From Education System to Unschooling De-systemization

A universal journey through rejection, re-connection, observation, and understanding.

by Joanne Hunt, program coordinator, farmer, unschooler, mother, at Finca Maravilla, Aguada, PR

I come from a line of educators. My mother taught the reception class at our local primary school. My grandfather taught primary age school children in South London. My uncle taught French. My great-aunt taught history. My great-grandmother was also a teacher. I believe the line goes back beyond her, but I confess to having always been more captivated by the family stories of smugglers, ‘ne-er do well’ son in laws, disinheritance scandals, and political revolutionaries, than by the tales of teachers.

Yet I always felt some kind of biological compulsion to teach. Whether that was the limiting factor of family trades and familial conditioning of my aptitudes and choices, or whether I had some epigenetic disposition to spending my adult life in classrooms, I know not. But, train as a teacher is what I did.

Which would be odd, had I come from another family, because I always hated school.

I did not enjoy the routine of school. I felt that it stole from me. From a very tender age I had this sensation of somehow not being able to live freely and according to the beat that I felt inside, but instead, being poured into social contexts that felt stale and pointless, bland, and lacking in soul.

There was nothing inspiring about my own education, bar one or two shining teachers, as we all (mercifully) appear to be able to recall. For the most part, my schoolteachers were dull, repeated themselves year upon year, appeared to show very little interest in me as a being, and did not seem to be inspired or excited in their own lives. At all.

My early primary education was reasonable enough, and relatively unpressured thanks to seventies pedagogy; but my middle school environment was fearful, due to a church-based funding system placing it outside the 1986 law ending corporal punishment in schools. If being hit with a ruler for talking in class, or smacked in front of the school for talking before grace wasn’t enough to take the fun out of school, secondary school finished the job off nicely; with its stultifying, under-resourced curriculum, and its repressive culture riddled with bullies, from the senior management team to the playground.

I remember my experience of being a teenager in this environment as a physical sensation. I physically yearned to break out (Queen’s ‘I Want to Break Free’ was my internal musical mantra!). My sensations were energetic, they penetrated every aspect of my being, from seeking experiences that transcended or offered escape; to disordered eating; to dreaming endlessly, in visceral sense imaginings, of the life that somehow I could feel to be my birthright, a life in which I felt alive, where nothing felt blocked, where disapproval had no home, and where I could be myself. I wanted an artist’s life, but I had no model to follow. I suppose that is the point.

I think my impulses and my ‘wildness’ probably scared my more conventional parents, it certainly overwhelmed them. My lovely Mum’s motto for life and love is still, ‘don’t rock the boat’, a concept that I have never quite been able to get behind! As a teenager I felt a growing explosion so great inside myself that I felt at one point that it could have consumed me. Had I not come from such a stable and loving home, I think it may well have done.

As it was, I managed to feel like a volcano, and yet pass for a high-functioning teenager making career decisions based on a limited experience of dull and uninspiring school subjects, largely taught to exam. The exceptions to that being Drama, English, and Art. My ‘favorite subjects’. I was instilled with the creativity-restricting belief that nothing good can ever come (in the form of a stable job or socially sanctioned ‘respectability’) from following one’s whims or passions or desires, that life required one to ‘find a job’, be good, get promoted, buy a lifestyle, stay small, question little, seek weekend diversion, fit in to society. I smelled bullshit.

I called bullshit on this theorem in my early twenties, when I cast off the life that I was awkwardly attempting to wear (with alternatingly ludicrous or depressing results), and set about following only my whims and desires for quite some time. I came to understand at this point that some aspects of my training did indeed serve me very well. Not the psycho-emotional stuff, the stuff that told me that I needed to be good, to follow the rules, to not rock the boat. But the skills that I had picked up along the way, the vehicles for my journey.

The teaching qualification enabled me to pick up paid work all around the world, developing my own practice; a practice I dove into fully, spurred on by my mentor in my final training post who described my teaching methods as, ‘utterly unconventional, entirely effective’. ‘Run with yourself and make light’ were his parting words to me. Some of the best words I have ever been given.

My ability to surmount fear and audition for and receive parts in theatre productions in cities and countries I visited, allowed me to further my study in performance and support my growth as an emerging artist. And my bread and butter depended on the editorial experience that I had acquired from years interning, working, and freelancing in the publishing industry. This work allowed me to travel the world with my laptop in my backpack, stopping off for a few day stint here or there for a cigarette-and-coffee-fueled sit-in at a desk in a room with a fan. There I would bash out edits before submitting chapters via dial up (remember that blue line?) in internet cafes in order to reach deadlines, before packing up my belongings and trekking off on the next whim.

It is a romantic period of my life to reflect back on, and the tales from that time are colorful, rich, and many. It was a period spanning many years; years that were often fraught with difficulties personal, emotional, financial, and cultural. But the difficulties are heavily outweighed by the light, the empowerment, and the growth, that have provided fuel for the rest of my adult life.

By that point, much of the rebellious teenage rage I had felt earlier had dissipated. I no longer felt restricted by that boat that I was not supposed to rock. I had stopped flailing around, trying to capsize it. I had jumped over the side, and was in the process of learning to swim on my own (much to my mother’s joy), on the path to merging with the ocean.

This path has carried me here to this point in my life. To this Now. A now that I would like my children to begin from, rather than have to heal towards, before finding their peace.

At this point in my life, I find myself largely bathing in the oceanic experience. Sometimes almost drowning, but mostly swimming, floating, diving, and flying above the waves. And my purpose now as an educator, is the same as my purpose as an artist, and as a mother: it is focused on freely and openly doing what I do, with vulnerability, honesty, and candor, while offering the open invitation to join me – or at least come for a paddle. It is cool here and the water is refreshing and deep; and, if the sharks are also numerous, at least we can take solace in the awareness that they are almost always of our own construction.

I want us to relearn the skills we have forgotten, and to trust in the instincts that we used to depend on to survive: the impulses and instincts that have been tamed out of us, so that we can all fit into our neat little bunks aboard that overpopulated and uncomfortable boat, that if we are honest, makes us sick.

This is the deschooling process.

Our deschooling is the unlearning of the constructs that were taught to us for reasons other than to empower or activate our own inner-learning light. Our deschooling is how we attempt to cast off the social shackles of the past. Through deschooling our selves, we unlearn the inherited inferiority or superiority complexes, we let go of that which does not serve us, and recognize those teachings as the status-quo-perpetuating lessons passed down from one wounded and repressed generation to the next. It is how we release, and how we forgive. It is how we actively love ourselves and each other.

Then, subsequently, or simultaneously, begins the relearning, and the new pathways, as we move into the future free-learning (or ‘unschooling’) wherever our heart and our curiosity leads. We embrace the connection that we honor when we truly decide that enough is enough, that we want to be free, and that we want to learn, relearn, to unschool ourselves from a fresh place, and take the path uncharted by oppressive historical social contexts.

When we allow our children to learn in this most natural way, we offer them the gift of soul freedom. We spare them the rigid experiences of being stuffed into a box. And we also spare them the painful extraction journey from it. With this, we offer the Earth a generation of souls with the preparedness and self-awareness, reverence for nature, respect for life, and a love for living and learning that are necessary for the continuation of life beyond our paranoid and maniacal times.

Unschooling is a life-long process. Unschooling is the journey to self-knowledge, expansion, skill-building, soul-enrichment, right livelihood, right community, right relationship, right responsibility, and freedom, that is our birthright as members of the human race. Unschooling, done right, enables a deep, self-directed education and a fully integrated human experience, as a part of nature, connected to our own nature, empowered, activated, free, for children and for adults.

We need each other in this.

We need each other for support, for inspiration, for cooperation in our homes and common spaces. We need each other to open up to, to listen to. We need each other for help with our child-raising, our celebrations, and in our grief. We need to see each other, so that in turn we may truly see ourselves.

We need each other in order to remember who we are, how we operate as part of a connected whole, a whole that is vital, evolving, and sustaining. A whole that requires our wholeness in order to function and self-sustain in health, vitality, longevity, joy, and peace.

I do not need to preach or make plaint, lament or disclose to you the position that our planet and the lives she sustains are in. For we are all aware. Well aware. Even those among our populations who argue the reverse to be true, who proclaim climate science a ruse, who battle-cry for yet more oppression, more ecocidal policies, more divisions, further inequality, unrelenting destruction. Even these people are aware, at the soul level. It is total incomprehension in the face of the frightening potential perils that makes people deny and rage against the truth with such passionate and absurdly beligerent delusion.

We are all one. Forgiveness is key to unity.

I am working on putting together a snail mail, quarterly offering, of unschooling ideas, recipes, plant information, DIY homesteading tips (particularly from the perspective of a shoestring budget, as that is where we have the most experience!), and several gifts gathered, foraged, wildcrafted, told, or handmade on the finca. Stay tuned for this to come together and you will be able to sign up to receive these magic packages of amorrrr de Maravilla…

Thank you for joining me here in this small slice of paradise. I hope that my sharing will partner your journey. That my strengths will offer you inspiration, and my shortcomings will engage your compassion. We are all in this together.