NBC – Today Show American Story Alabama’s Harding family

Military archeology, finite math, mechanical engineering and computer science are just a few fields some might follow in more advanced educations.  One particular Alabama family – the Hardings –  have those interests intertwined in their lives because this family has the freedom to follow their many passions. (more…)

The Unschooling Blog Carnival is hosting a Spring Carnival.  Deadline is April 20.  Here’s the guidelines:

✸ Submit unschooling blog posts that YOU find most inspiring! Sharing these posts may be just what some struggling unschooler needs to read.

✸These Unschooling Favorites should be fairly recent – but if you stumble across something wonderful, that the blogger wrote within the last 6 months, that will work too!

✸ Unschooling Bloggers can still submit their own blogposts – just pick a post that you think is your best writing/most thought-provoking or encouraging.

The Kellogg family of 14 now follows kayak trails and events across the country with the use of a 35 foot RV on the road.  The video below makes me smile and brings back mom memories deciphering the chaotic levels of children’s voices and cries.

The Kellogg Show/Family documents their adventures.  There is plenty of coverage across the country too.

From the Denver Post in October:
Colorado family of 14 kayaking throughout the U.S. By Jason Blevins

“Everything we have done comes from wanting to be free,” says Susie, who started home-schooling the kids a few years ago when a rigid schedule began pinching family playtime.

They’ve been kayaking only a few years, but Grady, 16, and Brody, 15, closed the season ranked third and fourth in the junior freestyle kayaking World Cup point series, and Kenny, 12, won the cadet class in the national freestyle championship in Idaho.

From Denver’s KDVR Fox 31 in November:

Family of 14 selling Colorado home, will live on the road and pursue dreams By Jon Bowman

All of the kids buy into this ‘simpler way of life’ their parents are moving toward. All but one of the children, 18-year-old Kerry, the oldest daughter, are being home-schooled. Kerry graduated from Glenwood Springs High School last spring.

“I am so ready for this,” said Kerry. “I am over Glenwood, I just want to enjoy new adventures and see new places.”

From the UK Mail Online
Kellogg family children to be home schooled as mom and dad drive them across the United States
By James Nye

The Kelloggs claim to have set off for the same reason the pioneers did:  Freedom — from ordinary lives.By James Nye

‘This is what freedom is,’ Dan said, waving his hand at the open road. ‘You go after it.’

Last summer, the family spent two months testing the waters of the RV life, touring 22 states and competing in nearly every junior kayaking competition in the country.

Good wishes for the kayaking competitions and I am sure this family will have loads of fun getting there.

Another family is also planning a road trip this year.  Pioneer Woman‘s website asked a good question about the legalities of
Homeschooling on the Road?

I’m sure more feedback for this family would be appreciated. (Ree Drummond’s recipe for the Perfect Iced Coffee is appealing too.)

Gotta love these families following their passions.

A San Francisco start-up brought in some help.  They created an engaging recruiting tool for their company with the vital help of Doug Hoogland, former homeschooler.  Doug is the youngest son of Karen and David Hoogland.  Karen is a long-time Illinois homeschool advocate with some computer/website skills under her belt too.

Start-Up Uses Portal Game as Recruiting Tool By Nick Wingfield New York Times Bits

Mr. Bisciglia got the idea to use the game as a recruiting tool after seeing the work of Doug Hoogland, who helped create a custom version of Portal 2 (called a mod in the gamer community) for a man who used it as a wedding proposal. Mr. Bisciglia estimates that half of the engineers at WibiData play Portal 2, which Valve encourages people to mod.

WibiData flew Mr. Hoogland to San Francisco to tour its offices and provided him with architectural renderings of the space so he could faithfully create a virtual version of it in the game.

I want to apply for a job there just to play the game! But I suspect my computer skills will give me the hook in the reception room.

Here’s another one. Founder and CEO of Tumblr: David Kulp

In his own words, he “pretty much dropped out of high school…was technically homeschooled the last three years…”  Worked for him.  Here’s the Forbes Cover Story video below and there’s more information here:

As an aside of sorts, Karen Hoogland also wrote a Home Education Magazine article [Education Without Medication] back in 2001.  It’s still timely as many kids are pulled out of schools to get away from the medication pressures.  High-energy kids have a hard time sitting in those seats all day.  Boys seem to have the worse problem being singled out in schools.

Educational freedom seems to prove most useful for our young adults that were homeschooled.

Update - Douglas was also in this Wired magazine article:

“It’s borderline creepy how accurate the finished product turned out,” he [WibiData Biciglia CEO] says. Hoogland wrote the game’s story, which features Bisciglia as a bumbling CEO who repeatedly forgets his PIN for the WibiData jobs website.

The Durham Herald Sun is running a Learning Life series.  The series follows a public high school junior, a public charter school freshman, a private school sixth-grader and a brother and sister that homeschool in Chatham County. 

Their latest article: Learning Life: Home school student helps with Nasher exhibit app by Wes Platt, looks at a North Carolina homeschooler’s smartphone application design team experience.

Edwards, a home school student from Chatham County, has worked with his team for the past eight months on an application destined for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. It is specifically designed for an upcoming exhibit, called Light Sensitive, which opens on Feb. 14.

One more opportunity to gain life skills collaborating in a practical way with a local organization.

A New York Times’ reporter, Mark Oppenheimer, offered an article about Mary Pride and her homeschooling family’s history.  It focused a great deal on their technology influences and her religious background. Many homeschoolers did seem to be right on that techie cutting edge ‘back in the day’. Even now, multitudes from the homeschool community head into computer engineering, programming, designing their own websites, blog, businesses or what have you on the internet.

From the article: Mary Pride A Christian Pioneer of Home Schooling Looks to Its Future“

Yet in her embrace of technology and the Internet, Mrs. Pride is a total Webhead, as befits the wife of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate whom she met when both were working “at the key-punch room in Raytheon,” the military technology company.

All their computer hardware and tested software helped create the 1992 Prides’ Guide to Educational Software.  The guide was reviewed in Whole Earth Review, PC Magazine, and from Wired Magazine’s first issue in 1993:

Crash Tested Homework Review:

Bill and Mary Pride have eight kids, all of them home-schooled. The Prides are into using computers for class work, so they have a computer room stuffed with a Mac, Apple IIGS, Amiga, a 386 clone, various CD-ROM devices, Nintendo, a Miracle Piano system, and so on. Add five or six kids to the room at any one time, and you have a homeschooling arcade. In between lessons, Ma and Pa and their computer-savvy kids have evaluated every piece of educational software known to be on the market. The kids are ceaseless and merciless testers. Somehow the Prides found time (and a vacant computer) in this madhouse to compile their evaluations in a humongous and amazingly complete atlas to all educational software available for personal computers and CD-ROM platforms.

All was not well during that time in the homeschool community though.  This older New York TImes article shared one example of a growing chasm in the homeschooling community.

On-Line Courses Have Given a New Impetus to the Home-Schooling Movement By Louise Yarnall

Technology enthusiasts like Mrs. Pride, the publisher, counter that the elitists are the anti-computer home schoolers — particularly those affiliated with the so-called unschooling movement, which rejects most packaged educational programs in favor of more free-form learning activities guided by children’s interests.
“I think unschoolers sometimes exaggerate the benefits of doing everything yourself,” she said. “There is a reason I don’t pump my own water and build my own well and make my own electricity and grind my own wheat.

I feel to limit yourself and say, I have to do it all myself, is a mistake.”

Maybe her perspective has changed in the last several years, but I think Mary Pride misunderstood the unschooling philosophy. It’s a shame, because there are many religious homeschoolers who do ‘get it’.  I’m assuming we’re now in the healing stage, as I’ve seen many a homeschooler defend all homeschooling styles now.  What fits for each child is the right way to go.

Then there was this from the same 1998 article:

In regions where home schooling is so popular that it threatens the financial health of public school districts, some school leaders have used computers to lure home schoolers partway back to the fold. In 1997, an Alaska school district seeking to raise funds to build a public boarding school developed a program that offered home schoolers the use of new computers (for a $200 refundable deposit), free curriculum supplies and support from an expert teacher if they would enroll in the district. The families kept home schooling, but their enrollment allowed the district to qualify for more state aid. The program attracted 2,000 applicants, far exceeding district estimates, and the extra state money helped pay for the new school. Similar programs are in place in Washington State.

I happily remember the growth of on-line homeschool networks, bartering and support. But the “collaboration of homeschoolers and school” seemed  frustrating for homeschool advocates with the time spent explaining to new homeschoolers ‘public school at home’ versus independent homeschooling.  The schools didn’t seem to be cooperating with those explanations nor lessening the confusion.  Wish they were more creative with our public schooled kids’ education than they are trying to suck money out of every little free crevice.

This is an exciting prospect, this open source education idea:

“Distance learning is coming on gangbusters,” Mrs. Pride said. “EdX will be very interesting. And what Harvard and M.I.T. are doing. And the MOOC initiative. …”

The 1998 NYT article noted Mary Pride’s thoughts about her son, who suffered from chronic health issues:

“Fifty years ago, he wouldn’t have been able to finish his own education or have a job.” Mrs. Pride is convinced that the home-schooling movement will grow because technology makes families more comfortable with the prospect of teaching their own children.

Approximately 15 years later, education at home is growing and some of the reason might be the networking technology opportunities.  But most of all, I think it’s because many families learned it’s great fun spending time together living and learning.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked to The Atlantic‘s October article: The Homeschool Diaries.

Reynolds asks: “Is this another foreshock of the coming K-12 implosion?”

The Department of Education continues to plod along with a Race to the Top, in similar style to the George Bush/Ted Kennedy No Child Left Behind educational plan. Race to the Top is a little flashier, as the current administration’s financial draw hauls in preschool standardized testing too.  Private schools are currently exempt from these federal regulations.

Glenn Reynold’s question has been asked around by innovative educators, including homeschoolers.  Logic should prevail it does not make sense to pull home educators into public school oversight, as teachers unions and many legislators incessantly attempt.

Salman Khan of the hugely popular Khan Academy has some dreams about education.

Salman Khan’s book – The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined:

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is; into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.
When and where do people concentrate best? The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the individual. Some people are at their sharpest first thing in the morning. Some are more receptive late at night. One person requires a silent house to optimize his focus; another seems to think more clearly with music playing or against the white noise of a coffee shop. Given all these variations, why do we still insist that the heaviest lifting in teaching and learning should take place in the confines of a classroom and to the impersonal rhythm of bells and buzzers?

A Homeschool Diaries excerpt below:

… the practical reasons for homeschooling are paramount. When you set the city’s gorgeous mosaic of intellectual and cultural offerings against its crazy quilt of formal education, you can’t help but want to supplement your children’s schooling with outings to museums, zoos, historic sites and neighborhoods, and the like. Even in a tight economy, just about every city cultural institution still has an educational division. Why “save” them for weekends or field trips?

Here’s a brand new one:   Unschooling Blog Carnival

Don’t forget the oldest homeschool Carnival based at Why Homeschool.  This week’s Carnival is at The Homespun Life

Check out what homeschoolers are doing and blogging about in our diverse community.

Class Dismissed is a new movie in production which is questioning whether schools, public or private, are really the best education option for many families, and it will be the first feature-length documentary to focus on homeschooling. From the website:

“From home study and kitchen table math, to perpetual recess and park days, Class Dismissed follows the story of an ordinary American family in their quest to educate their children outside the school system.

“As they struggle to discover what path is best for them, the social ramifications of their choices come to light, family dynamics are revealed and they come to realize that homeschooling is not just an educational choice, but also a lifestyle choice that affects the very heart of the American family.

“Truth and consequence, myth and assumption all come together in this fresh look at what it means to be educated in the 21st century.

“Class Dismissed will focus on the topic of education, specifically the validity of homeschooling as an alternative to the industrial school model. Framed within the historical context of traditional schooling, and particularly at a time when education across the nation is in a state of crisis, the film will examine the numerous approaches to home learning, exploring both its history and recent growth. There are many choices when it comes to teaching our children, and Class Dismissed will ask some big questions…”

A Nov. 11th L.A. Times article for L.A. at Home, which seems to focus on architecture and design for southern California homeowners, carried the cutsy title, “For home-school parents, classroom design is the subject du jour.” The first part of the article does, in fact, focus on parents with a severe yearning to replicate school in their homes, quoting one parent who “…demolished a galley-style kitchen in her home to create a school setting. The house had to be extended into the backyard, with a brand-new kitchen built in.”

Another parent, who the article describes as ‘striving for structure and routine,’ states, “It seems there’s a whole new group of us that I refer to as ‘contemporary home-schoolers…’” The article goes on to explain that she is “so committed to the idea of replicating a traditional school experience for her son that she has given her classroom a name: University School for Children, with uniforms, a logo and school IDs.”

This beginning part of the article almost had me passing it over for mention here, but the second part highlights an entirely different approach, and quotes a longtime friend and author: “Tammy Takahashi takes an ‘unschooling’ approach with her three children, ages 7 to 13. The classroom might be an art table at home, a recycling center or the beach. The inherent appeal of the approach is that the style of teaching can be tweaked to accommodate what works best for the student, said Takahashi, who has also written two books on home schooling.”

There are some good arguments for both structured and non-structured approaches, and lots of food for thought and discussion.