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.

Amy Millstein, of UnschoolingNYC, and 14 year old unschooler, Jude Steffers-Wilson, gave a brief explanation of unschooling on John Stossel’s Education Blob.  It’s always difficult to explain the unschooling, or even homeschooling way of life, to people who don’t experience it every day.  But it was obvious Jude was passionate about his education. What more can you ask?

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A free John Holt book Escape From Childhood: The Needs And Rights Of Children is available for download on Pat Farenga’s site.

This Kindle book is only available until midnight tonight.

An excerpt:

No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take form someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.

We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right largely for granted, cannot imagine that it might be taken away from us. Indeed, as far as I know, it has never been written into any body of law. even the writers of our Constitution did not mention it. They thought it was enough to guarantee citizens the freedom of speech and the freedom to spread their ideas as widely as they wished and could. it did not occur to them that even the most tyrannical government would try to control people’s minds, what they thought and knew. That idea would come later, under the benevolent guise of compulsory universal education.

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.

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.”

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.

“Look at people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison. They all dropped out of school.”

The Unschooled Life is an interview with bOING bOING’s Mark Frauenfelder, by Ted Balaker, from the November 2010 issue of Reason magazine. bOING bOING is a small technology-culture magazine that eventually evolved into one of the Web’s most popular blogs. In addition to blogging at bOING bOING, Frauenfelder is editor in chief of MAKE magazine. Another excerpt:

“Unschooling is letting kids get bored at home and get bored with their friends and come up with their own ways to learn.”

Read the article at the link above.

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.

An Associated Press article which has been appearing around various Internet news sources addresses the question of curriculum with a look at unschooling:

At ABC News: Home-School Options: Curriculum or Not? by Carole Feldman, Associated Press Writer:

“Some home-school parents create their own curriculum for their kids. “There should never be a set curriculum,” said [Janice] Hedin. “Every child is so unique. Our goal as parents is to custom design the education that fits our children.”

The writer interviewed Home Education Magazine co-publisher Helen Hegener, who is also Director of the American Homeschool Association:

As a first step, parents new to home schooling should check out their state’s laws. Helen Hegener, director of the American Homeschool Association, noted that there is a wide variety in state requirements.

The usual statisics were quoted:

The National Center of Education Statistics reported last April that about 1.5 million American children were home-schooled in 2007, representing 2.9 percent of the school-age population. The number of home-school children increased by 74 percent since 1999. The upward trend is believed to be continuing.

The article also appears at MSNBC’s Today Show and other news sites.

Writer Sara Schmidt very thoughtfully examines unschooling in a multi-part article introduced here:

Lately, there has been a surge of questions, comments, and in many cases, diatribes against unschooling. Most of these have been spawned from two very brief, very biased (in many peoples’ opinions), news-oriented television programs–not from actual research completed on unschooling itself. In response to so much misunderstanding and heated–even hateful, in many cases–commentary, I decided to write out my own defense of unschooling.

My family and I are not technically unschoolers. I’m very attracted to the word and what it means, and we do “unschool” in some ways, but we still prefer to use some Waldorf curriculum in our life. That works for us. Different methods work for different families. I support unschooling just as I do other forms of homeschooling, and I don’t mean to isolate or offend anyone in my lengthy response.

Continue reading Sara Schmidt’s in-depth article.