The only way out is through
Living in the tension of values and realities (unschooling dreams, part 2)
“Why do schools even exist?!”
-Daphne, age 6
“[This book…is reminding us that] enchantment is not in short supply. That learning happens everywhere. That this moment, when our children are temporarily released from their incarceration in “studenthood,” is a moment to study (in the Fred Moten sense of the word) the troubling complicity of mainstream schooling and public education with colonialism. That forward movement is no longer possible, and we must go awkwardly into playful paths by allowing our children to lead the way.”
-Bayo Akomolafe, in Raising Free People by Akilah S. Richards, p. x.
“…there is no way out - only through. To challenge the habits of modernity is not about rejecting them but to notice where they live in us, how they shape our desires, and how we might compost its harm into something that whispers of wisdom yet to come.”
-Dorothy Coccinella Ladybugboss, Burnout From Humans
Dear beloved readers,
In last year’s post on unschooling dreams, I wrote:
…there has to be another way. I cannot teach about liberatory education, and co-create liberatory educational spaces for and with others, without also trying to find or carve the most liberatory path for my daughter - with her - that we can find together. It would feel completely hypocritical and antithetical to my values.
Lately, perhaps always, I have been living deeply in this tension.
Living in the tension of what I dream of and what exists in the world as it is.
Living in the tension between what I believe and hold dear and what I have to do.
Living in the tension of my beliefs and the compromises I have to make as a solo parent.
Living in the tension of being a professor who professes about liberatory education, and a parent who needs to send her child to school so that I can go to work.
Living in the tension of holding values and trying to live them in the world.
Is this you, too, dear reader? Are you living in some variation of this tension in your own ways? What tensions are you living in?
Where are the values you hold most dear bumping up against your lived reality, the choices you have to make?
Perhaps it is just to be alive and be human at this moment, a human who loves and cares deeply amidst systems that were designed for the opposite.
Schooling is one such system.
This tension has been front and center and weighing on my heart as I prepared to send my daughter to first grade. Until now, in Colorado and Costa Rica, she has been in Montessori schools, which has felt resonant and aligned with my own philosophies around education. At its heart, Montessori education is child-centered, play-based, and holds peace as its aim. Lots of free play, mixed age settings, engagment in constructive conflict resolution. Follow the child is the central philosophy.
For the past two and a half years that we’ve been living in Costa Rica, she has learned a lot of Spanish. This wasn’t through being taught, but through playing in a Spanish-speaking environment all day. She has learned to read quite well in both languages, but again, not by being taught - simply by being around text and gradually figuring it out on her own. It’s an amazing process to witness - the way little humans are wired to learn and will learn without prompting based on what they need and what they’re interested in.
Last Monday, she entered a classroom. A Montessori-inspired classroom, rooted in its philosophies, but differing in some key aspects. Rows of desks. Neatly separated subjects. Neatly separated age groups. A spreadsheet of a schedule. Learning contained, compartmentalized.
It is weighing on my heart. There has to be another way.
I believe learning is wilder than schools can contain, that it doesn’t belong in rows and boxes. I believe it grows like the vines in the forest. For learning to be liberatory, it has to be free. It has to be wild.
When she was a baby and I was engaged in my doctoral studies, I imagined an unschooling community for her. We visited a self-directed learning community, Alpine Valley School outside Denver, and she loved it. One thing I felt clear on: it needed to be her dream, not mine, and while I held these dreams of self-directed learning and unschooling, I knew she might love school and want that for herself. I wanted to hold space for letting her choose, letting her lead the way.
For months now, she has been talking about hating school. She has been bored. I thought it was because she had outgrown her pre-K Montessori, that she was the oldest one there and not being challenged or stimulated enough, that it was just time for a change - one we couldn’t easily make until the school year ended at the turn of the calendary year.
“Why do schools even exist?!” she asked me with exasperation one day.
“Capitalism?” I said.
Schools were designed as a training ground for us to fit within the capitalist system1. Schools train us to work, to sit still for 8 hours a day, to be bored2. Schools exist so that parents can work, as a place to house children while parents earn their livings and contribute to the economy.
Schools kill creativity and curiosity.
Schools kill enchantment.
In the field of peace education in which I am professionally engaged and vocationally dedicated, we understand that education can serve to perpetuate the status quo of cultures of violence and domination, or it can serve liberatory ends3. The school system as it currently exists was not designed to be liberatory; it was designed to uphold and perpetuate domination and separation.
I know this, and yet I am sending her.
The rubber of my values is meeting the road of my life choices.
In this moment of planetary metacrisis, we can’t afford to let education continue to be complicit. If schooling maintains the status quo, and the status quo is literally killing the planet, then we really need to look deeply at this. We need to stop. We need other ways.
As
recently wrote in his manifesto on :“Unfortunately, current practices of ‘education’ contribute to the deepening separation we’re experiencing….Individuality, competition, and separation are features, not bugs, of schools.”
I could not agree more. Through education, we learn separation and domination - toxic individualism, competition, separation from each other and from nature. Subjects are compartamentalized rather than seen as entangled and interconnected as the world is. This is why I have emphasized the need for and committed to practicing towards a peace education that is rooted in unlearning separation and remembering our interbeing.
The learning (and unlearning) we need for the metacrisis, for the precarious moment we are living in, does not fit into neat boxes and rows.
It needs to be messy, entangled, wild.
And we can’t do it alone, separately. We have to do it together.
Pulling your kid out of the school system is not done easily, nor is it an answer that doesn’t create its own problems and challenges. Many of the unschooling folks I learn from4 are People of the Global Majority, and have withdrawn their families from the formal schooling systems because of the violence it inflicts on children, especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. To divest from this system, to walk out of it, is a matter of both surviving and thriving.
At the same time, it can be a privilege to pull your child out of the formal system, and ultimately, if we want liberatory for our children it has to be for all children. It is both/and. If you do not live near family, or live in a community ready to hop on the unschooling train with you, or without another adult caregiver in the household, this decision feels impossible. At the end of the day, this work is not meant to be done alone. Unschooling and self-directed education (SDE) beg to be done in a multigenerational mixed-age community, learning from and with the community you live in, including elders and the land.
Self-directed education and unschooling communities are not without critique or free of problems, either. When focused too much on the self as an atomized individual (not grounded in community), SDE risks being ego-centric and individualistic, perpetuating the same issues as the modern formal schooling system. According to a friend who has operated in SDE spaces for many years, the same power dynamics we confront in many formal institutions tend to replicate themselves in SDE spaces if we are not careful to tend to them, disrupt them, choose other ways. This is no surprise, and this is true of any space. We are not outside of modernity, we are in it and of it, and it will be present.
This is one of the core tenets we try to attend to within a decolonial peace education - that we are not above or beyond the power dynamics and systems of oppression that we criticize outside of the classroom; that these same dynamics are present within the classroom, even when we are actively trying not to uphold them, and our task is to attend to them when they show up - and they will show up. They do show up. They are here, and there is no outside. But when they are here, it is a chance to disrupt, to heal. As Dorothy Coccinella Ladybugboss (Vanessa Andreotti, author of Hospicing Modernity) wrote recently in the forward to Burnout from Humans, “…there is no way out - only through.”
For better or for worse, I am past the point of having romantic notions about change. Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have declared, “Let’s just start our own (un)school! We can do better!” And while this is still a possibility somewhere down the line and something I dream of, it is not because I believe we can be free of oppressive dynamics if we start something new. Just as we inter-are with the trees and breeze and everything beautiful, we inter-are with the very oppressive systems that we vehemently oppose, critique, and are trying to dismantle. Interbeing means interbeing with everything - including the unbelievable mess we’ve made as humans. The key is not to reinforce these dynamics in the process of undoing them. The key is to reach beyond the imaginaries they leave us stuck within, and get beyond them. Through them.
We are lucky to have choices, and I am making the best choices I can at the moment with given conditions, possibilities, and responsibilities. From what I have experienced so far, her new school has a deep foundation in love and care, which is a lot, and maybe that is enough for now. I will continue to dream more, and dream with her, and dream with our community, including this community - I hope you will join me (I know I have readers who are deeply engaged in radical homeschooling/unschooling and SDE, and would love to hear your wisdom around how you navigate these tensions, or how you are navigating the other tensions you are living through, dear readers).
On her first day of school, she told me that they did a name game exercise with a ball of yarn, which is my favorite icebreaker and community weaving activity. I saw a photo of the classroom and noticed they have a peace corner. I later learned the chairs were no longer in the rows they were in for the parents meeting, but in tables, small groups. All of these things align with my own pedagogical practice, and I felt relief seeing these small but significant things reflected in her classroom.
For now, we continue.
Continue to go to school.
Continue to hold dreams for more, for both of us, for all of us.
Continue to work our way through.
With love and care as we move through and beyond,
Stephanie
P.S. Did you know I co-write another substack with my friend Minna and the dreamworld? You can find it here:
. We write about community dreamwork as a decolonial, pluriversal practice - a way through. My next post - coming next Sunday - will be about my ongoing exploration of dreamwork with AI (which I am currently crushing on and which has been blowing my mind).P.P.S. Speaking of AI, as a huge AI skeptic and critic, my recommended reading this week is Burnout from Humans.
See this article from
on a brief history of education (and his book Free to Learn, as well as his wonderful Substack, ): https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/freedom-learn/200808/brief-history-educationI actually think learning how to overcome boredom is a crucial skill, but I also believe that learning doesn’t ever have to be boring. It feels like schooling takes that as a given.
Paulo Freire, among others.
Akilah Richards, Iris Chen, Chevanni Davids and other friends in the Ecoversities Alliance, among others.
So relatable, especially this living in tension with what you are working with now and who we want to be, with recognizing modernity within us. I don't have a daughter yet but I can imagine the weight of this. I wish to figure out a way for myself to get through first.
I cannot even tell you how much of my healing work the last few years was related to the school system where I grew up. Which was a "good district" in conventional terms, which incorporated some innovative structures in elementary school (though almost none of that by high school). It is such a tension to hold gratitude for a safe, well-funded school with grief for a structure that marches kids to their next class after 50 minutes, in which everything is high-pressure and testing-based and non-responsive to youth's actual interests and brilliances, in which the schools themselves have harsh lighting and loud floors and kids are mean without teachers having a lot they can do about it.