In Freedom and Beyond, John Holt writes, “Another consequence of defining education as schooling is that as we put more and more of our educational resources into schools, we have less and less left over for those institutions that are truly open and educative and in which more and more people might learn for themselves.” This conference had little to say about education models that aren’t like school, but it’s a start.
Read MoreA criticism of homeschooling is that we are experimenting on our children and their futures by not doing what school does. John Holt, in the above photo, is with his fifth-grade students at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He’s an example of a teacher who changed his ideas about schooling by experimenting with his students.
Read MoreThe emphasis on doing school like we always have during the pandemic has caused childrens’ health and safety to be severely affected. Schools could have helped families by shifting their focus from the needs of the academic schedule to the real-world needs of children to socialize, explore, play, and exercise…
Read MoreI think homeschooling is getting a bad rap during the pandemic. Parents are pulling their hair out trying to teach their children at home and cursing homeschooling as a result. However, participating in daily classroom lessons sent from school to do at home is *remote learning*, not homeschooling. This is why many homeschoolers use the word *unschooling* to describe what they do: learning at home doesn’t have to occur only at home nor resemble learning in school.
Read MoreDan Greenberg, a founder of the Subury Valley School, writes “Sudbury Valley Schools and unschooling have NOTHING in common.” I write why we have much more in common than Greenberg claims.
Read MoreIf schools aren’t able or obligated to teach some children to read why can’t we create publicly funded alternatives to school for those children? Self-directed learning challenges Horace Mann’s assumption about the need to compel school attendance: Freedom does not necessarily result in ignorance.
Read MoreSteve Hargadon’s survey is inspired by the book The Game of School, and it is a deep dive past the usual questions of school efficiency towards more qualitative questions about parents’ and students’ frustrations, fears, anger, hopes and dreams, and opportunities regarding school.
Read MoreSitting in a classroom or at home in front of a teaching machine is hardly a major advancement for a child’s social, physical, and mental growth. Our 19th century school assumptions about how learning happens bind us to an industrial model of the school as a knowledge factory, rather than a model of people as active learners. The photo on this post is from an article about the history of B.F. Skinner and his teaching machine by Audrey Watters.
Read MoreSince the dawn of time children were an integral part of adult daily life, for better or worse, but since the Industrial Revolution we've deliberately kept them out of adult society to focus them on school instruction, school schedules, and school awards.
Read MoreThis is a great resource for anyone thinking about what we can do besides replicate conventional school practices and schools.
Read MoreIt seems that every discussion about education assumes the primary goal of lower educational institutions is to get people into higher educational institutions. But there are better ways of thinking of one’s learning besides as a means to get a checkbox ticked on an application—after all, learning never stops, it ebbs and flows in intensity over your life . . .
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 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 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 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 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 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 . . .
Read MoreOver the last few months we created this series of six videos, handouts, and a private member's forum to help you start and continue homeschooling in your own way. I wrote a new book, How to Report Unschooling to School Officials, as a capstone to this project (you can get the book separately). But you can get a special price on the complete package . . .
Read More
