Posts Tagged ‘parenting’
Kids Are Capable of Much More Than We Give Them Credit For
The recent sailing misadventure of sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland and the successful climbing of Mount Everest by thirteen-year old Jordan Romero have me thinking about skill and ability as related to age. Whenever a kid accomplishes something major, it hits the media because children aren't expected to achieve much in our society. But the [...]
Beginnings: It Hasn’t Shut Me Up
As part of the process of writing a memoir called It Hasn’t Shut Me Up (my 10th book, to be published when it’s done), I’ve been examining the roots of my radicalism – especially as it relates to education. Like most other people, my upbringing and my schooling in the 1950s and ‘60s taught me to accept what I was told by my parents, my [...]
Unschooled Teens Are Different
There has been some discussion lately about (and by!) teenaged life learners. All too often, teens are collectively discriminated against or looked down upon due to their supposed bad behavior, moodiness, etc., etc. However, I think much of that is due to the way they are treated in our society...and people's expecta...tions of and respect for [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]