Well, Im definitely thinking again...

We forget that as white people we also have traditional ecological knowledge. We forget that it isn't the race that's the problem, its industrialisation, living indoors, advertising, and capitalism thats the problem. We look to other cultures to solve our problems and we end up bastardizing and co-opting the same things that we mean to preserve and cherish. Its a western problem, there has to be western solutions, otherwise we just end up polluting other cultures with our collective fucked up colonial attitudes and colonizing decolonization. How can someone want to deschool? As a freakin graduate student? Really? Well then, quit school. That'll deschool you pretty well. How can you dictate for others what you yourself have already gone through and benefited from? Where does that come from? What does that do? And do you realize the grave responsibility you wield when you say that? My daughter grows up in a materialistic, gendered, clearly consumerist capitalist world. She does that because she HAS TO. If she grows up in the bubble of deschooling/homeschooling/selfschooling, she lacks the skills to deal with the “real world”. We forget that we are first social animals. If we don't make sense to our social groupings especially as children, we are maladapted to life on this planet. It creates grief and unhappiness. We are creatures of conforming. People who don't end up like Levi, shot by OPP for being unable to live in society. Someone who just wanted to be left alone.

Its astonishing how much grief has been racked up over the years. Grief of incarceration, grief of clear cut, grief of concussion and brain damage, maiming and dismemberment, grief of death in Chiapas, grief of squats evicted, losing people, losing touch, child abuse, seams coming apart on already tenuous experiences of life, vulnerability, susceptibility, anxiety that seemed so prevalent in that clan. Grief of loss of enthusiasm, wonder, life, energy, creation, creativity, all going up in smoke and flames and molotov cocktails, percussion bombs and tear gas canisters and beatings. Grief of brutal, brutal beatings sustained by gentle, gentle people. And grief caused by the realization that we experience so little of what so many other people experience that we think we are justified in a moral and righteous outrage when it happens to us. Grief of privilege.

Deschooling can only exist in relation to schooling. Otherwise all you create is a less educated person. A less educated person has less power to change things because they must necessarily spend more time surviving. To learn is to thrive.