Holt's most political book, Freedom and Beyond is also a very practical and useful book for parents and anyone who works with children because it explores in detail many of the tensions caused by giving freedom. Partners who argue over the value of self-directed learning, who worry about discipline, and so on will find that Holt presents both sides of these tensions and notes they will never go away . . .
Read MoreFrom Freedom and Beyond: "In sum, a deschooled society would be a society in which everyone shall have the widest and freest possible choice to learn whatever he wants to learn, whether in school or in some altogether different way . . . . It would be a society in which there were many paths to learning and advancement, instead of one school path as we have now . . . a path far too narrow for everyone, and one too easily and too often blocked off from the poor."
Read MoreNow, there’s no doubt that homeschooling is a choice, but for me and other homeschoolers I know, it was not a choice of schools, it was a choice for our family to avoid the rat race of school: its busy work and pressure for labels, grades, class status, and homework. Our choice was not to go to school and to not turn our home into a school—and that’s a choice I never read about in the school choice literature . . .
Read MoreMontessori’s ideas are being adapted by some to meet the growth of the homeschooling movement and the organizer of the Montessori Homeschool Online Conference asked me to talk about some general principles I’ve learned as a homeschooling advocate . . .
Read MoreI often encounter fake news as a reason the election went the way it did. But I’m more upset by the real news accounts and analysis of the election results that claim, in short, this election was the triumph of the less educated over the educated—the idiocracy wins!
Read More"Informal or spontaneous learning is often far more effective than formal learning." If you agree with this position, please share this video with your friends and let us know your thoughts, or join the Alliance: http://www.self-directed.org
Read MoreThe movie’s exploration of how children and adults learn and grow together without following conventional school and child-rearing practices is vivid. Indeed, its celebration of childbirth and parenthood at the start of the film sets a beautiful tone for why parents might want to continue this type of holistic family life as opposed to conventional, fractured work/school/family schedules.
Read MoreWe want ASDE to be a self-sustaining and steady voice in support of self-directed education in this time of intense technological and bureaucratic surveillance and control of our lives and learning. We want self-directed education to be seen as normative, rather than alternative, in the public discourse about education . . .
Read MoreDocumentary films from France and Portugal explore unschooling and other paradigms of learning in juxtaposition to the factory model of modern schooling.
Read More"Many of us may coerce without meaning to.
"The question is, what kind of influence do we exercise over other people, what kind of open or hidden pressure do we put on them, what chance do we give them to say No, what do they risk if they do say it? . . ."
Read MoreJohn Young, a twelfth-grade English teacher, recently contacted me about The Norton Reader, which he uses in his classes and that first introduced John Holt’s thoughts about education to him years earlier. Mr. Young mentioned that Norton was no longer using Holt’s article and he was disappointed in this development . . .
Read MoreHomeschooling and unschooling continue to expand and gain acceptance around the world as conventional schooling ossifies.
Read MoreThe voices and ideas of the young are often paid lip service and then ignored by those in power—at home, in school, and in politics—so is it any wonder the young are jaded about the political process?
Read MoreSome thoughts about about unschooling and homeschooling after speaking in Dublin, Ireland and Brooklyn, NY recently, plus an article, "Awakening Ourselves to New Possibilities in Education."
Read MoreIt is all too easy, particularly in election years, to forget that homeschooling is a wide-ranging social movement, not a party-specific political movement . . .
Read MoreMy thoughts on an article in the Journal of Philosophy of Education that discusses, among other interesting things, the uneasy relationships between homeschooling and mainstream schooling.
Read MoreFrom John Holt's reply to Dr. Jerome Bruner's letter to the NY Review of Books: "The proper business of the intellectual is to make complicated ideas more simple, not simple ideas more complicated; to make the real world more comprehensible, not less so." Read more about this sharp exchange . . .
Read MoreShilpa and Manish Jain are grassroots education activists located in the United States and India, respectively. This spring each is putting on a unique event that approaches vast educational change at a personal, empowering level . . .
Read MoreTwenty-two personal accounts about why and how fathers decide to embrace and support unschooling. Peaceful parenting and thoughtful support for their children's mental, spiritual, and physical development are some of the important themes that get explored by the men in this new collection.
Read MoreThe questions from parents that Blake responded to at his talk are the same ones myself and others in homeschooling for the past 30+ years also asked when we started—childrearing issues don't differ from previous generations as much as our external circumstances do—and I feel obligated to pass those answers forward . . .
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