Guest post by John Holt. Educators talk all the time about “skills”: reading skills, writing skills, communication skills, even listening skills. It may be true, at the level of words, to say that anyone doing a difficult thing well is using a variety of skills. But this does not mean that the best way to…
Category: Unschooling
Let’s Raise Kids to be Entrepreneurs
Guest post Cameron Herold.
Facilitating Our Children’s Desires
Guest post by Nicole Olsen. For two years now my daughter Katy has wanted a cat. No, wanted isn’t really the right word. Passionately desired with every fiber of her being is more like it. At first, I kind of figured it was a passing phase. After all, she was barely five years old. Her tastes changed…
Education
Guest post by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By…
Learning Happens
Guest post by Wendy Priesnitz. Classic not-back-to-school question: “But what if a child doesn’t choose to learn math?” But that’s the issue, see. A child who lives and learns without schooling doesn’t have to choose to learn math! Learning math is a notion created and perpetuated by a group of adult experts who think that…
How Youth Resistance Was Crushed
Guest post by Bruce E. Levine. Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that…
Schooling: The American Way
Guest post by SchoolSucksPodcast.
Unschooling: Coping with Critics
Guest post by Nicole Olson. My husband, my son, and my mom are truly unschooling enthusiasts, and they love to talk about it with pretty much anybody. Thomas has even been known to start singing its praises to the cashier at the local grocery store! Being an introvert, I find I’m a little more reticent…
When does Guidance become Manipulation?
Guest post by Jan Hunt. Many homeschooling parents have puzzled over the distinction between “guidance” and “manipulation”. As a parent strongly committed to “unschooling” (learner-directed homeschooling) with my son Jason, now 17, I have sometimes wondered if I should encourage certain activities in spite of a lack of interest on his part, or at least…
School is Bad for Children
Guest post by John Holt. Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling – or,…