On unschooling, wrong turns, and why the clearest decisions start with knowing what to refuse.
I didn’t know unschooling was right for my son.
I want to be honest about that, because most stories about unconventional choices get told backwards, with the ending already visible in the beginning, the narrator standing in hindsight and making it all look like vision. It wasn’t vision. It was something much more uncomfortable and much more useful.
It was clarity about what to stop.
What I was certain about
What I knew, with absolute certainty, was that what he was being offered wasn’t going to allow him to become capable of choosing how to live his life. It would slowly shape him into a brick to fit somewhere in a broken system. Which is a completely different thing. And honestly, much easier to be certain about.
This is a distinction worth sitting with. We are told, again and again, that good decisions require knowing where you’re going. That you need a plan, a vision, a destination you can name before you take the first step. And so people wait. They stay in situations that are wrong for them because they can’t yet articulate what the right situation looks like.
But most of the time, the wrong is visible long before the right is.
You don’t need to know what a good education looks like to recognize that this one is extinguishing something in your child. You don’t need a fully formed alternative to know that the current arrangement is slowly making someone smaller. The no arrives first, clearer and earlier, and it deserves to be trusted.
The rest figured itself out
After we left, the path did not reveal itself immediately. There were wrong turns. Unwanted advice from people who were certain we were ruining him. Difficult stretches where I wondered whether I had made the whole thing worse. At one point, only half joking, I entertained the thought that I might be raising a future drug addict.
I now see all of that as part of the process.
Not because it wasn’t hard. It was. But because difficulty is not the same as wrongness. We confuse the two constantly. We take the presence of doubt, friction, and uncertainty as evidence that we have made a mistake, when often they are simply what the beginning of something worth feels like.
The alternative, staying in something clearly wrong because the path forward isn’t yet clear, has its own costs. They are just quieter. Slower. Easier to not notice until much later.
What freedom actually produced
After years of unstructured learning, of following what genuinely interested him, of discipline only when it was truly necessary rather than as a default mode of control, I have this small person who reads classics, studies architecture, builds his own models, and writes poems. He does all of this while dressing as a lord, because that is also who he is and no one has told him it’s strange.
People sometimes say: oh, but that’s just his character.
And I want to ask: where do you think character comes from? Character is not something children are born with fully formed and then carry intact through whatever environment they’re placed in. It is something that either gets space to develop or doesn’t. The children raised in freedom are not automatically savages. What I see far more often are children whose natural curiosity and self-direction have been so thoroughly managed out of them that they have no idea what they actually want, and act out the frustration of that in ways that look like wildness but are really something else.
There is a reason for this. And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
Trusting the no
Most of the good decisions I’ve made started not with clarity about what to do, but with absolute clarity about what to stop doing.
This is true in more than parenting. It’s true in work, in relationships, in the slow process of building a life that actually fits you. The no is almost always clearer. It arrives before the yes, less dressed up, less exciting, but more honest.
We distrust it because it doesn’t come with a map. It just closes a door and leaves you in the hallway. And we’ve been taught to believe that standing in the hallway is failure, when it is often the most necessary part of the whole journey.
The yes finds you eventually. But only if you’ve had the courage to honour the no first.
Trust the no. It almost always knows before you do.