The venerable New York Times Magazine published an article on November 8, 2011 titled My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists, by Margaret Heidenry:

“Tired of the constraints of the 40-hour workweek, my father, in 1972, quit his job in publishing. My parents were in their early 30s, and they had four children under 7. ‘But we still wanted to explore the world,’ my father recalled recently. They bought six one-way tickets to Europe, leaving only a laughable $3,000 to subsist on. Young and idealistic, they thought they could easily educate us along the way. ‘Life itself would become a portable classroom.’”

Margaret explains how for the next four years they “embarked on an uncharted ‘free-form existence,’ traveling through Spain, England, a Midwestern farm, Mexico, and finally settled in St. Louis. She details how her parents stretched their budget to allow for the far-flung classrooms, and writes of the family adventure, “…my parents were consistently inconsistent. There were a few interludes of standardized education, but for the most part, as my mother would later write in this magazine, ‘during all this time, the children traveled with us and received nothing that remotely resembled formal schooling.’”

“Home Is Where the School Is,” published in the Oct. 19, 1975, issue of The New York Times Magazine, was the first article in a national publication to espouse what was then still a fringe educational choice.

Read Margaret Heidenry’s entire article at the link above.

My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists

Mothering magazine’s web site has a good article by Becky Jackson titled No Time for Teaching: Spontaneous Learning at Home:

“In the four years I spent pursuing an education degree, I learned a lot about what to teach and how to teach it. Then I spent four years as a full-time mother. I would have to say that I learned more from the latter. In fact, I’ve discovered that the most effective way for young children to learn is not the Program for Effective Teaching model or the whole-language approach: it’s the natural relationship between a mother and child.”

And too wonderful not to share here: “I am, indeed, well qualified to help my children reach their potential-but not because of my teaching degree. My real qualifications are these: I’m their mother, I love them, and I know them better than anyone.”

Read Becky’s entire article at the link above!

Spontaneous Learning

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.

Natural Learning Behaviors

While not specifically about homeschooling, an article by Brian Gresko, a stay-at-home dad and writer, explains his view that childhood is under attack by the very people who should be protecting it: parents. His article In Defense of Childhood: Let Kids Be Kids! explains:

Many of the most important skills are untestable — imagination, general optimism and lightness of heart, the capability to love another creature, to empathize and demonstrate compassion. These are things a child can’t bubble in on a Scantron sheet, and yet cultivating these attitudes matters more in determining how my son will exist in the world and what kind of contribution he’ll make with his time on Earth.

Read the entire article at the link above.

In Defense of Childhood

The last of three articles on local homeschooling families is a positive, upbeat article from the Oct. 7th issue of the Dansville-Genesee Country Express in Dansville, NY, titled Homeschool Gives Choice to Students, Parents:

The freedom to pursue what a parent deems best for their child is still allowed in America.

That’s the feeling of Heather DeNee of Sparta, who feels “very blessed to have the opportunity and choice to homeschool.”

This mother of three (soon to be four) added that she understands that homeschooling is not for everyone, but, “there’s an opportunity for those who have that desire.”

Read the entire article at the link above.

The Freedom to Homeschool

A Journey to Unschooling by Mary Hickcox appears in the current issue of the newsletter, Dissident Voice:

When I first heard about unschooling 8 years ago I thought it seemed crazy. I thought all the things that some of you are thinking right now. What about socialization, grades, college? My children need to go to school to be “on track” with everyone else. It seemed lazy and neglectful, and I couldn’t imagine going against the grain in such an “extreme” way.

Flash forward to today and you see a very different philosophy in my home. I have spent the past 6 years homeschooling my oldest son.

Continue reading Mary’s article at the link above.

A Journey to Unschooling

Kevin Kelly’s Achieving Techno-Literacy appeared in the Sept. 16th issue of The New York Times:

One day our student would dissect and diagram the inside organs of flowers; the next he’d write short stories or poems and then revise them; and the next day we’d solve logic problems with algebra, then he’d work on plans for a chicken coop and maybe we’d do a field trip to a car factory. He also went through eighth-grade textbooks in history, grammar, geometry and the like. This type of home-schooling is really nothing special. Our son was merely one of more than a million students home-schooled in the United States last year.

The interesting part – and the reason for the title – is this comment, which Kelly explains:

Now that the year is done, I am struck that the fancy technology supposedly crucial to an up-to-the-minute education was not a major factor in its success. Of course, technology in the broadest sense was everywhere in our classroom. There was an inexpensive microscope on the kitchen table and an old digital camera to record experiments. There was a PC always on for research. Our son was also a big user of online tutorials.

Read the entire article at the link above.

Homeschool Techo-Literacy

CBS News’ Political Hotsheet has an article about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child:

31 GOP Senators Oppose U.N. Children’s Rights Convention
by Brian Montopoli – 36 comments

Thirty-one Republican senators are cosponsoring a resolution opposing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to the conservative group ParentalRights.org, which is pushing the resolution.

The resolution, which you can read here, states that the convention “undermines traditional principles” of U.S. law and calls efforts to sign on to the treaty “contrary to principles of self-government and federalism.” It says the convention should not be put before the Senate for a vote.

As Mother Jones reports, the legally-binding U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child was issued in 1989 to establish rights across country lines for citizens under the age of 18. The only members of the U.N. not to have signed on are the U.S. and Somalia, though the latter plans to ratify it this year.

American conservatives have long opposed ratification out of fear that it will impinge on their right to raise their children as they see fit. Among the complaints on the ParentalRights.org website, which is led by homeschooling advocate Michael Farris, is that under the treaty parents “would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings” to their kids.

Continue reading this article at the link above, and note the lengthy and informative comments at the end of the article.

UN Children’s Rights

Laura Weldon’s new book, Free Range Learning, received a glowing review in the news-tech magazine Wired’s blog, GeekDad:

Free Range Learning by Laura Grace Weldon is a new book about homeschooling. It isn’t a strict how-to, nor is it just about someone else’s personal experience. It’s a mixture of the two, intertwining real families’ experiences about teaching their children and lists of project ideas and resources. In between, there is plenty of guidance and information about teaching your kids, and even about scientific studies on how people learn. Yes, the audience of this book is mostly homeschoolers, but if you’re the kind of parent that tries to teach your kids during evenings and weekends, this book will have as much to offer you as it would a homeschooling parent.

Free Range Learning

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.

Homeschool & College