Category: unschooling

• Anyone Can Look Up Answers

  Ask questions about life. Be curious. Because it’s the questions that are important. Anyone can look up the answers but not everyone can ask the…

• Against the Grain

  Penelope Trunk writes about going against the (school) grain and getting a great job: A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting…

• Homework

  Alfie Kohn shares more research that concludes there is no meaningful benefit to homework. And still, the homework persists, because there are plenty of people…

• Living As If School Didn’t Exist

  The yarn project needs two more colors. Can we go to JoAnn? I put Sherlock on the Netflix queue. It says there’s a very long…

• Library Educated

  “I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in…

• Put Them in a Box

  I watched Waiting for Superman recently. It’s an exasperating film, full of unfounded assumptions, not least of which being the assumption that putting kids in a box…

• Just Let Them Go

  From an article by Richard Elmore, instructor at the Harvard School of Education, on the modern secondary school: I wonder, finally, what would happen if we…

• School is Prison

  Classic Peter Gray: If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference. The only difference I can think of is that to get…

• Tipping into Unschooling

  Before we were unschoolers, we were homeschoolers. We were relaxed about it, pursuing a makeshift curriculum that touched on all the basic stuff while allowing…

• You Have to Be Carefully Taught

  Apropos of “enhanced pat downs” and “full body scans” and all the rest of it we’ve been hearing about as the holiday travel season approaches,…