In this first of three posts, titled Compelled to Attend, HEM’s Road Less Travelled columnist, Linda Dobson, is revisiting her first book, The Art of Education: Reclaiming Your Family, Community and Self, published by Home Education Press in 1995. An excerpt:

And if colleges and universities ignore the true meaning of education and accept indoctrination as their function in society, what then is the purpose of all the years of schooling that lead up to college, starting at the tender age of five or, in many cases today, even younger?

Continue reading at the link above.

Susan Ryan blogs about a Thanksgiving Throwdown with Master Chef Bobby Flay and Ree Drummond, also known as The Pioneer Woman:

In the introduction of The Pioneer Woman’s life, Bobby Flay pointed out that she homeschools her four kids.

And:

This particular hour of Throw Down a Thanksgiving Feast was charming and fun and half of it was about a homeschooling mom’s life.

Check it out via Susan’s Corn & Oil blog.

In an article titled Does Your Homeschooling Support Natural Learning Behaviors? homeschool mom, advocate and blogger Sara McGrath explores the concepts behind how children learn through following their curiosity, through play and exploration, and through experience. Sara, the author of Unschooling: A Lifestyle of Learning, The Unschooling Happiness Project, and Memoirs of A Strange Little Girl, lives near Seattle with her husband and three daughters. She writes about homeschooling and many other topics for online publications and print magazines.

Susan Ryan at the Corn & Oil blog is upbeat about an article on homeschooling titled Grooming the Next Generation of Leaders. Good quotes:

“We have greater opportunities as homeschoolers to dance to the beat of our own drums,” Alyssa said, adding, “The only downside is that we can never just watch a movie without having to dissect the plot afterwards.”

“As a mother, I am always told, ‘You homeschool? I could never do that.’ I consider myself the most fortunate woman in the world to have the privilege to invest my life in three spectacular young ladies,” Austin-Taitt said. “In the process of teaching them through the years, it is I who have learned the greatest lessons from them. I have learned to laugh hilariously, cry passionately – and learn incessantly.”

This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, at The Homespun Life blog, features some great articles, covering a variety of subjects, including lifestyle, faith, and classical music, and beginning with the founder of the Homeschool Carnival, Henry Cate from ‘Why Homeschool’.

The Mississippi homeschooling family of Robert and Debra Shinn is facing every homeschooler’s – no, every family’s – nightmare. In a post aptly titled When Hell Came to Our Home the homeschool blogger mom known as Lioness writes “a story that gets scarier and more bizarre the further along it goes.” She implores readers, “Please repost this story far and wide. One forum already refused it as being too “troublesome”, but I am terrified as to what will happen to my children and myself if no one knows.”

An excerpt:

What with all the upset, it’s nightfall before I get around to mentioning to dh that the internet went down right before this started. Dh teaches computer building and maintenance classes. He gets out his kit and checks the line. He reports back that there’s 1/10th volt on the line, and the only thing that could have caused that would be if it were deliberately switched off at the relay station.

Dh goes over to Good Buddy’s house to make phone calls. He calls the cops. They say, “Get out. Get out now. It’s not safe.” He calls a relative in another county for shelter.

Sunday Morning.

We throw everything in the car and leave for the relative’s house.

Then things start getting scary.

Sound a little over-the-top? Read Lioness’s multiple posts and decide for yourself, and read the updates she’s posting to continue following the developments. And share her story far and wide, not only to help Lioness and her family, but to help others who might face similar situations and be wondering what they can do.

Huffington Post blogger Kate Fridkis writes about the New York Style Magazine article on upscale New York homeschool cooperatives:

The New York Times Style Magazine piece about the trendy Brooklyn homeschoolers, “School’s In,” both did and didn’t remind me of my own pre-college education. My family called it unschooling, because we didn’t have any classes. We were living in one of the parts of New Jersey that has a surprising number of farms, and our neo-Nazi neighbors harassed our black neighbors. We had “group,” which met every week or so–not for French lessons, but for random fun. The kids from group, local homeschoolers of different ages, went ice skating in the winter. We were the only ones on the rink, except for a foul-tempered skate guard with a bristling mustache. We went to parks in the summer. We built a raft out of recycling buckets and plywood and floated on the pond. We were not cool. Some of us ate processed cheese. No one had very much money.

Continue reading Kate’s outstanding article at “School’s In,”. But for those who won’t click the link, here is an important reminder about homeschooling (but we suggest skipping this and just reading Kate’s entire excellent article):

Both of my parents are very, very smart. They are both good at networking. They are both creative. But most importantly, in terms of my education, they both somehow were able to agree that I would turn out fine, even if I never sat in a classroom. They somehow trusted that children will always learn, as long as they are encouraged.

The Brooklyn homeschoolers’ world, as described, sounds so delicate to me. Which is funny, because people have always imagined my world to be constructed out of fragile materials and a rare brand of naïve idealism. This is a narrative about homeschooling that people repeat. It’s not “real.” It’s sort of a fantasy. It’s not gritty and down to earth and diverse. Maybe this is always at least partly true, but maybe it also just depends a lot on who is doing the homeschooling, or the unschooling. Because the truth is, school and home are never really perfectly balanced alternatives to one another. They aren’t opposites. School is controllable and uniform to an extent that unschool can’t possibly be.

Susan Ryan at Corn and Oil cautions: “I want to point out again…that the Regional Offices of Education are systematically pushing for daytime curfews in Illinois communities to rein in homeschoolers. It’s all over the state, but quite a few southern Illinois communities in a couple of Regional Offices of Education areas with anti-homeschool agendas have passed curfews in the last few months.” Click on Susan’s link to read much more.

Homeschool advocate Patrick Farenga writes about a message he’s carried “for decades” from John Holt, founder of the groundbreaking Growing Without Schooling:

“…the message of John’s that echoes more today than ever for me is this: college is among the chief enslaving institutions of America.

“When Holt said this I believe he was thinking about graduates who spent time and money on degrees to work in fields they no longer enjoy but are now trapped by their mortgages and loans into staying. Now this critique is gaining traction outside the circle of alternative schooling, probably because the cost of higher education is so out of alignment with its benefits. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom is we must send our kids to college so they can make more money than high school graduates do.”

Patrick makes several very good points in his post, and points his readers to further good reading.

Debbie Harbeson ponders some questions about labeling children in her post, Homeschooling as a Method of Child-Proofing, on her Freedom and Fun blog:

“I’ve recently discovered Peter Gray’s Freedom to Learn Blog and I enjoy reading his perspective on learning. His most recent post, ADHD and School: The Problem of Assessing Normalcy in an Abnormal Environment makes the case that problems resulting in ADHD diagnoses may have more to do with the schools than any actual “problem” with the children diagnosed.

“This topic is interesting to me because I’ve encountered it in different situations (on a purely anecdotal basis of course).

“As a homeschooling parent, I met many families over the years whose children were having great difficulty in the school environment and were told their child had ADHD. Yet when they removed their child from school, those problems either went completely away or were lessened so tremendously, there was no need for any medical intervention.”

Read the rest of Debbie’s good post at the link above.