Helen on July 26th, 2009

Home Education Magazine publisher Helen Hegener shares information about Lenore Skenazy’s weblog and book on Free-Range Kids, which explores the concept of how, “Somehow, a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing. They have lost confidence in everything: Their neighborhood. Their kids. And their own ability to teach their children how to get by in the world.”

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Helen on May 22nd, 2009

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.

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Helen on May 14th, 2009

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.

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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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Helen on April 6th, 2009

We’ve spruced up the looks of the site and re-organized some of the navigation, on our way to publishing the complete archives of Home Education Magazine online – that’s twenty-six years of published content – while we continue to broadcast timely news, great homeschooling resources, and plenty of valuable information from the HEM blogs.

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