‘parenting’ Archives
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 [...]
Why is it scary to honor and trust our children?
Thanks to Kyla Matton for her insightful review of our recently published book For the Sake of Our Children by Quebec author Leandre Bergeron. I know the book is challenging (otherwise, why publish it!?), but I'm wondering why the ideas of honoring one's children (rather than treating them as possessions), allowing them the freedom to [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
The Unschooling Route to Thinking for Oneself
One of the common criticisms of homeschooling is that it supposedly allows parents to “brainwash” their kids in their own narrow ways of thinking. Maybe that’s true in some families but there is a huge community of progressive home educating families that is focused on exactly the opposite. And one of the foundations of my own parenting [...]
People Are Talking…About Our Books
Thanks to all the book club members and homeschooling groups who are discussing our books - For the Sake of Our Children, Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier and Challenging Assumptions in Education. Book clubs and other groups receive a generous discount for bulk orders of more than five copies. And we're working on a set of [...]
The Not-Doing-To Lifestyle
The idea of life learning (or “unschooling” and its various subsets, as some prefer to label it) is elusively hard to understand. Many people have tried to define the concept and I’ve been observing a variety of discussions on the topic lately. I, too, have tried many times to define and describe it, although when our family was living the [...]
It Hasn’t Shut Me Up
When I began working as a writer and a journalist over 30 years ago, I had a sense of coming home, that I was doing work that perfectly fit my temperament and personality. In fact, I felt a sense of relief that I was finally able to ask questions; that I could make money doing so was a bonus. I’m known in my family as a questioner and a [...]