Written by Nicole Olson for Unschoolers.org. Back in my mainstream days, I was an avid fan of the nanny shows. There were several on at the time, and they all boasted the same thing – that by using their techniques even the most wild of children could be tamed, that houses filled with chaos and…
Tag: schooling
Schools as Black-Holes
Written by Butler Shaffer for LewRockwell.com. There is an old joke about how knowledge accumulates in universities: students enter college, knowing everything, and graduate knowing nothing. In this way does knowledge continue to grow within universities. My years of experience in what is referred to as “higher education” inform me that there is more than…
When Does Guidance Become Manipulation?
Written by Jan Hunt for The Natural Child Project. 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…
School is Not For Learning
Written by Grace Llewellyn, as published at The Natural Child Project. Our brains and spirits are the freest things in the universe. Our bodies can live in chains, but our intellects cannot. It’s that simple. The mind will be free, or it will be dead. It can be numbed, quieted, and restrained so that it…
Radical Unschooling With Teens
Video by Dayna Martin.
Unschooling in the World: Joyce Fetteroll
An Interview by Sandra Dodd. One of my favorite unschooling analysts is Joyce Fetteroll, of Medfield, Massachusetts. Joyce has been writing about unschooling since 1995, when her daughter, Kathryn, was four. Joyce has an engineering degree and worked for a while as a software engineer and technical writer for a communications company. Her husband, Carl,…
Unschooling: You’ll See it When you Believe It
Written by Sandra Dodd, as published at The Natural Child Project. Following years of sporadic reports by people who claimed they had tried unschooling but it hadn’t worked for them, I started tracking their similarities and, as usual, I learned something new. And, as usual, I thought I should share it so others might not…
How I Learned the Mechanics of Money, and So Can You
Send him mail. “Insight for the Young and Unrestrained” is an original weekly column appearing every Thursday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Gregory V. Diehl. Gregory is a writer, musician, educator, and coach for young people at EnabledYouth.com. Archived columns can be found here. IYU-only RSS feed available here. To date, one of the most influential books…
The Largest Perpetrator of Violence
Writes Free Your Kids: A quick welcome to those of you who have just joined us. We talk mainly about peaceful parenting, unschooling, and the abolition of the state. Wait? Abolition of the state? What’s that doing on a page devoted to freeing children? It all melds together seamlessly, I think. We’re anti-violence, anti-coercion, and…
You Ask, Can I Homeschool?
Writes Free Your Kids: You ask, can I homeschool? Do I have what it takes? Answer the following short quiz to see if you can be an effective home educator… Do I have a library card or access to books?Do I have internet access?Do I have markers, pens, crayons, paper, scissors, and other such things?Am…