Don’t miss this tomorrow morning!

Conversation on WizIQ with Patrick Farenga

Join the conversation with Patrick Farenga, a leader in the homeschooling movement, on WizIQ on April 12 at 10 EST and find out what can and should be done to change the school system from where it counts, at home.

Pat Farenga will be interviewed by Dr. Nellie Muller for an hour.  From the WizIQ Press Release:

A homeschooling expert, a prolific writer, speaker and education consultant, Pat has written many articles and book chapters for publications as diverse as Mothering magazine, Paths of Learning magazine, Home Education Magazine, The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society and The Encyclopedia of School Administration, and has appeared on local and national television and radio shows like The Today Show, The Voice of America, NPR’s The Merrow Report,and CNN’s Parenting Today.President of Holt Associates Inc. and author of popular books like ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Homeschooling’ and ‘Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling’, he has been the publisher of ‘Growing Without Schooling magazine’ (GWS), America’s first periodical about homeschooling, started by Holt in 1977 from 1985 until it stopped publishing in Nov. 2001.

Later this month, Pat will also be speaking at the The Alternatives to Compulsory Schooling Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Gutman Conference Center.  Looks like a great conference to me.

In this brilliant video lecture, The history of alternative schooling and homeschooling, Canadian-American documentary filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor describes her own homeschooling – specifically unschooling as promoted by John Holt in his ground-breaking publication Growing Without Schooling (“delivered to our mailbox in a brown paper bag”). She contextualizes her unschooled experiences and the progressive homeschooling movement by reference to the history of alternate education, especially the public conversation about it in the sixties and seventies:

“Raised by independent-thinking bohemian parents, Taylor was unschooled until age 13. Join the filmmaker as she shares her personal experiences of growing up home-schooled without a curriculum or schedule, and how it has shaped her educational philosophy and development as an artist.”

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.

Valerie Bonham Moon, who edited this News & Commentary blog for a long time, posted a properly scathing analysis of the recent programs on unschooling at her Happy as Kings blog:

“…not only are the subject and the bias not news, they’re not new. Unschooling is so old, cyber-culturally speaking, that the newsletter-magazine devoted to it, Growing Without Schooling shuttered itself in 2001 after 24 years.”

And later:

“Watching the Nightline report on the Martin family, and the Good Morning America segment featuring the Yablonski-Biegler family confirmed for me why I’m a non-viewer of television news programs: I recoil at reporters poorly manipulating my thoughts. I’d react better to a well-planned manipulation that makes me think (which is what most nonfiction writing intends, in one way or another) than to a report that presumes I will go along with sharply edited interviews rolling across the screen in mere seconds-long bursts.”

It’s a good fisking, by a thoughtful writer. Well worth reading.

The infomercial site that I (will admit) glibly awarded the Worst Headline of the Week carried a new piece “A Brief Look at the History of Homeschooling.” I can not glibly dismiss this article, infomercial or not.

Not until a little before mid 1800s did institutionalized schooling became the norm. Many of America’s founders were educated by mentors, family and apprenticeships without any state-run education system. This is some of the background information and basis for homeschooling catalyst John Caldwell Holt’s book How Children Fail, which came out in 1964.

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However, neither of his books addressed or proposed any alternative to education. Holt basically planted the seed for change and many other education dissenters started producing books and articles supporting the premise soon afterward. Author Harold Bennet had actually written a book that gave suggestions on how parents can keep their children out of school illegally.

Only after parents had written him regarding his teaching, stating they started teaching their kids at home, did Holt start producing literature on homeschooling. His last book Teach Your Own, published in 1980, contains his take on homeschooling.

(Oops, the author fails to acknowledge Holt’s Growing Without Schooling started in 1977.)

The piece goes on to talk about the work of Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore and then to state, “Studies have found that homeschooling parents are of the Christian faith in the U.S. — nearly 90 percent having been polled said as much.”

I sat with Raymond and Dorothy in both formal meetings and informal brain storming sessions discussing the dangers of dividing the movement along religious lines. We differed in strategy, but their words and deeds supported the diversity of the homeschooling movement and opposed the coming division.

Maybe this ‘brief history’ is innocent, maybe by design, or, the most likely, just good for selling Christian Curriculum. In any case, ignoring the history, which includes the diversity and the purposeful division along religious lines, continues to drive us apart and is not helpful for anyone’s freedom to homeschool.

For now, I will point you to the resource section of this post for more information.

Here is the infomercial.

Yesterday evening, Pat Farenga of Holt Associates, and editor of the Growing Without Schooling newsletter, was interviewed on Geraldo Rivera’s television show. I missed seeing it (duty called), but the reports on email lists about the interview are positive. The one complaint is that the news show recommended that state boards of education be the source for homeschooling information.

Geraldo’s website doesn’t (yet?) have any links to the story, so the only discussion right now is on the email lists.