Deschool Yourself with Zak Slayback and Jeff Till Zak Slayback and Jeff Till

In this installment, we explore getting help with deschooling and helping others, including spouses and children.

Helping others deschool
- How to talk with others about school and deschooling
o Convincing them
o Not pissing them off
- Friends and family
- Your parents
- Homeschooling your children

What if you are currently in college or high school?
- If you went
- If you are in school
- Options for pre-college people
- Not going/dropping out/rising above
- Praxis and other programs

Wrap-up
- Our recommend reading/media list
Gatto
Holt
Illich
Lewellen
Peter Gray
Productivity and success books
- 4HWW, Getting things done
- Napoleon Hill
Nathaniel Branden, six pillars of self esteem
SSP
Renegade University
Praxis blog
Don’t do stuff you hate

Praxis Education Director T.K. Coleman joins us to talk about next steps in the deschooling process.

Themes we discuss include:
Self-analysis - Deciding whether you are a school
- Do you have wounds from school? Are you schooled (we’ve covered this, but it should be a formal self-analysis with serious thought)
- Do you desire individuation? Do you desire to deschool

Getting rid of school behavior and thought process
- Releasing the school/work mentality
- Get off the conveyor belt (or the treadmill)
- Developing intrinsic self-esteem
- Knowing what you don’t want to do
- Rejecting appeals to authority
- Reassessing obligation
- Decoupling your identity from school, university and job

Lifetime learning
- Rekindling a love of learning
- Just in time learning vs. just in case learning
- Getting an education
- Becoming the learner that fits you

Taking control of your life
- Creating and value creation
- Entrepreneurship or the entrepreneur heart.
- Rethinking your schedule
- Ending permission-seeking
- Willingness to accept the possibility that what you love is something you have yet to discover
- Embracing risk
- Calculating the cost of risk and change (there’s usually none)
- Creating your own voice (writing, podcasting, video)

Zak and Jeff talk about the difference between schooling and education. Topics include:
School learning:
- Being taught that learning is a grind, learn to hate learning
- Memorization
- Instructor-based learning – The lecture, 5,000 year old teaching technology
- Learning by "not doing"
- Testing and grades
- Forgetting after the test
- Absence of free play
- Not taught critical thinking.
Extrinsic incentives and punishments for ‘learning’
Do you know how to learn intrinsically?
Does your relationship or experience with learning block you now from learning new things, taking chances, improving your self worth/self esteem

Good education/learning
- Learning is life-long and constant
- The way you really learn today personally, in your work, for your hobbies, in your relationships, for fun
- Resetting priorities on what is necessary or desirable to learn, not through a curriculum developed by bureaucrats, but through you interests and real-life needs
- Intrinsic learning – learning as its own reward
- Becoming autodidactic
- Rekindling a love of learning
- Learning methods and models (e.g., Trivium, quadrivium, others)
- Establishing your way of learning in your day-to-day life

- Explain the difference between schooling and learning

School learning:

— KEY POINT: Schooling is COERCED. Learning is CHOSEN. Some learning can happen in a school-like context, but it has to be chosen by the subject. School removes the context around learning, almost guaranteeing that learning won’t actually happen.

- Being taught that learning is a grind, learn to hate learning (i.e., learning is something you “have” to do, not something you “get” to do.)
- Memorization — either blunt memorization or memorization of systems (i.e., algebra, etc)
- Instructor-based learning – The lecture, 5,000 year old teaching technology
- Learning by "not doing" — compare to coaching or riding a bike
- Testing and grades — Teaches that knowledge exists only on a two-way spectrum.
- Forgetting after the test
- Absence of free play
- Not taught critical thinking.

Extrinsic incentives and punishments for ‘learning’ — carrot and stick incentives

Self-exam

Do you know how to learn intrinsically?

Why does one learn?

What feeling do you get in your gut when you think about learning? What images are conjured in your mind?

Does your relationship or experience with learning block you now from learning new things, taking chances, improving your self worth/self esteem?

Do you feel exhausted when you think about learning something new or do you get juiced?

Good education/learning

TRUE learning exists when the subject willfully CHOOSES to learn; this happens best when they have a strong enough belief to drive them to learn, i.e., a strong enough “why” for learning.

- Learning is life-long and constant
- The way you really learn today personally, in your work, for your hobbies, in your relationships, for fun
— Do you learn tactically? Audibly? Do you learn through experience or do you prefer to read?
- Resetting priorities on what is necessary or desirable to learn, not through a curriculum developed by bureaucrats, but through you interests and real-life needs
- Intrinsic learning – learning as its own reward
- Becoming autodidactic
- Rekindling a love of learning
- Learning methods and models (e.g., Trivium, quadrivium, others)
- Establishing your way of learning in your day-to-day life

We welcome Brett Veinotte, host of the School Sucks Project. We discuss the role of schooling, its effects and the relationship with self esteem and deschooling, including bringing in some ideas from Nathaniel Branden.

In this episode we go deep into what wounds and damages school likely had on you.

Contents include: The grim reality of what it is and what it does
Schooling’s history
- Your own (and everyone’s) generational history
Schooling’s true purpose in creating soldiers and workers
- Indoctrination
- Ruining critical thinking
- Creating dependence
The institutions that are fighting for it:
- You parents
- Your neighbors
- Your peers
- Your school system
- The industrial and service economy
- The government
The ten lessons of schooling (note: write these in how they are inflicted upon the reader)

Gatto’s seven lessons of school:
- Confusion
- Class position
- Indifference
- Emotional dependency
- Intellectual dependency
- Provisional self esteem
- Constant surveillance (One can’t hide)


Veinotte’s three lessons of school:
- Apathy – Covered this one with Gatto’s indifference
- Obedience
- Conformity

Other damaging effects (these could be reordered or categorized)

How we learn and our relationship to knowledge will be covered next episode

Limited viewpoints
- History as government, presidents and war
- Limited political/societal views
- Controversy is avoided

Bad use of time and a general inconvenience
- Took away your ability to manage your own life and time
- Ruined opportunity costs
- A waste of time
- Lack of sleep and exhaustion
- Constricted vacation
- Removal from family

Controlled and Ruined Feelings
- Lack of happiness
- Boredom
- Peer pressure
- Stress
- Bullying
- Bad socialization and lack of individuation
- Health, nutrition and safety


Bad preparation for adulthood
- Useless credentialing
- The mandatory march to college
- Extension of childhood and the postponement of adulthood
- Limited or meaningless networking
- No exposure to varying age groups and adults
- Adults as authority only

Did school even make you…?
- Poorer or limited your ability to earn and have a relationship with commerce
- Soldiering – Does school prep some to join the military.

A detailed discussion with Thaddeus Russell on school history, renegade history, and alternatives in education.

Thaddeus is the author of "A Renegade History of the United States" and founder of Renegade University. He works as a college professor teaching history and other topics.