Editor’s Pick. Written by Sue Elvis. My children follow their own interests when it comes to learning. This sounds rather indulgent, doesn’t it? Why should I let them direct their own learning? Hey, they’re only kids. How do they know what they need to know? I stop and think about these questions for a moment,…
Category: Unschooling
That Which Is Learned vs. That Which Is Not Learned
Editor’s Pick. Written by Chantal K. Saucier. Human beings learn constantly and they do so from the time they are born until the time they die. I have yet to meet anyone who did not believe this to be true. Yet, the vast majority of people also seem to believe that human beings between the…
Our Own Measures of Success
Editor’s Pick. Written by Christopher Rowley. I have recently heard a similar sentiment across the various unschooling communities that I am privileged to have access to. The boiled down version of this sentiment seems to center on confusion concerning ideas related to goals and measureable successes. If I phrase the thoughts I have heard in…
Does Unschooling Mean “Anything Goes”?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Jennifer McGrail. One thing I hear fairly often is that people will “experiment” with radical unschooling, the kids will go wild (for lack of another term) and the parents will pronounce it a failure. But the problem isn’t unschooling. The problem is that if you take kids who are used to…
Getting Kids to Help with the Chores
Editor’s Pick. Written by Sue Elvis. It took me years to work out how to encourage my children to help with the household chores. Before that happened, I tried all the usual methods: I designed rosters with jobs for each child for each day of the week. I wrote out lists of chores and let…
Why I’m Glad My Family is Unschooling
Editor’s Pick. Written by Charles Morris. The most important moment of our lives is not in the future. And that is the most important thing on my list of reasons why I’m glad my family is unschooling. In the public schools I went to, the sole focus was that I had a job to do.…
Learning Versus Thinking
Editor’s Pick. Written by Darci Walker. Last night I watched a Ted talk by Jacob Barnett, a 13-year-old genius with Asperger’s. His message? “Forget what you know.” “Stop learning and start thinking.” And, while Jacob’s story begins with how the educational and diagnostic systems that we have in our society were not able to meet…
Learn Free – An Unschooling Documentary
Editor’s Pick. Video by Nielsio.
Unschooled Kids Mythbusting
Editor’s Pick. Written by Shae. Generalizations make the baby jeebus weep. And I’m getting a bit over them to be honest. Lets bust some myths shall we? Unschooled kids are all weird. You know what? Some are. REALLY weird even. But then there are a whole bunch of kids who have never set foot inside…
The Politics of Play
Editor’s Pick. Written by Jay Griffiths. Aged fourteen and without his parents’ approval, the future King Henry II hired a band of mercenaries, sailed from France to England, and failed to take two minor castles. In the realm of fiction, the audacious and adventurous Huckleberry Finn, only “thirteen or fourteen,” rebels against the mores of…