How long to deschool?

[Jarvis75]

Hello!
I took my 9 year old ds out of school a couple of months ago. So far, we have not been doing anything that is 'officially' educational as I have decided to let him deschool for a while as he had such a bad time at school. (We do read in the evenings together, go to museums, cook etc).

The problem I have is if I try to introduce anything vaguely school like he refuses to have anything to do with it, ie any kind of learning websites etc.

If we are out he is ok, but left to his own devices at home he will go from minecraft, to some cr@p on the tv to the occasional shooting of Nerf guns.

School seems to have instilled in him that learning is boring. Not sure how to turn that around. Should I carry on deschoooling in the hope that this will change, or does anyone have any ideas on how to make learning fun again.

Thanks for reading. Any advice welcome!

[catnipkitty]

HI Jarvis

I'm not a great expert, but took my DD out of school just over a year ago when she was 8. She hated school, appeared to be coping on the outside but wasn't. I think it took her at least four months to even start to get school out of her system. At first she asked me alot 'what can I do? what shall I do next? etc' and then she started to rediscover her creativity which she'd lost entirely while at school - she had been such a creative toddler/preschooler. Nowadays she hardly stops creating - drawing, designing, arts and crafts, baking. We do alot of stuff out of the house...BUT she absolutely still hates anything that resembles formal schooling. I've given up trying to get her to do workbooks/worksheets, she just won't do them. We are becoming more and more unstructured as time goes on! If she thinks I'm trying to 'teach' her something she runs away .

We're not at all in to gaming/tv in our house. I don't have a problem with them and my DDs do have computer time and DSi's but I do limit the amount of time they spend on them, and they do watch some tv but not what I consider 'rubbish'!

I think your DS will need alot more than 2 months to deschool - and you probably also need to deschool too! In your situation I would do exactly as you're doing, he'll be learning plenty, and enjoying life alot more!

Good luck!

[ommmward]

Rule of thumb is a month per year in school. Longer if he had a traumatic time.

Mine craft is fab :-)

[marissab]

Watching this. My boy's been out since oct but we did formal schooling till jan at home. I was battleing him everyday. I now think he needs to deschool.

[Flourfairy]

My ds who is the same age as yours is still very anti anything remotely school like after almost a year of home education. We have had big battles over any attempt at formal literacy or numeracy lessons.
I am only now really seeing and understanding how unschooling works, and that's after lots of reading and lots of thought and observation of my son over the past year.
It is a radical concept in the extreme to this ex grammar school mum, but seems to be working in some mysterious way.

[chocolatecrispies]

In my experience children spend a lot of time watching TV or playing computer games when they have been limited before. I have seen no evidence they are addictive in my children who have unlimited access to TV and computers and who do a host of other things. Deschooling often involves doing a lot of things which were limited by school before, and also doing things the child enjoys and finds relaxing - often TV and computers. Time taken varies from child to child - I would say we are still deschooling my ds who only went to preschool and we are 3 months in. Deschooling will take longer for you than for the child - seeing the value of things like minecraft which is apparently on the curriculum in Swedish schools will probably be part of it!