My kids taught me to listen with an open heart, and to see without making judgments. They taught me patience, and perseverance, and persistence , but they also taught me to know when to quit. They taught me that love does not bring conditions with it, but just is, and they made me a much better person than I’d have ever been without them.
John Taylor Gatto has been an outspoken and eloquent critic of the public school system for over 20 years, and this post shared some favorite quotes from him, along with links to his biography, some videos of his speeches and interviews, and more information about this incredibly dynamic and engaging man.
Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry” (2009, Jossey-Bass), is a down-to-earth and common sense book about how to raise confident children by simply saying no to paranoid parenting, and just letting kids be kids, without invoking the harum-scarum fear tactics which have become commonplace in too many young lives today.
The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning understands learner centered democratic education as individuals deciding their own curriculum, and participating in the governance of their school-if they are in one. Some examples of learner centered democratic possibilities are unschooling, Sudbury Valley, Fairhaven, the Albany Free School, and the Beach School in Toronto. In terms of unschooling, we view it as a self-directed learning approach to learning outside of the mainstream education rather than homeschooling, which reproduces the learning structures of school in the home.
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It was inevitable: People are starting to wonder if this latest health scare and the resulting closure of schools isn’t going to lead to an epidemic… of new homeschoolers. Some interesting notes about swine flu and homeschooling from around the Internet.
