Unschooling and the Rabbit Hole of Potential

If I had been raised by wolves, I would have never learned how to walk and speak because we need others to learn from. However, we all know that none of us have been taught by structured lessons or any type of schooling in order to do so. We simply observed, listened, tried a million times and got better bit by bit until we could express ourselves with words and move efficiently.

If we imagine people learning to walk and talk by being taught in schools, being explained how to, reading about it and getting little chance of actually trying it, we would most probably damage our physical intelligence in a way that would make it very unnatural and inefficent to move and converse. Don’t you think?

People forget that the body does everything without our active doing, like breathing, pumping blood through our body, growing a baby inside, just to mention a few. In a similar way we learn to walk and talk - naturally.

Now schools supposely exist to teach children how to think.

What does this tell you?

It tells us that we’re putting children into an unnatural environment that cripples their natural ability to learn and their thinking suffers because most of the time they spend in school, they are being instructed what to do. They are not encouraged to think for themselves and to do what their minds and bodies tell them to, what their natural intelligence is asking them to do in order to learn in the most efficient way.

Kids start nursery and school younger each decade and they spend longer hours away from their families. But even if they started school at the age of 7, they would have spent 7 years with their school-conditioned parents whose thinking has also been limited by their school experience and their own parents who spent many years in that system where authority-driven living is the default.

Generations of families who have been schooled are not tapping anywhere near into their full potential because all they know is the system they’ve been born into: A system where authority is in charge of most decisions of their lives.

To question what your grandparents, parents, teachers and other authorities tell you can seem frightening and wrong because most people you know are living the same way and it has become the norm to do what everybody else does.

However, once you have become aware of one flaw in the system, you often cannot look the other way but start looking for more glitches. The rabbit hole seems endless but it’s also interesting beyond anything you’ve ever studied because you’re discovering the truth and your mind feels excited because you’ve finally started to use it in a purposeful way.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but we cannot understand the depth of our own mental possibilities because at school we have learned to be quite simple minded, to put it blundly, even though we are questioning the system.

Now, imagine what kind of mental (and physical) abilities you are granting your children by not just keeping them away from school but by teaching them to question, by being around other smart, free-minded, truth-seeking adults and their unschooled children!

That’s the environment you’ll find at A Place To Be :-)