‘unschooling’ Archives
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, [...]
Unschooling Young Person Starting ‘Zine
There is an articulate and passionate self-described "unschooling vegetarian animistic green anarchist hippie child" who blogs. She's starting a 'zine and is looking for contributions. I've just sent her some material. She'd welcome more.
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 [...]
Unschooling Extends John Dewey’s Legacy
October 20 marked the 150th anniversary of John Dewey’s birth. If he were alive today, the educational reformer would no doubt be aghast at the fact that the dominant educational philosophy still mimics that of an assembly line, with memorization and regurgitation of isolated “facts” organized in a pre-determined curriculum continuing to be [...]
Not Using Their Heads
I have been reading a series of feature newspaper articles about brain science and its relationship to education. Believe it or not, the education community – especially the public school system – has never paid much attention to neuroscience. You’d think that understanding how people learn would be at the very basis of how schools [...]