breaking up with school

I knew you didn’t have to go to school until 6 and that you could stay at Playcentre until 6, so it was a no-brainer to stay as both of us loved Playcentre. Then at 6 my child said she wouldn’t go to school and I couldn’t make her. There was another hoo ha at the time about truancy, and as a solo parent, I couldn’t afford that… And it wasn’t like she didn’t know what school was having been with me when I was teaching and having been to the school for years to pick up other kids. I didn’t have a good time at school, so I was sympathetic. I was also interested in making education more democratic. 

At first, we had a plan of sorts. I was still breaking up with the idea of school as I knew it. We did the 50 KCC challenges – one a week more or less. Over the course of this, it became apparent that she had plans of her own, and we were increasingly unschooling. Every now and then, I would want to push a school like environment, but less and less. Then, I started experimenting… I left learning to read to her, and at 7, she started on Madeleine, and within a few weeks later, it was chapter books. I thought she would feel the power of educating herself!

Now she is 12 and passionate about Shakespeare (I hate Shakespeare) right down to reading the plays. She entered a competition and whipped up an amazing story in two nights, better than I could ever write. I gave her a year 9 maths book, and she seems totally able to do it without much help.

It seems to me children want to be educated and they watch us. They don’t need to be told what to learn. We can learn from them – I am even starting to enjoy Shakespeare.

This experience and seeing the amount of learning that happens for schooled children at Everyone Out and what reading these readings in this course is also doing to my ideas has made me totally break up with school. I will not teach at a regular school again. So what next?