“We go to many schools” and the decentralization of education
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My 5 year old said to me the other day as we were driving to one of their “schools”.
“We go to a lot of schools, don’t we?”
And I said, “Yes we do. Are you happy about that?”
“Yes, mama.”
And then my heart proceeded to melt. 🫠
And maybe it’s time the world could re-think what education and schools could look like. We don’t go to school, we go to many schools. We can opt in and out at any time we choose.
This is more powerful than people care to realise.
Our school definition is probably different from yours
We didn’t set out to use the term in this way, it’s more what my kids started referring to as the activities we do. I suppose it’s a model they understand, and so I will go along with it.
And actually, it’s a pretty nice term. We are home educators, but really we’re just creating or making use of other schools out there. They are just not full-time and traditional schools.
The schools they go to vary, at the moment are:
- Forest School
- Sports
- Football
- Gymnastics
- Swimming
- Badminton
- Imaginarium (a drop of ‘school’ for the day)
This is our list, and this will vary from family to family. If something is true in life, our ‘education’ preferences will never be agreed on at a human scale.
Whilst some of these are only an hour long, some are 3 hours, Imaginarium is a full day. There is a huge variety to accommodate different needs, both for the kids and the parents.
When the sessions are shorter we can add play time to it. This can be during sessions if we have multiple kids, or after. For example, my son does football whilst my girls play at the park right next to it. And sometimes, we’ll continue to hang out afterwards.
Who says school has to be the construct of what society has created, and where kids have to go full time and they have no real say in creating the rules? A quick Google and they say, “school is an institution for teaching of children”, I say school are the things we choose to do and study. And ‘the place’ is where we choose it to be…
