Posts Tagged ‘self-reliance’
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 [...]
Unschooling from a Father’s Perspective
Life Learning Magazine's publisher Life Media also publishes a small selection of books under The Alternate Press Imprint, founded in 1976. Our most recent book is For the Sake of Our Children by Leandre Bergeron. This book is unique in many ways. One of them is that it's a natural parenting memoir written from the perspective of a father who [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]