Deschooling

Deschooling is a term invented by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. Today,^[when?] the word is mainly used by homeschoolers, especially unschoolers, to refer to the transition process that children and parents go through when they leave the school system in order to start homeschooling.^[1][2] The process is a crucial basis for homeschooling to work.^[3] It involves children gradually transitioning away from their schoolday routine and institutional mentality, redeveloping the ability to learn via self-determination, and discovering what they want to learn in their first homeschool days.^[4]

The amount of time this process takes can vary, depending on the type of person the child is and how much time they spent in the school system.^[5][6][7] The process may affect the behavior of different children differently. Especially in the first days of deschooling, it is often the case that children mainly want to recover from the school surroundings and therefore will generally sleep very long and refuse any kind of intentional learning and instead search for substitute satisfactions like watching TV or playing video games, very similar to the behavior during early school holidays.^[8][9] Further in this transition process, children may feel bored or may miss the daily structure,^[5] until they eventually find out how to make use of their time and freedom^[6] to find interests. In the best case this results in them voluntarily informing themselves about certain things they are interested in, whereupon homeschooling can start.

This step is often considered a recreation stage or a process of healing from the school environment. Many followers of the modern homeschool movement consider this step necessary because the school system can damage the innate creativity, curiosity, and willingness to learn in children.^[6] They claim that in school most children only study under unnatural extrinsic pressure like grades, instead of for themselves, and that what, when, how, and with whom to learn is always predetermined instead of self-determinable there.^[2]