If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
Tag: schooling
School Should Be More Like Summer Camp
Perhaps we should look more to summer for the solutions to our school-year woes, and challenge a system that puts more emphasis on containment than freedom.
Every Remaining Remnant of Human Liberty
We don’t have a school shooting problem. We have a perception of scale problem. There are roughly 15 million high schoolers in the US at any given time. What percentage of them are actually engaging in school shootings? It’s less than 1/10,000 of 1 percent.
The Quiet Exodus from Mass Schooling
Parents are fed up. As mass schooling becomes more restrictive, more standardized and more far-reaching into a child’s young life, many parents are choosing alternatives. Increasingly, these parents are reclaiming their child’s education and are refocusing learning around children, family, and community in several different ways.
Episode 079 – Unschooled Faber Brothers’ Journey (1h37m)
Episode 079 welcomes Justin and Joshua Faber to the podcast to chat with Skyler and Morgan. The Faber Brothers, and several other siblings, grew up as de facto unschoolers, without ever knowing that term. Topics include: their large family, their Facebook video series titled All This with Aldous created with Morgan, growing up unschooling, their experience learning to read, being free range on several acres of forest, going to high school and the surreality of schooling, why school is prison, the origins of their voluntaryist political beliefs, the US Constitution, and much, much more.
Top 10 Books for Empowering Yourself as a Mother
Once I realized so many of the messages I recieved as a young girl and teenager didn’t serve me or make sense as an adult, I dove deep into books that rocked my world. I love books for this reason. They can offer a fresh new perspective and change the way you view and approach reality. One book can be a total paradigm shift for you. I have read several such books, and that is what I want to offer you here.
Some Refreshing Honesty about the Purpose of Mass Schooling
These school posters explicitly reveal the troubling reality that mass schooling retains its 19th-century roots as a system of social control. Originally designed to bring order to an increasingly diverse population, the industrial model of mass schooling continues to impose order by encouraging compliance, rewarding conformity and eliminating individuality.
Homeschoolers: The Enemy of Forced Schooling
Holt observed through his years of teaching, and recorded in his many books, that the deepest, most meaningful, most enduring learning is the kind of learning that is self-determined. As “the enemy,” we homeschoolers reject the increasing grip of mass schooling.
Bully-Proofing Won’t Work Until We Give Kids More Freedom
Children who are bullied in school have very few choices and very little recourse. Required by law to attend an assigned public school, many children and their parents have minimal agency to withdraw from a bullying scenario. Some parents will look for alternative schooling options for their bullied children, like private schools, charter schools, online schools, or homeschooling. But for many families, these choices are not available or accessible.
5 Ways Mothers Give Away their Power
This isn’t about convincing anyone to do things my way (how boring a world that would be!). But if you don’t know that you have choices beyond the mainstream world, then you aren’t actually making decisions from a place of truth and desire. You are living on autopilot and not considering the impact of living a life in accordance to the status quo, whose only agenda is to keep you relying on it. So what do I mean by giving away power?