#94: Why Would Anyone live without school?

🐒 Folks reclaiming self-directed learning

In most families I know, school sets the rhythm of our days, childhoods, lives. It determines the time children wake up and go to bed, the people they interact with, the books and sports and ideas they encounter, possibly what they eat and wear.

In our two-part interview last month (here & here), psychology researcher Johnmarshall Reeve spoke about the ways that school can stifle children’s intrinsic motivation. He also shared his optimism that teachers and schools can get better at supporting kids’ autonomy. But some families think that school cannot provide what their kids need, and decide to live without it. They may practice homeschooling—which tends to replicate the structure of school classes and curricula at home—or unschooling—where children steer their own learning.

Growing up, I never met anyone who didn’t go to school (that I know of). Home education is illegal in countries including Germany, and in places where it is explicitly allowed, it is often closely regulated. What pushes some families toward this countercultural, sometimes impractical choice? To find out, I asked parents in different parts of the world¹. They generally spoke about their desire for more: more autonomy, more time, more flexibility, more exploration; a wish to expand their children’s (and their own) lives rather than a bid for control².

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

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“I think the way school is centred in so many families is unfortunate; there’s just so much more to life than school and work,” says Naomi Clarke, a mother of two in London, UK³. She adds that she lives without school “because I don’t think [school is] safe for Black children, or neurodivergent children.”

Clarke says of her 7-year-old son: “He’s autistic, as am I, and I’m unsure if this makes a difference to his ability to actually care at all about extrinsic motivation, but you could offer him the world on a plate and he would not do what someone else wanted unless he saw value in it.” For instance, she says he was motivated to learn to read so that he could play certain video games more effectively: “He started asking what odd words said, and picked it up very quickly once he got the gist.”

Hope Henchey, a mother of five children (aged between 2 and 10 years old) in Tennessee in the US, says school left her feeling “unprepared for life as an adult”. On the other hand, her homeschooled husband was “completely ready to start a family at age 21 and be a successful entrepreneur,” she says: growing up, he had time to start businesses, keep a garden, care for his neighbours, and make “his own hats and moccasins out of squirrel hide.”

In practice, Hope—who writes the thoughtful, idea-packed newsletter Family Scripts⁴—says she adjusts her children’s curricula “based on where they are and what they need, not where ‘the average child’ their age is supposed to be.” More broadly, she adds: “we want our kids to have a lot of freedom over how they spend their time and what they pursue.”

This echoes the concerns of Candice Hodson, a former teacher and full-time parent to an almost 3-year-old and 5-year-old in New Zealand: “I know the limitations of the classroom. I know how structured and fast-paced it is. There isn’t time for exploration, following passions and going down rabbit holes. There isn’t much time to build a deep internal motivation either.”

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Marjorie Bautista, another former school teacher, has taken things several steps further. Not only does her child not go to school: she co-founded an “écovillage” (about an hour from Toulouse, France) where 30 adults and 15 children all live without school.

Here’s my conversation with Bautista about her motivation and experience, which I have translated and edited for brevity and clarity.

May I introduce you to Marjorie Bautista

What was your initial motivation to co-found the Ecole Dynamique in 2015, a democratic school in Paris, and then the Écovillage de Pourgues in 2017?

When I was a teacher, my motivation was [to find] pedagogical freedom, which was quite limited. I felt that the children were even more limited in their freedom to be and to learn. I tested different things, but the structure and the institution kept me in line. Then I discovered Sudbury schools in the US, and I heard that someone wanted to create one in Paris. I found play buddies, a universe that resonated deeply with my values and validated that I was not crazy. At the time there were few alternative schools [in France]; we were just starting to hear a little about Montessori schools.

I saw Clara Bellar’s documentary film Being and becoming. I discovered home education [instruction en famille in French] and realised—after years of working as a public school teacher—that school actually isn’t compulsory in France; instruction⁵ is. I discovered that not only do alternative schools exist, but we can also not bring our children to school at all. In that context, it made more sense to me to become a mother, and about a year later I got pregnant.

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This is Ramïn Faranghi, co-founder of the École Dynamique and the Écovillage de Pourgues, speaking (in English) at a TEDx event in France in 2016 about democratic schools. You can watch more videos about the Pourgues project (in French) here.

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At the École Dynamique, we went from the pyramid-shaped hierarchy of the national education system to a horizontal structure. We had real challenges, budgets to manage and philosophies to steer. We were six [adults] and I also discovered that form of creativity and cooperation.

But when the school day ended everything stopped. Our members—we don’t call them pupils—could not understand why we had holidays. Why is there a time to learn and a time without learning? We wanted to create a place where we could experience this non-stop. We travelled to the Hameau des Buis [another écovillage founded in 2006⁶], came back from that trip and that same night we started working on the village project.

What’s the environment like in Pourgues?

Before I talk about the environment, I think the first element is how we look at children. That gaze says: I trust you and your intrinsic motivation; you have that drive to move, walk, speak, to imitate people around you. That gaze is what builds up self-esteem and helps intrinsic motivation to flourish. For instance, as a school teacher, you receive a student’s file and know if they were an A+ student or had poor grades in previous school years. Whether I want to or not, that will condition how I look at that child. It’s also a physical posture. Do I dominate children? Are they free to move around, to express themselves? Are they considered as complete human beings?

The physical environment in Pourgues is a copy-paste of Sudbury schools. We de-compartmentalise time and space, we don’t have strict timetables for the whole week. We do have a structure, with several weekly meetings and a lot of flexibility. Someone might say "I'll be doing sports on Tuesday morning", someone else will be in the workshop on Thursday, and other people can join.

We don’t separate people by age⁷. Children have a lot of time to play freely. The adults work on-site, whereas children who go to school don’t usually see adults doing their daily activities. We are a collective enterprise, we organise touristic activities 19 weeks per year and that's a tight ship to run, plus each of us has other activities.

Each family also has its own structure. For instance, there’s a child in Pourgues who wants to go to middle school in Toulouse to join his cousin. That's his project, and he'll dedicate some time every day for several months to reaching that goal. Everyone finds the right dosage of structure and freedom according to their own constraints. There are rules, and even when some activities don’t bring immediate pleasure and don’t match our short-term motivation, they make sense and are important.

How do we make sure that parents don’t exhaust themselves and neglect their own intrinsic motivation while they try to nurture their child’s?

That’s the slippery slope that a lot of us find ourselves on [at some point]. We felt so constrained in school that we forgot that we’re not only parents, and that freedom must come with responsibility. I also have my own intrinsic motivation, we all have limited resources in time, space, energy, money. Saying No or Stop to a child is legitimate; having a structure is really important. Sometimes there’s a confusion between [nurturing] intrinsic motivation and being permissive. Self-directed learning requires a frame and boundaries.

Some parents may do things with their children that they’re not really interested in but they feel a duty to do, and that’s exhausting! My son for instance might have 50 passions, and I have my own 50 passions. Maybe four of them overlap and that’s what we’ll do together because it feels nourishing and interesting, not tiring. And never practice unschooling on your own! Here in Pourgues, we have two adults per child, and we live in a vast space where we don’t need to watch our kids closely. Sometimes I don’t see my son for hours, there are other adults and teenagers around who can respond to his needs and lots of friends for him to play with.

Is unschooling accessible to everyone?

I don’t think it is. It requires a solid personal foundation and motivation, networking skills, maturity to cope with children’s emotional states and projects, some external conditions and flexibility. If those conditions are not there, it may be better to go to school—like a Sudbury school, or there are good things happening in some public schools—and to do cool stuff in the evenings and weekends. Then the child has a kind of part-time setup.

What’s your advice for families who will keep going to the office and school?

Apply that posture and that look that says: I trust your intrinsic motivation, and I have my own. Stop over-scheduling, make time for free play and for emptiness. Invite your cousins over, make friends, help each other out. That’s really the main thing: having play buddies.

[Note: play buddies not just for the kids, but for us too 🐒]

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Books to find out more about unschooling

Here are just three different perspectives on self-directed learning:

Peter Gray, 2013. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

Gray, an evolutionary developmental psychologist, explains how his 9-year-old son’s firm refusal to go to school led their family to a Sudbury school, and Gray himself to study self-directed learning. In this book, he writes in particular about the “play-filled” lives of children in hunter-gatherer societies, and advocates for “trustful parenting”.

Akilah S. Richards, 2020. Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work

A memoir tracing Richards’ steps from coercive parenting to “unschooling as a child-trusting, anti-oppression” approach. She writes in particular about unschooling as a Black family: “School is perceived to be the space where [BIPOC children] could use those performance techniques to get on a so-called level playing field with White people. This is why for many families of color, the term unschooling is unsettling and even offensive, because education is, after all, linked to liberation.”

John Taylor Gatto, 1992. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

A collection of impassioned speeches by a disillusioned former teacher, who wrote: “I dropped the idea that I was an expert whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.” Named several times New York City teacher of the year, he described school as “a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.” (Let’s also appreciate his knack for punchy titles; he wrote another book called Weapons of Mass Instruction.)

1. This post is about families who reject school to some extent, rather than about families who are okay with school in principle but don’t attend it for practical reasons—say, because the children have an artistic or athletic career. (In this post, my Substack colleague Glenn Cook talks about the experience of his son Ben as a child actor, and interviews one of Ben’s former tutors about those practicalities.)

2. I’m not talking here about homeschooling parents whose main motivation is to impart religious beliefs and practices at home. Here’s what Hope Henchey told me about that: “My husband and I are Christians, and we really love Jesus, and we teach our children what we believe to be true—as all parents do—but I want my kids to decide for themselves what they believe and what they love. […] A mistake I’ve seen so many times in homeschool circles is that religious parents want to make sure their kids follow them in their faith, so they restrict and protect and—now in my 30s, I can see how it turned out, and I’d say more than half of the kids I know who were homeschooled do not associate with the faith of their parents, and a lot of these relationships are broken now.”

3. With big thanks to Lucy AitkenRead, who provides online courses and support for unschooling families and runs a monthly unschooling membership, for helping me to connect with Naomi Clarke and Candice Hodson.

4. Go subscribe to it, and you’ll soon want to live in Hope’s crafts closet. Or her pantry!

5. France recently tightened its home education laws: families now have to apply for a school exemption instead of simply declaring that their children don’t go to school. The number of children registered as home educated rose from about 13,000 in 2007/2008 to almost 36,000 in 2018/2019; about half of these were registered using a state-run distance learning curriculum. Although that’s a big increase, it’s still a small fraction of the 12 million children going to school in France overall.

(We do have more recent stats: the number of registered home-educated children increased further to over 62,000 children in 2020/2021, but that’s not strictly comparable to previous years because the age of compulsory education was lowered from 6 years old to 3 years old in 2019. If we exclude children between 3 and 5, about 45,000 children were educated at home that year.)

6. In recent years the Hameau has experienced serious internal conflicts, leading to a legal trial.

7. Pourgues residents are between 18 months and 60 years old.