Rigged is a new young adult novel about Fisher Haskins and his search for friendship and direction that school in the Florida Keys doesn’t give him.
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If you have a teenage homeschooler or unschooler and you want to know what opportunities and resources and options are available for them, put this book in their hands. If you have a teen who is floundering in high school, put this book in their hands. If you have parents and adults questioning your sanity for allowing your teen to quit school for independent studies, put this book in their hands. If you haven’t read this book and you have or work with teenagers who don’t enjoy school, get this book.
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We sold Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics for several years in the John Holt Book and Music store. Though never a popular seller, John insisted on keeping it in the catalog. As time passes, I see more and more why John Holt wanted more people to know about this book and how hard it is for human-scale solutions to take hold in a world possessed by the massive consumption of goods and services as the best way for society to prosper.
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The 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…
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I have two strong impressions after viewing the movie Unschooled. One because I personally know Peter Bergson and the second because of my experience advocating for unschooling and self-directed education.
I went to the screening already knowing that Peter was upset with his portrayal in the film and with the film’s over-riding narrative of “kindly white person saves inner-city minority youths.” . . .
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There are issues facing us today that are larger than any single educational or regulatory issue homeschoolers face, namely racism and intolerance of people unlike ourselves. These issues need to be called out by all who support a free and just society.
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Dan 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.
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“If you look at how much of the morning goes into waking the kids up when they’re not done sleeping, getting them to shower, go to the bathroom, eat, arguing. ‘Come on. You need to go! You’re going to be late.’ They sometimes started to cry and I had to hurry to work with that on my mind.”
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Cecilie and Jesper Felumb Conrad have totally different education backgrounds and life experiences but over time they agreed that unschooling was the best choice for their family.
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My wife and I were in Denmark in the mid-1980s and I asked a Dane we got to know if homeschooling was allowed in Denmark. He replied why would anyone do that in Denmark? They could make whatever school they wanted. 35 years later there is now a nascent homeschooling/unschooling movement there. Is something rotten in Denmark?
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Two new online forums built expressly for unschooled teenagers are described by Jim Flannery, the founder/moderator of both. Plus the third Northeast Changemakers Jam happens at the end of March.
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There aren’t many homeschoolers and unschoolers who openly discuss mental illness in their lives but those who do, such as Mary Herrington, show us how people can successfully manage even these difficult lives . . .
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. . . If I could have given myself one piece of advice when I was a child, it would have been: “If you happen to make your mark by doing what you purely enjoy, then fine. But never do what you fail to enjoy for the sake of making your mark.” . . .
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From 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."
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Montessori’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 . . .
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"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
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The 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.
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We 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 . . .
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Documentary films from France and Portugal explore unschooling and other paradigms of learning in juxtaposition to the factory model of modern schooling.
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John 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 . . .
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