But it’s really, really hard to do. Dale McGowan at Meming of Life has written about “confirmation bias” in trying to enlighten ourselves about religious doctrine, where even a tough, serious and motivated mind may have embedded scripts below the level of consciousness that sabotage objective inquiry in decision-making of all kinds.

It feels so risky to stop believing the party line of either church or school, that our own minds and emotions are on the other side working against us! — to talk us out of it or if that fails, TRICK us out of it, for our own good of course, because conformity feels safer to the lizard brain.

The primitive fear is the same in either case, that if you reject either school or church teachings, you will be cast out into the darkness and damned, your life will lose all meaning and you’ll eat out your own liver for eternity. Talk about high stakes tests!

JJ’s Hypothesis: Adults determined to study and test their own embedded beliefs about either church or school, are likely to have similar personal experiences with both.

Some people get to unschooling more with their feelings, often after being so monstrously mistreated by schooling that the mind finally will accept almost anything as being safer than a return to that. Same with church. Maybe think about “church” conventions as a parallel to “school” conventions — how the culture indoctrinates us that both are some sort of universal human truth and resistance is futile. As children we receive church AND school dogma as “written on our hearts” to the point that as adults, daring to break with belief inside our own hearts and minds, can feel like falling into an abyss.

Others of us get there with our thinking more than our feelings, I guess. Like me.

But even as we think we’re being so analytical and rational, and we try consciously to challenge the cultural scripts about church (and school) all around us, they keep playing on a loop INSIDE us all during our inquiry, under the level of rationality, and it’s very hard to resist; I imagine it must be something like how addiction feels? When the mind has doubts about embedded scripts of school and church, even a well-educated and scientific mind tends to rationalize away the doubt to resolve the dissonance, and usually that means the embedded idea is not only not removed, it’s actually reinforced and harder than ever to think away the next time. This is not logical but very human.

I read and researched for years, tried several belief systems and thought I had a couple of transformative spiritual experiences even, before I could finally set aside my lizard brain scripts of church — and then I had to start all over again with school. Studied it all, tried it all, thought I believed and embraced it all, until I had my own children. ( That should be the picture in the dictionary next to the word “epiphany!”) So then I addressed my growing doubts with years of gorging on cognitive and education psychology, and that eventually became my own mind’s way of accepting that any risk in unschooling was better than the known system failures of schooling.