Go De-School Yourself (and your kids)

This week we're talking about De-Schooling Yourself. 

It’s such an important thing. We came up with the phrase, De-Schooling Yourself, to refer to getting out of the mindset that homeschooling is just moving school and plopping it into your living room.

It’s a misconception that people have, but we need to let go of those outdated and broken systems. 

School is broken, we all know that, and it's totally within our power to create a new paradigm in which school becomes an enjoyable experience that enhances all our lives—the kids, the parents, and the teachers who are working with them—rather than making us all feel bored or frustrated or even sad.

It just doesn't need to be that way anymore. (Alysia) I’ve gone through that so much in my household. It really has been a shift. It’s taken a lot of releasing and clearing to be able to let go of those old ways. I didn't realize how much of a grip they had on me until just recently, in these last few weeks.

So, that's what we want to help you guys do as well— to release and shed all of the old that keeps us stuck in ways that don't feel good.

(Kristy) I’ve taught for a lot of years and I saw firsthand how miserable all the kids were in school, and the teachers were miserable too.

Then the parents would come in, and because their kids are miserable, they're miserable. It’s just a vicious cycle. I've been in a classroom where I've got 35 or more kids in there, and there has to be some element of control or else it's just chaos. 

I would just say, “Guys, we're gonna do something my way.” Suddenly, I had my class completely engaged. All the behavior problems, they just went away. The boredom went away. They would get excited and they would engage. Even the really shy kids would engage because they were feeling supported, and they would just light up. They’s say, “Oh, Miss J., you're our favorite teacher.” 

I would get my hand slapped on Friday at the principal's office, but I really didn't care. It was worth the punishment to be able to light those kids up like that. 

(Kristy) Alysia, I’ve noticed with you that because you're an adult and because you went through the school system—I think that's true for all of us who are adults now—we went through it and we think of school a certain way. 

(Alysia) One of the biggest things I've realized recently around the topic of De-Schooling is that I spent all last year focused on my kids, and they're older. They were in the school system for a while and now they're homeschooling.

I didn't have the phrase De-Schooling at the time, but I felt like I needed to help shift them from certain ways that weren't healthy for them from traditional school as they moved into homeschooling. 

I realized, yes, my kids did need a little guidance, but it was actually me who needed to do the most De-Schooling because I was the one that was still hounding them about not attending or not doing their homework. In homeschool, they don't have very much homework, but when they do, I'd be on them like, “Why can't you just do this?”

This just came to me a few weeks ago as I was in the midst of getting upset at my child for a school situation at home. That I was the one who was still gripping on too tightly, and I had a lot of old beliefs to let go of for myself because of what I went through at school.

I would just question it and say, "Hold on. Is this really the truth or is it something that's just a belief I'm holding that I can now let go of?” 

(Kristy) You know, it's interesting that you say that because I've experienced the same thing as you, only from the perspective as a teacher.

I realized when we were developing the Barefoot Learning Club that doing things in a different way, teaching parents, sifting through all the things that I've learned over all my years—to not hold on to the things that didn't work and just say, “Why do we have to do this this way?”

I've worked with so many kids with learning differences like dyslexia, for example, and, and you have to always be thinking, “How can I come at this in a different way? They're not getting it."

So, I have to rethink it and come at it another way. And I think that sort of was training me to do this because I sifted through a lot of stuff and thought, this doesn't work. 

Now, it's so simple and it's so clear what works, what doesn't, and how we can make homeschooling a really fun and beautiful experience for both kids and parents.

With little kids, it's probably between 1-2 hours of learning per day and they get so much done. There's joy and expansion and it's just a really wonderful place to be. 

(Alysia) That was one of the biggest things for me to let go of was the timeframe for learning, because my kids—they’re in 3rd and 7th grade—and even at their age, two hours per day is where they max out and they're still learning so much even at those ages in those two hours because it's just them and there's not a whole classroom of kids with distractions that's keeping their focus away. 

(Kristy) That is so true. Every teacher out there knows how much wasted time there is in a classroom. We're not just teachers. We're parents, we're nurses, we're mediators, we're fight control, we're cops, we're everything. It just wastes time.

(Alysia) De-Schooling has been a really big thing in my house. It’s really been freeing for us in so many ways. So much freedom has come into our household. Once I figured out it all started with me, that it was all within me, I started to release the approach I had with my kids.

Then they stopped resisting so much. That was when the big shifts started. This just happened recently because it took me that long to understand that it was all within me, that I was the one still holding on. 

(Kristy) Barefoot Learning Club is not just moving the classroom and all the boring worksheets and stuff like that into your living room. It's a whole new approach and it starts with the mindset. 

School is just an artificial construct. It was designed for the rise of the industrial age to socialize children into growing up and working in a factory. And that just is not the way it is anymore. 

We're in the information age. It's an age of creativity and innovation. 

Yet, at school, they're told to sit down, be quiet, and do what they're told. Then they grow up and we expect them to be creative and innovative. Those two things don't fit. 

We've come up with a more natural and life-affirming way to inspire creativity and joy right from the start while still giving them that foundation—reading, writing, and math. When you see a kid light up with excitement about learning, there's just nothing better than that.

It’s our mission to De-School the world.