In unschooling circles, that "detox" period is called "deschooling," and is estimated to take about a month per year of formal schooling.
If you've ever taken a break from work, you've probably experienced something like it. At first, you drive yourself crazy, because you don't know what to do with yourself now that you're outside the routine you've "always" had and "everybody" else seems to have.
Then there's a period of mental stagnation. To me, it feels kind of like defragging my brain. It needs not to be doing much else as it processes all the stuff it's just knuckled down and gotten through over the years, trying to craft some sort of self narrative about it that integrates it and makes it into a (semi-)coherent set of desires and character traits.
Eventually you come out of it and start wanting to do stuff again. It might be the same kinds of projects. It might not. It might change pretty frequently, because you're still testing your new ideas against this new self narrative, and iterating on both.
I think not doing this periodically ruins people's lives. That's how you end up with death bed regrets about never becoming the person you wanted to be.
The first few times I did it, I really got worried about the early stages, but now I'm realizing there's a pattern. It comes together in the end, and I'm always better off for having done it!
If you can teach this to your kids early on, their lives will be so much better for it.
A lot of people realize they have been missing this in their middle-age crises and then they go off to the Himalayas, the Oceania, the Amazon, and so on.
Our brain gets mothballed by routine and the years fly by without us doing what matters to us, or why we even got jobs in the first place. We also get convinced, with every passing day, that this is good for us. That routine provides structure, stability, safety. Then at some point, we are so convinced we don't have the capacity to doubt it anymore.
Some of us will get shocked out of it by some kind of a trigger, like a death, financial shock, physical ability changes, etc. But not everyone.
The author did enroll his kid into school for freshman after a break. Is this normally considered beneficial? Having a period of unschooling followed by traditional school?
I do hear a lot that there's some level of engagement with a traditional school at some stage, but that the experience goes very differently.
Even as an adult, I sometimes want to enroll in an enrichment program that looks a lot like a school class (was just researching culinary training options yesterday, in fact), but there's a huge difference between how that lands and how it landed when I was "stuck" in school as a kid.
When you choose to be there because you've evaluated its merits and found something you consider worth the costs (whatever annoyances come with it), and you also know you can leave, it loses the "prison" aspect "schooling" has for a lot of kids.
Our oldest daughter will be 16 next month. Last year, she decided to take a couple of agriculture-related classes at the local high school so she could be part of FFA and show livestock. This year she spent three hours per day there.
She’s currently spending the next three days at an FFA leadership event at a university about five hours away - despite never having been enrolled as a student in a public school, she will be the only person in her (small) FFA chapter to have ever qualified and attended.
She’s planning on doing “high school” for one more year, then attending our local community college to get an associate’s degree. While she technically “won’t be a high school graduate” when she turns 18, she will have a two-year college degree and about half the transferable credits necessary to graduate from a four-year university if that’s what she wants. For that matter, she could start university this fall if she wanted - but it doesn’t make much logistical sense to send a 16-year-old to live on her own, and that’s not what she wants to do anyhow.
I don’t think there is a true definition for “pure unschooling”. By its very nature, every child ends up valuing different things and making unique choices.
Curious to hear more about your process here - did you start off with one of you homeschooling her and slowly just gave her more freedom as she got older? My oldest is not quite two and we're thinking about how we're going to approach this as we're older and your case sounds intriguing to me.
Nope. It was honestly our intention since the very beginning.
My wife and I are anarchists, and the idea of requiring our kids to attend a government school is kinda anathema to us. We knew about unschooling before our oldest was old enough for her peers to enter kindergarten, so we never really did anything else.
If there’s any one thing we’ve learned it’s that the key is to just let them live life with you. They’ll develop their own interests; support them in that.
If you’re concerned about them learning a specific skill or concept, find a way that it’s required for something they want to do. My oldest learned to read at a conversational pace through Guild Wars 2; my youngest learned basic math through crochet and needlepoint.
Learning is part of human nature. Kids aren’t an exception to that. As long as they have supportive people around them, they’ll learn everything they need to achieve their own goals - and in the process, they’ll learn “how to learn” and build the self-confidence needed to embark on more and more ambitious projects as they get older.
If you've ever taken a break from work, you've probably experienced something like it. At first, you drive yourself crazy, because you don't know what to do with yourself now that you're outside the routine you've "always" had and "everybody" else seems to have.
Then there's a period of mental stagnation. To me, it feels kind of like defragging my brain. It needs not to be doing much else as it processes all the stuff it's just knuckled down and gotten through over the years, trying to craft some sort of self narrative about it that integrates it and makes it into a (semi-)coherent set of desires and character traits.
Eventually you come out of it and start wanting to do stuff again. It might be the same kinds of projects. It might not. It might change pretty frequently, because you're still testing your new ideas against this new self narrative, and iterating on both.
I think not doing this periodically ruins people's lives. That's how you end up with death bed regrets about never becoming the person you wanted to be.
The first few times I did it, I really got worried about the early stages, but now I'm realizing there's a pattern. It comes together in the end, and I'm always better off for having done it!
If you can teach this to your kids early on, their lives will be so much better for it.