I saw the headline in Monday’s Harvard Gazette: “Life Stories Keep Harvard Bibliophile Fixed to the Page.” My first thought was, ‘I bet he was homeschooled.” He was.
Tag: homeschooling
The Association for Teaching Kids Economics (35m) – Episode 083
Episode 083 welcomes Thomas Bogle back to the podcast to talk about his new organization, “The Association for Teaching Kids Economics”. Topics include: The Tuttle Twins by Connor Boyack, illustrated by Elijah Stanfield, teaching economics, liberty, and free markets to kids, why teachers fear teaching economics in primary school, “mainline” economics, Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” and The Lego Movie, Tom’s search for sponsors and personnel in each state to aid introduction and expansion, Socratic method based curriculum, CinemaSins, and the classroom ambassadors program.
You Don’t Have to Be a Fool to Deschool
Growing up as a child, I remember watching “pro-education” commercials with slogans like “Don’t be a fool, Stay in School” or “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Where I’m from, the term “drop-out” generates just about the same effect as the term “dope-dealer.”
My Homeschoolers Love Worksheets, Because They’re 100% Voluntary
Unschooling, or Self-Directed Education, means giving young people the freedom and opportunity to direct their own learning, following their own interests and passions, using the full resources of real and digital communities, without coercion.
Unschooling and Workbooks
Just as we have crayons and paper, books and computers, yarn and playdough, magazines and watercolors, we have workbooks. They are nothing fancy–just the ones you can pick up at a local store or online (my gang seems to like Brain Quest)–but they are scattered around our home. These workbooks are available to the kids, just like all other tools and supplies, to use and explore as they like.
Letter To a Prospective Homeschooling Parent
Welcome to the exciting world of learning without schooling! You have already taken the important first step in redefining your child’s education by acknowledging the limitations of mass schooling, recognizing the ways it can dull a child’s curiosity and exuberance, and seeking alternatives to school. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, exhale, and explore.
Self-Directed Education Is Instinctual
The key advantage of Self-Directed Education is that it empowers parents and children. Parents learn to trust their children’s natural learning instincts while tapping into their own instincts about how to best nurture their children’s growth. Children learn to trust themselves, retaining their innate creativity and desire to explore and understand the world around them.
A Voluntaryist 7-Point Plan
As advocates of a truly free society, we voluntaryists, unlike the statists who outnumber us, do not engage in traditional political activism. This simple fact got me thinking about a habitual plan or checklist each of us might form or follow quite naturally, in the course of our daily lives in order to promote the kind of stateless socioeconomic order we envision.
Life Outside the Cloister
Every time a person asks how homeschoolers learn about relationships or socialization, I think that some folks must believe a) that homeschooled kids must be stuck in the home all day, since their own experience is with being stuck in a cloister, and b) they must not realize that lots of life actually happens outside that tiny cloister in which they spent most of their early lives.
Why Most Homeschooling Systems Devolve, and Why You Can’t Plan a Startup
The notion of a year-long plan created in an Ivory Tower and imposed on all students of the same age without deviation no matter what market feedback is coming is absurd and tyrannical. Imagine an incubator like Y-Combinator paying some smarties to come up with The One True Business Model, roll-out schedule, target market, hiring strategy, budget, and action plan, and imposing it upon every one of the startups in their program. Oh, and demanding every company produce and sell the exact same product.