Is Deschooling a Process, a Mindset, or Something Else?
I’ve been thinking a lot about deschooling lately. Not because I’m new to the concept. Quite the opposite. I’ve spent years in conversations with homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning families. I’ve supported parents through the transition out of coventional school. I’ve watched families move from strict schedules and curriculum plans towards more flexible and responsive ways of learning.
Yet recently, I’ve found myself returning to the simple question: What do we actually mean when we say “deschooling”?
The more I listen to people talk about it, the more I realize there isn’t one shared understanding. For some families, deschooling is a period of time. For others, it’s a mindset shift. For still others, it’s a lifelong practice of questioning assumptions and unlearning habits that no longer serve us.
Perhaps it is all of these things.
Two Definitions
One definition, often shared in homeschooling spaces, comes from HSLDA:
“Deschooling is the transitional period of decompressing and unlearning the rigid structures of traditional classroom education when shifting to homeschooling or unschooling. It allows both children and parents to shed old habits like standardized testing, strict schedules, and forced compliance to rediscover a natural love for learning.”
This definition focuses on the transition away from school. It assumes that children and parents have been shaped by school structures and need time to adjust to something different. Many families find this framing helpful. It gives language to what they’re experiencing. It normalizes the confusion and uncertainty that often accompany major change.
But another definition speaks more directly to how I’ve come to understand this process. Akilah S. Richards, in her book Raising Free People, defines deschooling as:
“shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people’s agency over our time, body, thoughts, and actions.”
Notice what changes here. The focus is not longer school but agency, power, choice and autonomy. The ability to determine how we move through our own lives. This definition invites bigger questions. Questions that extend far beyond education.
The Limits of the Word Itself
This is where I find myself wrestling with the term. Even as I continue to use the word deschooling, I wonder if is limits what we’re actually talking about. The word itself keeps school at the center. It suggests that school is the reference point from which everything else is measured. (I think similarly about the word unschooling; the reason why my family has used the term life-learning & life-learners—we center our lives.)
I understand why the term exists. It’s familiar. It’s been used on multiple platforms, on websites, in books, and podcasts by ‘unschooling experts’. Many people immediately understand what we’re referring to (well, at least those within homeschooling and unschooling spaces). Yet I’ve often wondered if the deeper work is not about school at all.
What if school is simply one expression of a larger world view? A worldview that values compliance over consent, standardization over individuality, external authority over self-trust, and productivity over well-being (think: Western worldview).
If that’s true, then what we’re unlearning reaches far beyond academics.
And I would say, it is true and most certainly goes beyond what we’ve understood as schooling.
What Are We Really Unlearning?
Many families begin by questioning educational practices.
Why do children have so little say over their time?
Why is learning separated from real life?
Why are rewards and punishments used so heavily?
Why do we assume all children should learn the same things at the same pace?
These questions matter. But they rarely stay confined to education. Soon families begin asking other questions.
Who gets to make decisions?
Whose needs matter?
What does respect actually look like?
How do we share power?
How do we support autonomy while caring for one another?
How do we honor consent?
How do we create relationships build on trust rather than control?
This is where deschooling becomes something much larger than changing educational methods. It becomes and invitations to examine how we live together.
My Own Understanding Has Changed
When I first encountered deschooling, I understood it much like many families do. It was a period of adjustment. I was a classroom teacher. I had absorbed all the instruction and understandings around being in control (classroom management), leading students through learning (following curriculum), and, while offering variations, keeping everyone on track (scope & sequence). The unlearning that I begin doing was within my own understandings of what it meant to learn.
My children were never in conventional settings, so the deschooling that starting taking place was with me, initially. It was a time to step away from schoolish expectations. I began observing my children follow their curiosities. I witnessed how they already trusted themselves and their self-direction. Their questions of ‘why?’ became my questions, too.
My understandings weren’t all wrong. There were just incomplete. Over time, I began noticing that the most significant changes weren’t happening around what I thought about academics. They were happening in our relationships through parenting. In conversations about power. In learning how to listen differently. In questioning assumptions I didn’t even realize I was carrying.
What started as an unlearning around education became a relearning about how to be human together. And that continues to be the most interesting part of this work for me.
Deschooling Is a Practice
Consider this: Maybe deschooling isn’t something you finish. Maybe it isn’t a checklist or a timeline. Maybe it isn’t even a destination. Maybe it’s a vehicle.
I understand deschooling to be an ongoing practice of noticing.
Noticing where old assumptions show up. Noticing where control disguises itself as care. Noticing where we’ve accepted ideas about children, learning, authority, and success without ever questioning them. And then deciding whether those ideas still align with the life we’re trying to create.
As I continue reflecting on deschooling, I find myself wondering:
What beliefs about children, learning, and authority have you inherited without questioning?
What assumptions feel so normal that you’ve never considered there might be another way?
And what might become possible if you did?
Let me know what you think. What are you understandings about deschooling? Where are you in this process? What questions do you have about it?
My next post will be exploring deschooling as recovery vs. deschooling for liberation. Please subscribe and join the conversation.