here it is:
“.. the opposite of dispossession is not possession, it is deep, reciprocal, consensual attachment. Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to the land through connection - generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship.”
Ok. So the same exact day, I also came across this quote, “Unschooling is first and foremost an educational approach. Unschooling was not created by Holt, nor propagated by my colleagues and me since Holt’s death in 1985, to be an ideological parenting method, though I think unschooling certainly informs ones’ parenting… Unschooling.. [means] we are not doing school at home with our children. That’s what unites us and makes unschooling an educational movement.”
The first quote comes from the book As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It’s not an unschooling text, but in a way, it is.
The second is a piece by Pat Farenga, in the Growing Without School blog (he was a colleague and friend of John Holt, who continues to spread his message.)
I have some things to say.
First, I do not believe we should gatekeep the word unschooling (I’m not saying this is what Farenga is doing, I’m just expressing my thoughts on this in general). I spent a bunch of time trying to define unschooling, but frankly I don’t really want to anymore. If you say you’re unschooling, that’s good enough for me. Unschool away!! It won’t look the same as what I do or that other person does, and that’s the point.
Unschooling can transcend ideology and politics, or if not transcend, then it can be superimposed on different world views. It is not *inherently* political, although for many it is in practice.
Secondly, I reject that John Holt “created” unschooling.
If unschooling is “not school at home”, in other words living as if school didn’t exist, then it makes no sense to claim Holt invented it, because living without school is our evolutionary norm. It is what humans were doing when they first happened upon the earth. It is what humans continued to do for millennia. It’s what many humans still do. School is not the norm. Life without school, is.
(Also, as a side note, Holt often used homeschooling and unschooling interchangeably, says Farenga in GWS.)
If unschooling is living in opposition to schooling - doing the opposite of school - well, then that removes the autonomy element from it and it becomes dogmatic. It *has* to look like the opposite of school!!
I’d like to think Holt intended for us to live without school, not in direct opposition to it (although of course opposition will work for some!), because self-direction is about autonomy and engaging with the world, not about doing the opposite of something.
Thirdly, I know that school works for many children, and I know many of us need it.
My biggest issue with school is not the pedagogy or the educational philosophy, but the coercive, top-down aspect of school, which I think holds up a mirror to our entire culture and way of being in many Western countries.
This paradigm basically says that if you are more powerful, you get to control, coerce, dominate, cajole, manipulate, patronise, lecture and wield power over those who are less powerful, in a millions small and big ways. We see this in parents who claim “authority” over their children (whether this is authoritative or authoritarian - the root of it is still authority!), we see it in the parental rights movement (parents claim children belong to them), in schooling of course, in the corporate world, in relationships between men and women, in relationships between “dominant” groups and more marginalized groups. We see this same pattern everywhere.
This dynamic - the dynamic of possession, control and extraction - is everywhere. It is so normalized that we parent as if we are the boss and we don’t question it. We control children in multiple ways in and outside of our homes, and we don’t question it.
Western liberatory thought has thrown so much light on the issue of power dynamics and hierarchies in society - I feel like thinkers like Paolo Freire and bell hooks, for example, have greatly influenced the way we practice unschooling as much more than just another form of education. As Akilah S. Richards says, it can be a liberation practice.
School is not the root of all evil, but it is a place where power-over prevails. It would literally not run the way it does without it. It’s a place of “possession”, not “attachment.” Possession implies one group gets to tell another what to do, attachment implies a mutual relationship where both groups or people are in essence free, and mutually dependent.
Schooling came a lot later than life without school - it’s a relatively modern creation.
Life without school, on the other hand, has always existed - nobody invented it. It was just “as we have always done.”
Which brings me to Simpson’s quote. Here she is speaking to her relationship to the land, but I immediately thought it applied so perfectly to our relationship with our children. Many of us were raised to believe we belonged to our parents, and were therefore to do as they said, until we would finally be “free” when we turned 18. Simpson’s words speak to how we might conceive of our relationship with our children differently: not owning our children doesn’t mean we disown them, we step back and let the chips fall where they may, we become bystanders. No!
The opposite of not owning our children is not disowning, separation, alienation. It is being in a loving, consent-based, mutual relationship with them, to paraphrase Simpson’s beautiful words.
The opposite of possession is attachment.
The opposite of control is not releasing all control, it’s not unbridled freedom: it’s connection.
This, to me, is the core of unschooling as I see it. Mutuality, relationship, connection. Living and learning with these principles to root us in ourselves and the places we inhabit.
So much of the deschooling work we do, and the way we practice unschooling in our homes, comes back to this work.
You are free to use unschooling as an “educational approach” and I will cheer you on. It has become such a vague term that at this point, it needs a qualifier to actually define it.
You are also free to not call what you do unschooling, and STILL lay claim to consent-based, no-power dynamics in your home. Unschooling doesn’t have the monopoly on relationship and connection, that much is clear.
But for me, unschooling, or life without school, is not about education at all. It is about living as if schooling did not exist, rather than in opposition to schooling. It is about learning from those who know or can imagine what living and learning looked like without school; about re-learning how that might feel for us, how I as a parent might trust myself and my children enough to create space for us to find out.
It is about learning from those who have continue to exist in connection and relationship rather than in dynamics of domination, while also figuring out how that might look like for me - in the place, time and identities I inhabit, which of course will be radically different for every one of us. It’s also about learning from Western liberatory thought, which goes to the root of power dynamics and what they look like; to the root of autonomy, freedom and consent.
How do you use unschooling as an educational approach if you don’t do all the work that is the foundation of learning autonomously? How do you separate how you live from how you learn if they are inextricably linked? You can’t separate relationship from education, if relationship is the root of all interactions with other people and the world. How do you allow for autonomy, or consent, without all the inner work we do as parents, without all the work we do to partner without power?
And that’s why I think Simpson’s quote goes right to the heart of unschooling (and I should say Farenga also writes about relationship, as do many others, but not quite in the same way).
I do not own my children; we are in relationship. It is messy and “nonlinear”, and emergent, and always unfolding.
I cannot tell you how to do it because I don’t even know. I’m testing it. I have no history of attachment, only one of possession.
And also, I cannot tell you because you are not me.
But I can tell you what I value, and how I’m figuring it out, and I can also put to you that unschooling can be way more than an educational movement, way more than Holt’s baby, way more than not-school at home.
That perhaps it has always existed, just with another name, or no name, because it was just the way humans lived. And now we all get to figure out how to find it and co-create it within our homes - all of us, perhaps even those of us with children in school.
I can put to you that if we zoom right out, John Holt is a small (important, ahead of his time, but small!) branch of the whole tree of humans doing what they’ve always done.
So happy to find you here Fran! I am thrilled to read your work! Just beautiful!
Just got around to reading this and it is beautiful, Fran! What a great idea to strive for in our relationships.