‘life learning’ Archives
The Dark Side of Influence
A recent blog post by a dad with kids enrolled in a Sudbury Valley type school (SVS) has prompted me to think once again about how life learning parents relate to their children in a unique way. The blogger was comparing unschooling to the SVS model because someone had once used the oxymoron “unschooling school” to describe a SVS. He came up [...]
March/April 2010 Issue Now Published
Subscribers to Life Learning Magazine have just been notified that the password-protected March/April 2010 issue is now available for them to download. You can view the table of contents here and you can subscribe here. We've also posted a short sample article from the issue on the Life Learning Magazine website. Drop by the website and [...]
Unschooling, Radical Unschooling, or Something Else?
Most life learners don’t like to label their children – whether it’s using the alphabet soup provided by those who would drug children into submissive behavior or by means of school-style grades. So I’m always amused and disturbed in equal parts when the debate begins about what to call this sort of child-led, non-coercive, lifestyle that [...]
Wanted: Unschooling Quotes by Women
A few years ago, I was approached by a woman who wanted to write my life history as a woman homeschooling advocate as her PhD thesis. While doing her MA research, she had been struck by the lack of women's voices in the academic literature. She did write that thesis as a contribution to the literature, and there are now a number of other women [...]
We’re All Life Learners
I’ve been doing the New Year clean-up shuffle over the past few days. Among the piles of random notes falling out of my journal and cluttering up my desk was this quote from John Holt: “People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.” When I first came across this [...]
Learning to Write By Doing It
I had a chat this morning with someone who was bemoaning kids’ use of technology. Her fifteen-year-old daughter wants either a cell phone or a laptop computer for Christmas, she said, but she and her husband are worried that the teen won’t “learn to write properly because of all that Facebook, Twitter and texting nonsense that young people [...]
The World is Discovering Autonomous Learning
"Kids learn on the Internet in an autonomous way, by looking around for information they're interested in or connecting with peers who can help them. This is a big departure from how they're asked to learn in most schools, where the teacher is the expert and there's a fixed set of content to master." I, and many other unschooling advocates, [...]
Preview the Cover of Life Learning’s Jan/Feb 2010 Issue
We're hard at work putting the finishing touches on Life Learning's January/February 2010 online edition. It will be ready later this month and includes an assortment of articles and essays about unschooling and self-directed learning. Included are pieces about deschooling ourselves in order to match our parenting to our children's needs, a day [...]
Not Boxing Ourselves In With Labels and Definitions
Back in the 1970s and 80s when my daughters were young, they learned by living their daily lives, through experience...both that which found them and that which they sought out. They reacted to a need or an interest by exploring, researching, asking questions, listening to others, testing their ideas and putting them into motion, getting feedback, [...]