We’re back with the second episode in our new series on the podcast, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we’re beginning our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn. In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm! We loved diving into learning and we hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Pam’s Substack article, “But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn?” Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Larrichia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello! PAM: So we are back with another episode in our Field Guide series. We’re working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey, A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and it’s a weaving together of myths, contemporary stories, and just tales from my own journey. In our first episode, if you haven’t listened to that yet, you can go back, we dove into the first phase of the unschooling journey, which was Choosing Unschooling, in which we answered the call to unschooling. We found our guides, which in a fun twist are so often our children. We navigated past various threshold guardians as we crossed the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of unschooling and moved through our time in the belly of the whale where we came to embrace the curiosity of a beginner’s mind. Now we are firmly in the deschooling phase of our journey, which encompasses seven stages and really does represent the bulk of our transformational work. Joseph Campbell calls this next stage the Road of Trials, which through the lens of unschooling, I have broken into two stages because I experienced them as quite distinct from each other. The first focuses on challenging our existing beliefs about learning and then the second one on those related to parenting. In this episode, we’re going to talk about five truths about learning. And if you’re new to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely to be dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean and some of their further reaching implications because it’s just mind-blowing enough to hear these the first time and go what, that doesn’t match with what I’ve known so far. Anyway, if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them. You’ll be strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, because you’ve been doing this for a while, so building your wisdom. And you are moving towards really believing and feeling these truths in your own bones, owning them for yourself. All right, after all that preamble, the first truth we are going to explore is that teaching is not a prerequisite for learning. And right off, oh my gosh, there are just so many aspects to this one truth, isn’t there? ANNA: It’s true. And I think it’s so interesting, because all of us can think of so many things we’ve learned without being specifically taught in that one way. And, oh my goodness, just look at babies learning to walk and talk without expert classroom instruction. And yet somehow schools have really sold us on this concept that to learn you need to be instructed by someone. And not only that, but learning happens while sitting at a desk. And let’s throw in some power dynamic, loss of autonomy, a little peer pressure for good measure. But even without all of that soup, the idea that we need another person to teach us in a very specific way is just so limiting. But what’s funny, personally, is that I didn’t want to homeschool in the beginning. I was very resistant because I didn’t want to be a teacher. So that statement right there shows you how deep I was in the idea that learning was about a teacher giving information to a student. I think it was just so baked into my experience and what I’d been told for my whole life. And so even when in my own life, there were all these examples of me learning things all the time as an adult on my own in different ways. But somehow those didn’t count now. It was just so interesting to unpack that for myself. And watching my kids was really what changed that, with a little point in the direction of observing from John Holt. I could see that I couldn’t even stop them from learning. They were just these little sponges, so interested in taking in everything, turning it around, trying to make sense of it, building context, building their own unique web of learning that we talk about so often. And then I started to kind of deconstruct the whole process. So, even with the most amazing, well-meaning teachers, and there are so many of those beautiful people out there, if a student wasn’t interested, it wasn’t going to work. And I also read a lot about brains at that time and how we don’t learn well under stress. And that’s when I started to think, is school ever a helpful environment for learning? Does it ever make sense? And I’m just not sure that it does. And I think learning can happen there, but it’s kind of despite the terrible environment, not because of it, not as if it’s an optimal environment. And like you said, it’s so individual. How does each person take in information? I prefer reading. I’m not auditory at all. David’s much more hands-on and experimental. So, long lectures just wouldn’t hold his attention. He needs to be moving at all times. There are definitely times I turn to people who know more than me about a particular subject. I love that. It’s fun to see how they approach it, how they move through the challenges. But in the end, their approach may or may not work for me, but I can learn more about them, the subject, and ultimately myself as I’m able to move in and out of that type of learning environment. I think the big thing here is just as we start to question and observe, ourselves, kids, our partners, see all the different ways that learning is happening every day around us. And it really just opens up such a new world. ERIKA: I love that. This idea is so huge. Once I started thinking about it, it’s like, oh my gosh. And it was one of my biggest paradigm shifts at the beginning of my own unschooling journey was realizing this truth. And I had a lot of fun digging into the word “teaching,” which started to not even make any sense to me anymore. Once I thought about it, it’s like somebody can say, “Well, I taught these kids how to do whatever.” And it’s like, but did you? You could say that you told them about it, but you really can’t say what happened inside of their brains. And so, I really liked questioning the word “teaching” overall and trying to move to the idea of just learning. Learning does not require teaching. Learning happens inside of the learner. And having someone teach you could be a way of learning something, but those two are not necessarily connected. And just because a teacher says that they taught people does not mean that they learned it. I know that’s true from my own experience in school and my experience as a classroom teacher in high school. I’ve taught more than high school. I taught music classes and some little kid classes as well. Everyone is so unique, every individual is so unique. And what I’ve seen is that process of teaching, the way that I would teach makes sense to my brain. It’s such a challenge to try to, what they would call in school, differentiate your instruction in order to meet everyone’s brains. But then the thing that’s missing from that is the interest. And so, the way people actually learn is by being open to learning and about being ready to learn. And so the format is less important. And the teacher is just a possibility. It’s not the only thing. And it’s not the thing that makes learning happen. I really think that having that experience as a teacher probably helped me get there a little bit faster on this part, because I’ve seen it. And so, I know that the classroom experience can be really frustrating for teachers and students. But I think you’re right, it’s not an optimal environment for learning in any way. Because we’re trying to get every
