After outlining the general issues the March 7, 2014, Congressional Quarterly Researcher report looks in depth at three key questions:
1. Should governments oversee home schooling more strictly?
2. Is home schooling academically superior to public schooling?
3. Can home schooling help the public school system?
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On a tactical level, it seems futile to think by signing an online petition about the laws of a country where I am not a citizen that I will somehow help shape that country’s laws. However, on a strategic level, I can see how all these actions are important and linked . . .
Read More"The mother who fails at times to be attuned to her child, facilitates her child's healthy development." Don't suffocate your children's development with too much parenting. Here's why you can relax and enjoy being a good-enough parent.
Read MorePresident Obama called for “more challenging curriculums and more demanding parents” in his state of the union address and the NY Times has followed this up with a debate on its pages, Blaming Parents for Poor Schools which, I think, encapsulate the issues of why schools are so resistant to change . . .
Read MoreEight legislators in France have decided homeschooling is dangerous and should be tightly regulated to prevent the mental, ideological, or religious conditioning of children. This is done without much, if any, evidence being produced to support this claim . . .
Read MoreIn 1975 The Continuum Concept was published and John Holt was an early, enthusiastic supporter of the book as another reason why parents should trust themselves and their children to learn and grow without constantly referring to experts to be sure they're doing it okay. Today, hunter-gatherer cultures are studied more but, as this exchange shows, what we can learn from them is difficult for many to grasp.
Read MoreA call for homeschoolers, ages 13 to 18, to participate in a research study about their civic and moral development during their high school years.
Read MoreKen Danford, a cofounder of NorthStar: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, does a TEDx presentation about this unique resource center upon its 18th anniversary.
Read MoreRecent national news about homeschooling.
What happens when homeschoolers get to use a technological platform reserved for university-level courses (Blackboard Collaborate) to co-create a free, online, nonsectarian homeschooling event? Read about it and see some presentations to draw your own conclusions.
Here's a short ad for The Legacy of John Holt using a great moment from Holt's second appearance on The Donahue Show, when Phil Donahue asks John to respond, in one sentence, how schools could be better.
Read MoreIn Germany, homeschooling has been banned due to concerns about children "adopting their parents' opinions"—this was among other reasons, but it is a major reason cited by the authorities. What, exactly, does this mean in practice?
Read MoreHomeschooling is spreading around the world, but it is facing serious challenges from institutions and governments that prefer a single, compulsory, standardized education system for processing everyone.
Read More"Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never truly grow up . . ." Thoughts about Dr. Peter Gray's latest article, The Play Deficit.
Dr. Peter Gray writes a followup article to his controversial Salon essay, "School is a Prison and Damaging Our Children" . . .
Read MoreThe latest U.S. Dept. of Education study of the number of homeschoolers in America shows continuing growth, though the rate of growth is slowing . . .
Read MoreThe latest issue of Learning All the Time, the HoltGWS newsletter, is now available for free.
Read MoreFree recordings from the first online, global homeschooling conference, including all the audio-visual presentations, are available now . . .
For those who do not enjoy and flourish in conventional schools there seem to be few choices: homeschool or enroll in a private school. However, even most of those choices mimic the conventional school model, so for someone who does not learn or enjoy the way school teaches they are not great options . . .
