"I don’t know if I could ever homeschool. I will do it if I could take the kids and travel all over the world. Can you do that or do you have to be in the country for test and stuff?… I think everyone chooses what’s best for their own family. Best of luck for you and your family!" ~ from the comments after Why We Are Homschooling at Holistic Squid.

The first year we officially homeschooled was 2003. We've been at it for 11 years. One of the most illuminating and rather sad things I've learned is the lesson of deschooling. My children have never been to institutional school so they can't deschool--there is no institutional paradigm for them to shed. I, on the other hand, have been plagued all these years.

I spent that first year sitting at my kitchen table in Texas fretting. I worried over curriculum. What a waste of time that was. We use no curriculum. I worried I was making an unwise decision for my children. Nope, they're well grown and quite intelligent. I worried I could never give them enough because I'm not smart enough. The truth is, homeschool is not about parents pouring themselves into children. Homeschool is about children discovering the world in a nurturing environment. Its about them expanding themselves. And finally, I was seriously and dreadfully full of worry and fear that school was coming to get us. I was jumpy. I had nightmares.

A monster was coming for us. A real monster with a cavernous dirty mouth and a 13 year digestive process that eventually shits its victims out the other end in compact dark boxes. At least, that is how it felt to consider pulling out of school. I felt there was nothing much between my children and a horrible monster, except me. And I'd already been beaten by this monster. My nightmares the first year involved tall skinny severe white men hunting me down in hallways to administer never ending tests despite my never ending failure. Waking hours, I feared the doorbell ringing in our home that first year. I expected the monster to come calling.

It would be easy to say this fear is my own damage and nothing more. But through these eleven years, I've seen it in the eyes of new homeschooling parents, listened to them talk it through over and over again, spent hours reading and responding to them online. There are about 3 million homeschooling families in the United States. That is nearly 6 million deschooling parents and they are all scared. I've never heard anyone who didn't start scared. That's one helluva lot of spook for nothing to be scared of.

You can not grasp the influence of institutional school over your psyche until you try and pull away. It is an invisible force inside you. People don't realize because most of us never walk away, and we aren't meant to. When we graduate it is not over. We can never leave what we now wear on the inside. And we understand our parents went, we went, our children will go, our grandchildren will go, and we will never question it. The smartest people I know, the most radical thinkers, the bravest and the strongest aren't smart, radical, brave, and strong enough to pull away without deep fear. Most aren't even strong enough to question the perverse circular logic of going to school because school says its best. Yes, democracy depends on a well educated constituency but school won't tell you, that has nothing to do with school. Yes, children living in poverty could be well served by school. But really, we all know they mostly aren't.

De-schooling is a lifelong process. On average, it takes about a year to stop having the worst of the nightmares and to stop fretting quite so much. I think because it takes about a year to observe your children doing well even though they aren't at school, even though you haven't discovered the perfect curriculum yet, and even though they seem strangely happy. Though, happiness is anti-intellectual, isn't it? That's what school says. Of course, we are used to measuring children yearly so that feels natural. 

"I don't know if I could ever homeschool." I have internalized the message that I am impossibly small and unimportant. I would homeschool if I had permission, a hall pass, to do dynamic and awesome things--things much bigger than my own obvious smallness--such as traveling the world with my children. But school clearly owns children and nothing else can properly fill, measure, or label them. I believe in my own smallness and the grandiosity of school so deeply, I have such profound faith in the correctness of the system, the system's voice is so deeply ingrained inside of me, as to be a part of me and therefore inaudible as a separate voice. Institutionalization is complete when the illusion of choice seems real. There is no viable choice. But "best of luck to you and your family" if you homeschool.

It will take the rest of your life to de-school. If you care to try. Thankfully, it gets easier as you go.