Posts Tagged ‘trust’
Having Fun…For the Fun of It
One of the unfortunate mainstays of the homeschooling industry is inspirational books and magazine articles describing fun things to do with your kids that are also educational. This notion that we have to make learning fun by dressing it up as games or other enjoyable activities is nonsense…and, more often than not, our kids know that. And [...]
We Know How to Learn…Until Schools Gets in the Way
I’m often bemused to read how important it is that children “learn how to learn.” It seems to be the phrase du jour among self-described progressive educators, book authors, school critics, and those who promote ever-earlier attendance at pre-school institutions. Some young children might be able to be trained – in dog-like fashion – to [...]
More Than the Absence of School
A number of people have recently asked me questions about our family life back in the 1970s and 80s. And I realized that, in all of my books and articles over the years, I haven’t written much about that. So here goes! When Rolf and I got married in 1970, we had already decided that our future children wouldn't go to school. So when Heidi [...]
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 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 [...]