Enjoy and Bless

Reader note: I did not write today’s episode ahead of time so below is the transcript. Listening to this episode may be more engaging than reading!

Transcript:

Today on the podcast I’m trying something different. I am stepping way out on a limb for my comfort zone and trying to record a podcast that I have not written beforehand. So we will see how this goes.

This is an experiment. It is a deliberate attempt to…on my process of deschooling myself. Part of this journey is having my eyes opened to the lessons I learned in school that have not served me well in life. And one of those is feeling the need to not share anything, not post anything, not put anything out there (Here comes a truck.) that is less than my very best—that I should give considerable time and attention to saying exactly the right thing, the exact right way, all the while knowing that that’s really not possible. But that is the message I received is that I should really try to get as close to that as I possibly can. So here I am pushing myself to share thoughts unscripted, unpolished, just as they come to my mind.

And I should also add that I am very introverted. I know for a lot of extroverts, this might be kind of confusing. What are you talking about? Can’t you just talk and put things out there? No, not typically, not typically. I overthink everything. I process in my head before speaking out loud. But these are things that I have thought a lot about. It might not come out very clearly or eloquently, but we’ll see how it goes. I did give myself some notes to go off of just to keep this a little grounded.

So, I’m titling this episode “school does not equal education.” And this, I think, is a huge part of how unschooling is misunderstood around the world, but I am in the United States of America, and here, especially, most people use those words interchangeably. I’m watching, sorry, Distracted, because I have a dog out here with me and she is about to go where she’s not supposed to go. Hold that thought, I’ll be back. All right, I am back. Dog is where she should be. You may be hearing that I am doing this outside. There’s cars driving by, there’s birdsong, there’s a dog wandering around with me. One part of being an introvert, I am not able to talk freely like this with the feeling that someone might suddenly walk in and interrupt my thought process. So I am sitting outside where my family is not currently, but we’ll see if the background noises are too distracting.

All right, what was I saying school does not equal education. In the United States. School and education are used interchangeably. People will ask how much education have you received? When did you complete your education? That’s a huge one. “Complete your education” is a red flag. Not, I’m not trying to be like critical, like red flag, but it’s just a signal that tells me that someone does not view education the same way I do. If you want to dig into this further, I don’t know if you’re the type of person that uses ChatGPT. I find it super helpful for just thinking through things. Obviously, you have to fact check and use your common sense if something’s not sounding right, Chat GPT is definitely not 100% reliable. But I’ve had some interesting conversations, discussions. What do you call that? Anyway, with ChatGPT about education and school and the distinction. and I feel like I am losing my focus.

School does not equal education. What is education? Education happens throughout your life—just because you’re 65 and haven’t been in a school does not mean you are not still learning things. Education is learning. It’s a lifelong process of learning, and the sad outcome of equating school with education is that it hinders our children and us from becoming lifelong learners. You will hear that a lot in unschooling circles that one of the reasons families have chosen this path is because they want their children to be lifelong learners, to love learning, to keep learning, to be curious, ask questions, keep trying new things, do things poorly and figure out if it’s something you want to pursue.

So school, what is school then? So school is really just one tool that’s been designed to organize and standardize education. And in some ways, it does a really good job. It serves a positive purpose in a lot of people’s lives. I mean, I’m all for everyone having access to learning how to read and write and use numbers. So important and that’s been fought for through the decades that everyone would have a right to be in an environment where they can learn these things that will help them, thrive and succeed in life. But there’s a lot about our particular school system that really can hinder education. In my example of this podcast is one of those that learning the lesson that things need to be presentable before they’re shared. Wow, that just hinders so much creativity, innovation, exploration. And that saddens me. And I mean, obviously, I know there are schools that are battling that, to try to find ways to break through the regimen, the standardization, and give more freedom for that kind of pursuit. But anyway, point being, school is not the same as education.

All right, maybe I hopefully said enough about that topic, but I thought it might be helpful while I’m just freestyling this to share a little bit about our life. I’m like moving the phone around a lot, and I just realized that affects the sound quality. Someday I might set up a more professional setup, but, again, this is part of my process. I apologize if the sound quality is distracting you. I thought I’d shared just a day in the life of our family. It has been so impactful to me to hear day in the life of homeschool families and to just see how they’re so different. That’s just one of the beauties of home education is that you can craft your educational experience to what really helps your family shine.

My brain just went off down a rabbit hole. It’s a completely different topic that I will come back to—in case you’re curious, it’s all about that education might not necessarily be your main goal for your children. It might be more around relationships, prioritizing relationships, and family life. Okay, back on task to today.

So today’s a Wednesday. This morning, we took my son to school. In a previous episode, I shared how he is attending what I call a micro school that has an open learning environment where he has a lot of freedom to choose how to use his time. They spend a lot of time outside, going on walks, playing together. Such a blessing. But I did want to share, so on Monday morning, he did not want to go to school. He was having some really big emotions. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, why he was feeling that way. And I was not able to stay calm. I was getting really frustrated and felt stuck when it dawned on me. You know what? We are a home educating family, and he seems to need a day at home today. I seemed to need to let him stay home that day. The pathway we were on was not doing our relationship any favors. So I told him, I said, you know what, buddy? You can stay home today. We’ll keep you home today. Something’s going on and it seems like your body might need some more rest, some more time with family. So you’re staying home. And we had a good day. It wasn’t a perfect day. The girls had some trouble adjusting to him being around because we can’t quite flow the same way with a seven year old boy in the house, but it was a good day, and I felt good about it, and he felt, I think he felt seen and loved and supported, and there was a little pushback the next morning that he also didn’t want to go to school, but then a root cause kind of surfaced, and he shared something he was worried about with school and we talked about it and I talked to his teacher and worked through that, and he had a great day at school yesterday on Tuesday. So just sharing that as a, I don’t know, just an example of one of the many gifts we receive in choosing this way of living that we don’t have to feel tied down to attendance, to schedules.

Okay, I apologize for that strange transition right there. I had a timer going to remind me me to get the banana bread out of the oven and it just cut me right off. So I think I might actually wrap up this episode right there just sharing that little anecdote about Monday. I will share another episode sharing about today and how we spent our time. But this has gotten longer than I intended these episodes to be. So thank you for listening. I’m curious to hear how this type of style of episode lands. I hope it’s engaging and helpful. I thank you for being here and listening and hope you are having a great week. Bye.