“Home schooling has become—by a wide margin—America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe …

“… Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, the Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases similar regardless of school performance.

“… The Post estimates there are now between 1.9 and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States …

“By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021 …”

Despite critics who lament that homeschoolers are not learning anything there is plenty of evidence that homeschoolers get into any number of jobs and colleges without conventional schooling experiences. The social proof that homeschooling works is, to me, the main reason it continues to grow. People see how other families teach their own and how those children fare and decide they can try it too. I’ve recommended many first-hand accounts about how and why families unschool (not turning your home into a school and your persona into a professional teacher). Jean Proffitt Nunnally has added her family’s story to this genre, with her well-written book, Success Without School: Unschooling my Children from Birth to College.

Jean writes that she and her husband had traditional public school and college educations: he has an electrical engineering degree and an MBA and her degree is in finance. Like many unschoolers and homeschoolers I know from the previous century (unschooling has been around a long time!), Jean learned about the benefits of breastfeeding from La Leche League and was disturbed by her pediatrician’s advice to stop it soon. Weighing that advice against her experience of calmly nursing her child in bed during the night made Jean reconsider expert opinions about child rearing. She then learned about homeschooling from a conference she attended and soon discovered unschooling. She writes about her unschooling experiences with candor:

“My patience was tested often. Despite my wholehearted resonance with the unschooling philosophy of freedom and self-directed learning, there were many times I slipped into a traditional teacher mode. That’s the model I had grown up with and was still culturally surrounded by: that children need to be taught, to be directed by a teacher of a parent. So I faltered in the beginning …”

Jean’s descriptions of her personal and familial struggles as they live and learn together in what she calls her “social experiment” will give heart to anyone seeking other ways to raise children outside the conventional school model. The details of how her son and daughter got into their first-choice college without ever going to school will be of interest to parents of teenagers, and her descriptions of how their family learned together can spark hope for those with young children. For instance:

“It was my intention to be more of an observer than a director, but I wasn’t always completely neutral. I certainly wasn’t above leaving books or materials around that I thought might pique curiosity. For birthdays and Christmases, I looked for practical gifts that might spark a line of exploration, such as a compass, flashlight, garden tool set, or recorder. The kids got plenty of toys from others, but I wanted them to know the value of real objects that could be enjoyed while also serving a purpose. Then I left it up to them to use those things or not.”

The Media and Me

On another issue, the ubiquity of media in our lives is astounding to me. In the 1980s and 90s we wrote about and sold books, such as The Plug-In Drug, about the dangers of too much screen time and how advertising is designed to influence us to continue watching. Today we all carry screens in our pockets or encounter screens nearly everywhere we look and, since young people in particular are targeted as the primary audience for advertising, there is a need for more critical approaches to what we are experiencing.

The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People, by Project Censored and the Media Revolution Collective, is a timely explanation and useful reference about how media shapes our lives and our abilities to determine what is actually occurring in the world. I like how its clear writing and examples give readers ways to think about and handle the steady stream of media messages they receive daily. The authors describe critical media literacy (CML) as

“… a liberators approach to making sense of the world. CML seeks to equip people with the tools to be independent media users, free from oppression or restrictions by others. We recognize that misinformation, disinformation, stereotypes, and problematic representations exist, but as media users we do not have to accept or internalize them. Indeed, an important part of being critically media literate involves creating media. Rather than just noting the problems with the media we encounter, CML encourages users to liberate themselves by creating messages and representations they with they found in dominant media.”

While the book is written for young people and contains in-chapter activities (“Think about the most recent text message you’ve sent …”) it seems to me it is most appropriate for mature teenagers and adults as its language is more academic than vernacular. For instance:

“Critical thinking encourages us to see that media representations are not reality; rather they are reflections or replications of social constructs that exist in real life. Social constructs tell us how society (the “social”) has assigned meaning (the “construct”) to objective reality. These constructs can shape our understanding of matters such as race, gender and sexuality, ability, and many other facets of individual or group identities.”

I hope there will be another book like this written for young people in elementary school and younger, as they too are aggressively targeted by media and parents need help and support to prevent their children from blindly accepting these messages. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful and useful book about how citizens can better understand how they are manipulated by the media in our society.

A video recording of the event can be viewed [here].1

The lineup of panelists was interesting—homeschool coops, hybrid homeschools, microschools, charter schools, virtual schools—and some of the major businesses and researchers in the charter school world. Thursday night’s keynote address was delivered by Governor Kevin Stitt (Oklahoma) and the next morning’s opening remarks by Manny Diaz, Jr., of the Florida Board of Education.

I was struck by the enthusiasm for school choice at the event and the conviction of many of the panelists. I appreciate that all homeschoolers benefit by having more places for their children to socialize and learn, and it’s good to be with people who are serious about creating school options that are local and personalized.

But as it went on I realized that most of the presenters and organizers wanted more people to participate in the “education market” instead of devising new ways to help children learn outside the conventional education paradigm. Self-directed learning was mentioned, but more as a technique to get children to learn what the school wants. For instance, one person lauded his company’s AI that could take any student’s interest and use it to teach them the required lesson. If the student is having trouble with math but loves Star Trek, the AI would present math problems to them using Star Trek stories.

The larger issues that prevent children from doing well in our schools are not being directly addressed by educators who just want to make the existing system work more efficiently. Parental rights to question school practices were openly supported but youth rights to do so were never mentioned. The benefits of less control of children and more natural learning methods were not addressed meaningfully. A caring family, having friends and a positive social life, work that pays enough to support a family, medical support that doesn’t bankrupt people, all form the basis for secure children and successful learning. Without addressing these larger issues education will continue to be trapped in its moribund state.

If you think children can succeed in school just by “trying harder” or improving educational technology consider the schools run by the US Defense Department.

With about 66,000 students—more than the public school enrollment in Boston or Seattle—the Pentagon’s schools for children of military members and civilian employees quietly achieve results most educators can only dream of.

… While the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last decade, the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students—in the bottom 25th percentile—have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.

But there are key differences.

For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job. “Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students. (NY Times, 10/10/23)

Many decide to homeschool, including families in the US military, because they want to reclaim time for themselves and their children to learn and grow based on their interests, beliefs, and schedules. They want to make their homes into sources of productive activity instead of just crash pads from work and school. Sajay Samuel describes this demographic in the journal Conspiratio (Number 3, Fall 2022): “[People] who wish to beautify their own lives by being less dependent, in thought and deed, on the market and the state.” In short, they want to exercise their rights as citizens to live as they see fit.

The main reason for establishing compulsory schooling in the United States, according to the Massachusetts compulsory school law, the first in the nation, is to create good citizens. Citizenship requires responsibilities, values, and actions that nurture local and national well-being. But that never came up at this event.

In Freedom and Beyond, John Holt writes, “Another consequence of defining education as schooling is that as we put more and more of our educational resources into schools, we have less and left over for those institutions that are truly open and educative and in which more and more people might learn for themselves.” Indeed, school choice funds can’t be used to support family memberships and activities, such as 4H, YMCA, libraries, museums and other civic organizations that benefit children’s learning.

It became clear that this event was more than just about celebrating a variety of school options after Gov. Stitt’s keynote. He said that when he used the word “parents” he meant only a man and woman and “family” referred to parents who fit that formulation. Single-parent and nontraditional families are left out.

Turning schools into efficient businesses was another theme Gov. Stitt leaned into. He deserves credit for giving Oklahoma public school teachers a raise, but at the same time he undermined the separation of church and state by publicly funding a Catholic school. Governor Stitt also included comments about his good fortune to have the governor’s office, state house, and senate controlled by Republicans. That fueled talk among the next day’s panelists about the red state trifecta that was spreading across the nation—9 states with similar school choice programs were mentioned. Manny Diaz, Jr., of the Florida Board of Education, noted how holding a trifecta was the only way that Florida could ever pass its school choice legislation. He even referred to the schools as businesses and parents and students as their customers.

Is providing education simply the sale and purchase of state-approved school goods? Is being a citizen just being a satisfied customer of public services? After this event I had John Holt’s words ringing in my ears: “A life worth living and work worth doing—that is what I want for children (and all people), not just, or not even, something called “a better education.”

Add to that the controversies about teaching reading in school, which have resulted in decades of children not learning to read well; the sanitized versions of history taught in different states; standardized testing that is presented to us as the best way to judge a person’s intellect and abilities, and so on. My point is that schools have always experimented on their students. And homeschoolers should do so, too. Not because we want to emulate school’s mistakes at home, but because we want to help our children learn and grow by trying something different.

As you embark on another school season as a homeschooler, don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t get stuck in the classroom mentality of isolated learning—get into the growth mentality. You don’t have to go to school to grow.

As I thought about this I remembered a radio interview John Holt did about a major national study that faulted American schools for not teaching children well. I hope his comments will encourage you as you live and learn with your children at home and in your community.

In 1983, WBOS-Radio in Boston interviewed John Holt about the report “A Nation At Risk” which was issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

Q. If you feel, as you seem to, that teachers are only a segment of the educational process, how important are teachers and what makes a good teacher?

JH: Good. Very important question, which the commission almost certainly did not ask. The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher … The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way. It’s an extremely important task. It’s not what most teachers think they’re supposed to be doing—which is, as I say, filling the bottles—but it’s an important task in itself. It is by no means trivial, and it is certainly not easy.

Q: So where can teachers learn to teach?

JH: By teaching. Where do you learn to swim? In the water. Schools of education, I promise you, would like places where you’d spend four years studying courses on hydraulics and the theory of swimming and so forth, and then they’d say finally, “Okay, we’ve taught you how to swim, now here’s a pool, or here’s a lake.”

You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?” That kind of a structure would help teachers get better.

Q: Aren’t you talking about doing a lot of experimenting as far as the teacher is concerned …

JH: Yes.

Q: … And if that’s true, aren’t the students possibly victims of this?

JH: They’re victims anyway. I mean, the commission says they’re victims. No, all your experiments aren’t going to work. The experiments they do now don’t work. Only the experiments now aren’t being done by people who are in the classroom, looking at these people, but by some character 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 miles away, very often somebody who never was in a classroom. All life is an experiment in a very real sense of the word. Teaching is, in that sense, a profoundly experimental activity.

But the only experiments that will ever improve education are experiments done by teachers in their own classrooms …

The characters are drawn largely through dialog, which makes for lively exchanges. But it is Fisher’s unspoken thoughts and feelings that move the story into deeper emotional territory, such as his angst of being a nice guy but perceived by his peers as dumb because he doesn’t do well in school:

Every person in the room stares at me. Maybe I have a reputation for being sort of stupid, but not for being in trouble. Never. I barely even talk at school unless I absolutely have to.

Fisher’s dad was an alcoholic and he, his mother, and their friends all seek ways to reconcile his Dad’s good nature with his bad habit after he dies. While describing the characters and scenery of the Keys, Fisher also provides us with his insight, a talent he develops in stages throughout the book. While Fisher feels that life is rigged against him, and the various incidents he experiences support that interpretation, he doesn’t give up and rail against his plight. He takes comfort and pride in his boat-washing work, discusses issues about his life with friends who work in the boatyard, and uses his imagination to solve the various problems he encounters.

Dad also used to complain about all that time it takes sit around making weighted rigs for fishing the next day, and all the time wasted rigging during the trip. I knew there had to be a better solution than the unweighted pin rigs fishermen so much time cussing over. So, when I was nine, I came up with an idea for a new kind of weighted rig that would be reusable and quicker to attach than the crappy ones made with egg sinkers.

It’s not a book about unschooling, per se, but at its heart it is. Fisher is not engaged by school nor understood by his teacher—she gives him an F+ on a test thinking she is positively supporting his effort but it instead sends Fisher into depression. Fishing and boating give him a supportive community of adults, many with their own flaws that Fisher is aware of, but who embrace Fisher and help him as best they can.

And Fisher needs the help as he navigates the dangerous currents of being bullied, courting his first girlfriend, getting in trouble for something he didn’t do, and getting people to believe in his weighted rig.

It’s always a pleasure to read a book about young people that shows how they come to understand and accept or change their behavior without the need for strong adult intervention. Fisher’s developing self-reliance and his conversations with other adults and young people show how teens (or anyone) can learn and grow in spite of their difficulties. Fisher also acknowledges the help he receives from people and reciprocates, unlike some of the teens he knows who simply expect their privileged lives to continue because they do well in school or sports.

Self-directed learning isn’t just about doing what you want to do: it’s also about becoming a self-aware person who is comfortable in their life and work and seeks and helps build support for themselves and others. Rigged is a novel about life’s messiness and how a teenager’s life can be more meaningful and liberating than getting a good grade in school. This is the first novel published by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education's Tipping Points Press and I hope there are more to come.

The room was full and the audience enjoyed the presentation, which ended on this authoritarian note to strong applause. I became nervous about giving my talk following this one, since mine was about unschooling—questioning authority and allowing children, and ourselves, to explore and learn about the world in our own ways. I didn’t have nearly as many people stay for my talk and since I never sold a curriculum, just books and materials about how you can develop your own curriculum based on what you and your children are interested in, and subscriptions to Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine, so my vendor table was sparsely attended. I also did my best to create a safe space for people to discuss how you don’t have to turn your home into a conventional school in order to help your children learn and grow into competent adults.

Me and my colleagues at GWS noted how personally difficult it was for us to be invited to present our views about educating children to groups that largely didn’t want us there. We went because some free-thinking, independent families within those groups invited us there, perhaps to make arguments for unschooling to their friends that they couldn’t. There were often speakers telling the audience how thick a switch to fashion in order to punish disobedient children, how the government would abolish homeschooling, and how America is a Christian nation that needs to be retaken from non-Christian interests. We were the small counterweight that spoke to those who were open to hearing about unschooling—working with children, not on children, to help them learn and grow. We kept our politics to ourselves as much as possible because we were invited guests, but it was not easy.

At a luncheon for a North Carolina homeschooling conference, I was excoriated just for being from Massachusetts, which had recently legalized gay marriage. A man at the head of the table never introduced himself but launched an enthusiastic tirade at me against the liberal politics of Massachusetts. No one challenged him or his manners and I didn’t want to raise the temperature further by defending gay marriage, since I’d already raised their animosity with my speech encouraging self-directed learning, so I remained silent.

When I started working with John Holt in 1981 it was clear to me that GWS existed in a unique space—the borderland between back-to-the-land hippies and Evangelical churches, alternative schools and conventional schools—and bridging those differences has been educational. For instance, I first learned about militias, the right to bear arms, and state’s rights directly from homeschoolers in the 1980s (I don’t remember these issues being taught or discussed much, if at all, in any of my classes in high school or college), and there is a strong connection to the extreme right-wing politics of today. For instance, these three letters appeared in GWS magazine in 1985 (issues 46 and 47):

1) From Indiana: … As to events on the homeschool front here, the Christian extremists are getting into this with a vengeance locally, seeing homeschooling as a way to force confrontation with the bureaucrats in order to air their ideology. That’s really scary. … I attended a meeting of about 40 of these folks, although I did not stay to the end. The rhetoric was hinging on sedition and was flying the banner of homeschooling. Scared the heck out of me I am on good enough footing with the local superintendent that I do not feel my situation would be compromised, but I think those who come after me will have a difficult time if these radicals succeed … It’s a little weird to hear the same diatribes from these people that I used to hear from Abby Hoffman and Bobby Seale in the-old days; the stuff about rights being taken away and the government is against the people and we must not fall for the brainwashing that tells us this is a democracy. They said that a democracy is an inferior kind of government because the majority is always wrong. They perceive Reagan as a radical liberal, which gives you some idea of where they are coming from. … I believe these people should be able to do what they want with their kids, but I don’t like it that they may jeopardize what I want to do with my kid. Actually, they are fighting a battle that does not exist, since most homeschoolers in Indiana have had little difficulty. What they want is the platform for a fight. These people believe they will be fighting from bunkers, literally, for their right to practice their religion. A lot of the “sermon” sounded like quotes from the MOVE organization. But they are calling themselves homeschoolers. ARGH! …

2) … As Christians, we are sorry that there are some extremists in Indiana giving Christian home education a bad name (GWS 46). We personally are excited about what the Lord is doing in our home and others we know. Please don’t label all Christians in your minds as extremists we too, are personally embarrassed by those who use the name of Jesus Christ to do what they want and not what He wants.
—An Ohio Reader

3) … I was sorry to read of the experience one mom had with a “Christian” homeschool group [“Excluded Because Of Religion,” GWS 43]. I am part of a large group here in San Diego, called Christian Family Schools; there are 12 park days all over the county which meet at least once a month, functioning somewhat as support groups. We plan field trips, seminars, beach days, and picnics; in June we had a “Curriculum Fair” which was attended by about 300 people. Anyone is welcome at any of our functions, regardless of religious beliefs (or the lack thereof); we do not actively proselytize, our main purpose being to help homeschoolers, but certainly, if the subject comes up, we will talk about spiritual things. As for the reader from Indiana and his extremists (GWS 46)—I too have met people like that; in certain ways I agree with them, but not with their comments about the government trying to take control of us all—I think a lot of that stuff is plain wacko! … I have met those same kind of radicals who were not “Christian” and still come up with some wacko ideas. I just don’t want people to begin equating all Christian homeschoolers with the wackos who believe the big bad government wants to control my children’s minds. We aren’t all like that.—Ellie Andrew (CA)

The paranoid strain in conservative politics is strong and has been written about often, but the paranoid strain in liberal politics is no better. Liberal paranoia claims homeschooling will undermine public schooling and democracy, and leave us with generations of uneducated children. Neither strain supports families who want to raise their children with as little interference as possible from government and educational authorities, though both strains claim to support freedom for everyone.

Being among speakers who actively opposed our point of view that children can be trusted to learn and their families can help them without resorting to corporal punishment, bribes, or emotional manipulations was never easy. But at least, we hoped, the people who invited us there got a boost of confidence and affirmation that it’s okay to swim against the tide of authoritarian education and behavior with children.

In those early years there were Christian lawyers and leaders who encouraged state and national groups not to limit their membership or leadership just to Christians who sign a statement of faith. Dr. Raymond Moore was a popular Christian writer and speaker in the 1980s and I heard him say from the podium, more than once, that everyone, “including atheists,” should be welcome to support from homeschooling groups.

But that openness to different points of view in the homeschooling community changed as the Homeschool Legal Defense Association came on the scene. Dr. Moore’s ecumenical vision was sidelined by the militant Christian wing that keeps its base scared of enemies and wants committed warriors, not peacemakers. When speaking in Washington state in the early 1990s, a local Christian homeschool leader lamented to me how tired he was of the scare tactics the Homeschool Legal Defense Association used to build its membership: “They keep telling people the boogeyman is coming to get them if they don’t join!” The boogeyman was some government or education agency that was going to take their children away because of homeschooling, so pay your annual dues to HSLDA to keep them off your back, just in case.

It is true that some families were being taken to court just for homeschooling, but I always felt HSLDA exaggerated the threat in order to build their business. Groups, like the Rutherford Institute, or individuals, like Dr. Patricia Montgomery, founder of the Clonlara School, also successfully defended and testified on behalf of homeschoolers. Dr. Montgomery often succeeded in convincing the courts that alternatives to conventional schooling work and these families were not prosecuted. Local lawyers, like Gene Burkart of MA, also helped homeschoolers get the schools off their backs when legal action was threatened. But women and men like Pat and Gene are not celebrated much by the homeschool community, nor are they as well-known as those who connect homeschooling to religious and political grievances.

Mark and Helen Hegener’s Home Education Magazine had a series entitled “Homeschoolers Freedom at Risk” that they started in 1991, noting how the diverse homeschooling movement was becoming homogenized by the efforts of HSLDA and its allies. It is a prescient work.

Long established support and political networks have been damaged, and in many cases replaced with new exclusive groups. Legal actions have been taken which have resulted in the strengthening of states’ rights over the education of our children. A view of homeschooling has been actively promoted which advances the notion that there is only one way to homeschool, and which ties that one way to an extremely narrow range of social and political support. (Endnote 1)

This risk became very apparent in the hysteria HSLDA created in 1994 over a bill, HR 6, which they claimed was a “nuclear bomb” aimed at shutting down homeschooling. The bill wasn’t nearly the threat it was made out to be—it proposed that all public and private school teachers be certified in the subject areas they teach but HSLDA claimed this meant homeschooling parents would need to be certified as well. The number of calls Congress received to “not end homeschooling” set a record and the donations and attention HSLDA received made both realize homeschooling was a bigger issue than anyone thought.

Within days of the HSLDA warning, some members of Congress had received hundreds of thousands of calls in opposition to the amendment. Volunteers personally visited the office of every Representative on the Hill to explain their opposition to the amendment. Not only did the amendment fail, but Congress added language to the Education Act stating that the Act did not authorize any federal control over homeschools. (Endnote 2)

Michael Farris noted years laters that “HR 6 was the biggest event in years … it is the event that put homeschooling on the map.” (Endnote 3) While HR 6 provided much publicity and solidified HSLDA and it’s branches, the National Center of Home Education and the Congressional Action Program, as national political players, HR 6 was never the threat to homeschooling that HSLDA and it’s media amplifiers made it out to be.

HSLDA and its associated networks of Christian groups have long been proponents of Christian dominionism:

a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation that is governed by Christians and based on their understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of acquiring governing authority are varied. (Endnote 4)

Those who hold this ideology know it is not a way to gain popular votes by stating everyone in the country should be ruled by Christian nationalists, so they prevaricate. In his book The Joshua Generation: Restoring the Heritage of Christian Leadership, Farris does this as he describes how fighting for homeschooling rights is not the end goal of his work:

“While those battles are important and will always continue to some degree, homeschool freedom is not the end goal. It is a means to a far greater end,” Farris wrote. The Christian homeschool movement can judge its long-term success, he said, by evaluating their results against a passage in the Book of Hebrews that describes godly heroes “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames … and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.”

The end goal of the Christian homeschooling movement, he said, was to raise a generation of children who would do those very things in the “Christian assignment of redeeming the culture.” “How should we judge our success? … Do we see our children administering justice, gaining what was promised, shutting the mouths of lions, and quenching the fury of the flames? … Have they become powerful in battle?” (Endnote 5)

The “children as weapons” idea is explored by some adults who were raised this way. Ryan Stoller notes,

The late Chris Klicka was HSLDA’s senior counsel and … wrote his seminal book The Right Choice: Home Schooling in 1995. … In Chapter Four of the book, entitled “The Biblical Principles: A Support for Home Schooling and an Indictment of Public Education,” Klicka articulated his and HSLDA’s understanding of the child–world relationship.

According to Klicka, children are the property of God but they are—in a sense—on loan to their parents: “Children belong to God, but the responsibility and authority to raise and educate them is delegated to their parents.” Parents have a responsibility to “craft” their children to be weapons for God: “God describes our children as arrows in the hands of a warrior! … Have we diligently crafted our ‘arrows’ so they can be trusted to hit their target as we launch them into the world?…Have we personally guaranteed our ‘arrows’ are the most carefully crafted and have the sharpest point?” (Endnote 6)

I have often understood such words to be metaphorical when spoken by religious leaders, but it is clearly not the case here. These words don’t describe a battle for people’s souls, but a battle for people’s compliance to a dominating power.

Kieran Darkwater writes:

Generation Joshua started in 2003, primarily catering to children homeschooled by extremely religious rightwing adults. Its purpose was to train us to fight in what the Christofascists have been calling the “Culture Wars.” It’s a loose and ambiguous term that basically means anything or anyone that doesn’t align with this very specific view of Christianity must not be allowed to continue. (Endnote 7)

Being obedient to a religious doctrine or leader is a choice everyone has in America. Choosing to join a religion and adhere to it’s mandates is a personal decision, one made willingly, and there is no argument about obedience to authority structured like this. The military, police, and fire departments, for instance, require such obedience in order to save lives and protect people. They are not acting as civilians, but as paid volunteers doing work that puts their lives in danger, and they willingly submit to authority to do their work. But forcing unwilling civilians to adhere to a minority’s beliefs about God and civil society, and who use the law and threat of force to do so, is domination.

Further, there is no choice for homeschooled children born into this religious framework, as Tara Westover made clear in her moving memoir, Educated, and many others do on sites like Homeschoolers Anonymous. They must obey or be disciplined, often harshly.

This is also true for adult women. For instance, Cheryl Seelhoff, a single homeschooling mother of nine, operated a homeschooling magazine, Gentle Spirit, and was a popular speaker at Christian conferences. Her marriage had fallen apart, her husband moved to another state, and she eventually started a relationship with another man. Her pastor told her to end the relationship but instead she withdrew from the church. What followed is a classic case of busybodies inserting themselves into a woman’s personal affairs in order to put Seelhoff out of business and obtain her subscription base through a smear campaign, all in the name of acting as good Christians. The judge noted:

A claim of good motives, like a claim of ignorance of the law, cannot justify or excuse a violation of federal antitrust laws. (Endnote 8)

The case, Seelhoff v. Welch, (Welch published The Teaching Home magazine) was won by Seelhoff; the other defendants—Mary Pride, Greg Harris, Michael Boutot, and Calvary Costa Mesa—settled out of court before the trial began.

On September 9, 1998, the unanimous jury returned a verdict saying the defendants Welch entered into an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, that damages were caused and determined the damages to Cheryl’s business were in the amount of $445,000. In antitrust actions, awards are automatically trebled, so Cheryl was entitled to receive in excess of 1.3 million dollars from Sue Welch. In addition, she was entitled to recover her attorneys’ fees and costs. Subsequently, Welch and Cheryl settled for an undisclosed amount. (Endnote 8)

If you’re interested in the whole story, Shay Seaborne has written a detailed account of it on her blog. These stories show that a lot of mischief has already been done in homeschooling under the Lord’s name, and the larger connection to today’s political turmoil is important.

Many speakers and promoters of the Republican MAGA movement, such as Mike Huckabee, Mike Pompeo, and Tucker Carlson, appear on the Christian homeschooling speaking circuit, and other government and military personnel who lean hard right have presented to Christian homeschooling groups over the years. The founder of HSLDA, Michael Farris, founded a political action group, The Alliance Defending Freedom, that acts, among other things, as a defender of Trump’s Big Lie. (Endnote 9) Farris is also a member of the powerful and secretive Council for National Policy (Endnote 10) and is against the concept that children should have rights. He founded parentalrights.org to “protect children by empowering parents.”

John Holt wrote a book about children’s rights, Escape From Childhood, in 1971 and it caused a lot of people to criticize him for making the case. John knew it was not a popular idea then, but felt the issue should be known so we can begin figuring out how to protect children from child abuse and make them more welcome in adult society. I feel the same way, but I also know that women and minorities still don’t have equal rights in the US, and we are all likely to lose more rights if the Republicans win the next election, so to promote children’s rights as an issue doesn’t seem likely to gain support now. Today, securing the right of adults to prevent certain books or ideas from being taught in public schools is presented as being more important than securing the right to personal safety, food, and healthcare for all children. Like so many political and ideological presentations, we must analyze the prevarications to understand what the real meaning of “parental rights” is in practice.

But "parental rights" must be understood as part of a political agenda, said Jeremy Young, the interim executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a reform advocacy group founded by formerly-homeschooled children, which is to say one of the populations most intimately familiar with the results of Michael Farris' advocacy. This new focus on parents' rights, Young suggested, represents the mainstreaming of positions that until recently were considered extreme: wrapping "these grab bags of everything conservatives are afraid of happening in the public schools" in demands for near-total parental authority. (Endnote 11)

The overriding theme of obedience to authority is important among Christian nationalists who seek to replace our pluralist, civilian democracy with Christian dominion. We see that happening with the loss of personal rights the courts continue to enact, the worship and defense of unlimited firearms that plague American society with mass shootings, and gerrymandered voting that undermines competitive races and true debate in our legislatures. I have watched this storm slowly build in the homeschooling movement and now the time appears ripe for Christian nationalists to capitalize on their efforts. Let’s not remain complacent and think this is politics as usual.

Photo Credit: Nationalism and religion by Quinn Dombrowski. Creative Commons, https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinndombrowski/3976981278

Endnotes

1. http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/closerlook/356/freedoms-at-risk-twenty-years-later/
2. California Law Review, Education Off the Grid: Constitutional Constraints on Homeschooling, Kimberly A. Yuracko, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Feb., 2008), pp. 123-184.
3. Crosswalk chat Feb 29, 2000, https://hsislegal.com/what_has_hslda_done_on_the_national_level/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology
5. https://dianeravitch.net/2023/01/22/mississippi-free-press-what-is-christian-dominionism/
6. https://homeschoolersanonymous.net/tag/chris-klicka/#_ednref1
7. https://www.tribes.org/web/2017/2/6/i-was-trained-for-the-culture-wars-in-home-school-awaiting-someone-like-mike-pence-as-a-messiah
8. https://www.shayseaborne.com/2016/08/truth_about_cheryl
9. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/religious-conservative-michael-farris-lawsuit-2020-election.html).
10. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/30/revealed-council-national-policy-republicans-extremists
11. https://www.salon.com/2022/01/12/parental-rights-started-on-the-christian-fringe--now-its-the-gops-winning-issue/

If you have a teenage homeschooler or unschooler and you want to know what opportunities and resources and options are available for them, put this book in their hands. If you have a teen who is floundering in high school, put this book in their hands. If you have parents and adults questioning your sanity for allowing your teen to quit school for independent studies, put this book in their hands. If you haven’t read this book and you have or work with teenagers who don’t enjoy school, get this book.

Grace Llewellyn enlisted the editing help of Blake Boles (author of several books about unschooled teens and higher education—and who will be speaking in MA at the Macomber Center on Monday, Jan. 23 at 5pm), and they refreshed the book with new writing and updates to it’s considerable resource recommendations.

I’m also struck by Grace’s openness about her own growth in this edition. It is very interesting to read how her opinions about school have been tempered over the years from the many people who corresponded or connected with her through her work with self-directed education. She writes:

… in 1991 I felt that the unschooling movement was a tiny, brave David to the Goliath of the System. When I first set out to write The Teenage Liberation Handbook, there was absolutely no one in my life who shared my perspective. I thought I needed to shout to be heard, and shout I did. … … Unschooling is still a tiny movement compared to schooling, but that reality no longer fuels my perspective. At this point I’d rather be part of the Michelle Obama club, doing my best to go high rather than low. Self-righteousness can be alienating and life-sapping, and parts of this book originally leaned in that direction. That said, I know there were readers who, themselves young and powerless, felt affirmed and even comforted by the angsty, punkish flavor to the older editions. In toning down some of my language, I certainly haven’t meant to withdraw support. I hope it’s still obvious that I’m in your corner if you’re stuck in school when you yearn to be doing something else with your precious time.

I think this new edition of The Teenage Liberation Handbook will inspire another generation of teenagers to seek their own ways to use or forgo conventional school, find work worth doing, and create lives worth living. You can get the book at Amazon and other retailers.

Why this extraordinary bias against what already exists, in favor of stuff that is in many cases not even on the drawing boards? I offer an explanation. Most of these scientists work for an organization which I will call Big Science Business Government. SGB. All one thing, not three separate groups, and least of all three competing groups. All of these people, whether corporate executives or Physics professors or Washington bureaucrats, want to see SGB, or SBG, get even bigger and stronger. This is why they don't like forms of energy that lend themselves to individual, or small-scale, or community action. —From John Holt's letter to Nelson (Bud) Talbott, 8/3/1975 in A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt

Unschoolers tend to believe that the most important issues of our lives deserve our personal attention, and that our personal attention, in turn, is naturally drawn to what is important—if it’s not schooled out of us. John Holt had precious little tolerance for easy answers—for curricula which would automatically make us healthy, wealthy, and wise; for experts who grew frustrated when asked for examples; and for Big Science Business Government who wrested from people their ability to educate, feed, or physic themselves. For as wise as his first book has proven to be about the failures of schooling, Holt wrote of it: “This book is the rough and partial record of a search for answers to these questions.” Wisdom born of humility—made of journals and memos—that could never have been born any other way.

Subtlety is required when approaching the goods and services of Big Science Business Government (SBG). What SBGs design, market, and sell surely range in worth from very good to very bad, and Holt is frankly contending that the majority of what they produce tends toward the bad side, or else could have been better produced at or near home. For certain complicated and arguably beneficial items which no cottage industry can produce, more subtlety is required in our approach. In general, a measure of distrust is a good thing as we evaluate what these SBGs produce, since even everyday solutions which have served us for thousands of years are ditched in a rush toward new science and new sales.

I wish to discuss a recent example of where accepted science and SBG have evidently been wrong and then relay this to an even weedier topic. I imagine that this will ring true to many unschoolers since we reject the common credo that learning needs to be structured, categorized, and graded. This recent example of bad science, I contend, is that of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), which are especially pertinent here, since these are commonly touted in schools. If school-science calls a bad thing good (that is, changing the millennia-old DNA of a crop to withstand heavier doses of petrochemical pesticides because pesticides reduce human labor), then how might we approach other very charged topics?

In a brilliant book entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver makes the claim that GMOs are exacerbating world hunger and that the solution to which is local, non-GMO horticulture. She chronicles her family’s year of consuming only locally produced food—its challenges, its humor, its beauty—in an unforgettable way, and analogizes this experience to a worldwide sustainability strategy. As with de-schooling authors, in reading Kingsolver’s work, we see the veracity of her experience and her claims—and more than see it, we feel it.

In response to a New Yorker article claiming that GMOs are the world’s salvation, Kingsolver writes:

The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the point end: It’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that is so. Exhibit A: “golden rice.” . . . The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds—with some strings attached—to Third World farmers . . . but most of the world’s malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity.

I cannot encapsulate her entire wisdom in a paragraph, but any open-minded scientist owes it to his or her research and subjects to entertain this and similar arguments.

That is, however, not an acceptable hypothesis in the science that is taught in school, by and large. Not acceptable, because it is often flatly dismissed. Here, for example, is how National Public Radio entitled an article: “Americans don't trust Scientists’ take on food issues,” which implies that all scientists concur. The author writes: “For instance, 39 percent of the survey participants believe that genetically modified foods are worse for your health than non-GM food. However, there's essentially no scientific evidence to support that belief — a conclusion confirmed most recently by a National Academy of Sciences report.”

Of course, there is evidence to support the belief! GMOs used in industrial farming almost exclusively promote monoculture; one only needs to look down from an airplane to spot artificial squares of the same crop. The classic example of the danger of monoculture is the potato crop failure in Ireland in the 19th century. Humans themselves have converted the biosphere into an increasing monoculture to the detriment not only to manifold other species but to themselves. Even with this writing on the wall, NPR can’t see the harm in making such statements.

Furthermore, for many of those who prioritize planet and soil health, biodiversity, and global hunger reduction, this lumping of all “scientists” together is a slap in the face, the more painful for its cocksureness. It may be that most highly paid genetic bioengineers concur, but hardly those who understand the greater issue, of which anyone who views this open-mindedly may classify as a “scientist.” According to the National Academy of Sciences, however, this is the thesis that should be taught in schools.

The Alliance for Science, associated with Cornell University, wrote an article entitled, “Study suggests science education improves attitudes about GMO food.” It makes a to-do about how “value-free” knowledge “leads to more positive attitudes toward GM foods.” Again, what kind of fallacies are being packaged, shipped, and forced into curricula (and foisted upon students)? How “value-free” can this curriculum be? Apparently, the more “education” that a student has with this particular course, the less informed he or she will be. (Many unschoolers might respond here: “Wouldn’t be the first time!”)

On the other hand, there is a distinctly richer flavor to unschooling, which Ben Hewitt discusses in a seminal essay on the topic in Outside magazine, later a book, Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World. He describes the bucolic setting in which his children live, making a point to add a photograph of them drying by hand the chokecherries they had foraged. He writes:

Organic vegetable grower Eliot Coleman told me once, "It's important for democracy to have a certain percentage of people feeding themselves so they can tell government to go f**k off. So grow something. I'm tempted to say ‘grow anything’ but frankly, there's already enough zucchini in the world. So, anything but zucchini. OK?”

The book The Teacher was the Sea centers around how students were able to shape their own classes and instruction, much of which directly pertained to food production. An easy corollary to make is “The Teacher was the Foraging of Chokecherries,” and the message is clear: When people (the young especially) are able to engage their curiosity with their natural world in a way that delivers a challenge and reward, they are able to learn from it in a way that no set curriculum could ever deliver.

Unschooling and open-pollinated, small-scale, mostly or entirely organic agriculture tend to go hand-in-hand. It is anathema to foist off our food production onto a mere six companies that pollute our waters so much that manatees are starving in Florida. John Holt said that growing one’s own food was a revolutionary act and that carrying a sign in a picket line is not enough, really, to get anything meaningful done.

In the discussion of SBG, the topic of vaccines—namely, the COVID vaccines—is simply unavoidable. It is one of the most publicly contentious areas of science and medicine today. Before getting more specific, I want to state that it is not my place to argue for or against the vaccines; however, in light of what Holt had said about SBG—and my own “rough and partial search for answers”—these statements strike me as very true:

First: Over hundreds of years, vaccines have evidently saved lives, but they—much more than horticulture—are beyond the capacity of nearly all of us to produce, study, and evaluate. However, is it so farfetched to wonder if drug makers could at least attempt to bring as much transparency to the production of vaccines as possible? After all, it has been done: Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, created a COVID-19 vaccine, Corbevax, which is free of patents, cheap to produce, and utilizes a well-established technology. Unlike the big three, this vaccine may finally remedy vaccine inequity world-wide. While rich countries have received enough doses to vaccinate their population many times over, poorer countries have been unable to inoculate their citizens even partially. People who are reluctant may have more comfort in an older technology than a newer one, and it really is a bad sign if we are told that salvation comes from the rich alone.

The classic example of transparency is that of Jonas Salk who chose not to patent the polio vaccine so that it became property of the world, instead of his alone.

Second: Why shouldn’t we criticize what SBG science has failed to study, given their Savior-like posture? We have quintessential proof that things aside from vaccines do help us to fight off COVID, vaccinated or not—base-line good physical health is Number 1. Why so little effort to study bee propolis as a vaccine adjuvant? Why so little effort to study herbal remedies, heat therapy, or nasal irrigation as adjuncts? Most heinous of all: the condemnation of those who suggest such things might be beneficial in protecting us from the dangers of viruses, even as a mere helper to the heavy-lifting vaccine.

For SBG to say, “It doesn’t work because we haven’t studied it,” is a blatant non sequitur. They’ve used that tired line on cannabis for going-on a century—for psilocybin, for over fifty-five years—both products of nature by which good scientists and laymen swear by. (See note 1.) Australian researcher Geoffrey Phillip Dobson, writing in the journal Frontiers, states, “Big Science is not the answer, and history has shown that most discoveries are made serendipitously by individual scientists thinking outside-the-box.”

Regarding Dr. Hotez’s Corbevax, Vice.com writes that Tito Vodka has contributed more funding than the US government and the G7 countries have provided. The author writes: “To date, the US and European countries have hoarded vaccines, and pharmaceutical companies and the US government have refused to share the manufacturing know-how and recipes.” This is a disgrace, and even those who thankfully received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines should criticize this type of self-serving behavior. Such criticism is the moral thing to do. We need more of it, especially from those who embraced the vaccines. (See note 2.)

We unschoolers should first be our own scientists, doctors, and educators; we can wisely consult with those who also seek subtlety and transparency—and although we are not guaranteed anything—we shall more likely than otherwise make the best choices for ourselves and feel well-served.

NOTES

1. A great example of a non sequitur: The United States government states that cannabis has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” For this, they have incarcerated tens of thousands of people (at the taxpayers’ expense) who merely use it. Yet the FDA itself says, “The study of cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds in clinical trial settings is needed to assess the safety and effectiveness of these substances for the treatment of any disease or condition.” What has the FDA been doing for the last seventy years while these people have been languishing in prison—very specifically, in the years since 1988 when the DEA’s own administrative law judge ruled that cannabis should be rescheduled? This fallacy is outrageous, to put it mildly.

2. Nearly eight months after the Vice.com article was published, NPR reported on the vaccine’s real-world success. Corbevax is not only in demand in developing nations with large populations (with 70+ million doses in India alone), but it also demonstrably provides long-lasting immunity, maintains an impressive safety record, and is vegan and halal certified. Cultural aptness in a vaccine is obviously one of the key factors of how readily people will use it.

That’s often how I feel about our never-ending school reform efforts: more technology, bigger schools, more testing, more theories and schemes about making children learn what schools determine they need to know so they can become the workers that science, business, and government want. Instead of focusing on the perceived future needs of science, business, and government, why not focus that money on improving the actual needs of local neighborhoods, family healthcare, salaries, and wages? Teflon, computers, and other product spin-offs and social benefits (such as sparking youth’s interest in science) are cited as the bonuses citizens received from the space program, but their creation could have occurred in any number of ways as markets and society sought them over time. But science, business, and government decided winning the space race against Russia was more important than ameliorating poverty, healthcare, and housing.

Thought not widely known, John Holt was a critic of the US Space Program; he once appeared on network TV to express his position. In What Do I Do Monday? John examines different types of writing, and notes the type of writing that makes us feel mystified and manipulated: “These people do not use words to get us to do something, but to tell us in different ways that it makes no difference what we do, that we don’t count. … We are conned into thinking that we are exploring space when we see on our TV sets a picture of men walking on the moon; but space is not the sea, it is not for you and me.”

An article in The Atlantic (Sept. 12, 2012), “Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program,” provides an overview of the resistance that existed then. The article opens this way:

Today, we recall the speech John F. Kennedy made 50 years ago as the beginning of a glorious and inexorable process in which the nation united behind the goal of a manned lunar landing even as the presidency swapped between parties. Time has tidied things up. Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.

We have little power in how our institutions direct their energies and use or create laws and regulations to make us bend to their visions of how life should be lived, other than to withdraw or minimize our participation with them. Ivan Illich wrote at length about this, and John Holt was a great supporter of his work. In his masterful book, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, David Cayley summarizes the situation this way:

In a society whose primary product is “services,” even the most elementary capacities—to give birth, to die, to love, to grieve—come under management, and it comes to seem obvious that these abilities can all be refined and improved by the relevant expertise. “The mind and the heart” are colonized, Illich says. The answer, for Illich, was not to deprecate all expertise and return to tradition but rather to strike a balance. He wanted to write a constitution of limits that would restrain professional expertise at a politically determined line and allow an opposing space for what he called the vernacular or homemade. … We now live after the flood which Illich foresaw—in an age in which it is no longer possible to imagine that compulsory schooling might be dis-established, that a “political majority” might be assembled in favor of what I have called a constitution of limits, that language might once again become a commons and not the plastic medium of professional communicators. Nevertheless, I think Illich’s writings retain a powerful ability to guide, to warn, and to aid understanding for those who are trying to keep their footing in the flood. What cannot be changed can still be withstood. (p. 24)

Unschooling, for myself and others, is a way to withstand the commercial and social pressures caused by, as Cayley says, “the contemporary experience of surfeit.” He continues:

Many of the people I know live in a condition in which all spaces seem fully saturated. Education never ends, health is a constant preoccupation, communication is unrelenting. Both speech and thought are continually entrained by careful “messaging,” branding has become a pervasive metaphor, and ready-made figures of speech increasingly inhibit personal expression.

There is always tension between the desire to conserve tradition and the need to change it when it no longer addresses current needs; unschooling/homeschooling was John Holt’s practical solution to let families balance the traditions that work for them while pursuing new ways to live and learn together. This issue isn’t confined to the education silo; it permeates our lives in many other ways. John Young, a guest blogger on this site, further explores this in next week’s posting

Herman Daly, who for more than 50 years argued that the economic gospel of growth as synonymous with prosperity and progress was fundamentally, and dangerously, flawed because it ignored its associated costs, especially the depletion of natural resources and the pollution it engenders, died on Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. He was 84.

John and Daly had something in common—they were ahead of their time. Though mainstream educators shunned Holt’s work in homeschooling, it was greeted warmly by parents and some alternative educators, much like Daly’s work. The Times writes.

… Although he was branded a heretic for his theories — or, worse, ignored — among traditional economists, he had plenty of adherents, who saw him as prophetic for anticipating climate change’s increasingly harmful impact and the vast sums of money needed to address it. Such propositions might seem simple, but arguing against economic growth, Dr. Daly wrote … was like poking “a big hornets’ nest with a short stick.” “It rudely upsets a very large and comfortable consensus,” he added.

It can be disheartening to realize, again, that many of the ecological and social problems we face today were called out and solutions offered over 40 years ago, but they were ignored in favor of doubling down on existing efforts. From schooling to the environment, Holt sought and promoted solutions that honored human-scale efforts to make things better, in line with the economist E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful ideas, another book John liked and sold.

John wrote in GWS 36:

… this country as a whole is going to have to begin to give some serious thought to some things that already interest many homeschoolers but have so far not been of the slightest interest to schools—economy, efficiency, thrift. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Things like that. No child can be said any more to go into the world and the future even moderately prepared who has not learned, perhaps among many other things, how to live healthily, productively, and happily on very little money, how to do for herself or himself a great many things that most of us now only think of paying others to do.

Schools could have helped families by shifting their focus from the needs of the academic schedule to the real-world needs of children to socialize, explore, play, and exercise. Europe was hit by Covid before the United States and, particularly in Scandinavia, it was noted that children didn’t spread the virus as much as adults and schools could open if they used more outdoors activities. But our schools prefer classroom instruction at the expense of all the other modes of teaching and learning available, a trend that accelerated years ago when public schools began reducing time for lunch, recess, art, and physical education to increase classroom instruction time.

The emphasis on doing school like we always have during the pandemic has caused children’s health and safety to be severely affected. Reports of increasing mental illness, despair, burnout, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies among schoolchildren during the pandemic continue to mount. Meanwhile, school officials lament that students are now months behind in their schoolwork and are prioritizing more class time and tutoring to make them catch up.

To me, the irony of the situation is one of socialization, which schools conflate with classroom attendance. Schools could have helped families by shifting their focus from the needs of the academic schedule to the real-world needs of children to socialize, explore, play, and exercise.

Using public schoolyards, playgrounds, sports arenas, and parks as gathering spots for children, parents, and school personnel would have filled a great void for our young during the pandemic in the United States. Just because something isn’t being taught to you doesn’t mean you aren’t learning: team sports, cooperative games, and strategy games are just some outdoor activities that nurture people’s learning and competence. Camp counselors, naturalists, gardeners, fitness trainers and local businesses could also be engaged to help make the outdoors more accessible to children during this time. These outdoor events could have happened while school officials and unions negotiated, and scientists figured out how the novel virus spreads during the past two years. If schools agreed that the health, emotional, and social needs of children were at least as important as classroom instruction during the pandemic we may not be seeing as many stunted and hurt young people as we do now.

The outdoors has proven to be a safe place as the pandemic plods on, yet the idea that important learning only happens indoors, in a school classroom, keeps us from considering other ways that people learn and grow. Homeschoolers have long used public parks and communal spaces to socialize and hold events and classes for children, as do some alternative schools. Green Schoolyards America rose to the challenges of the pandemic by supporting schools “to move their classes and programs outside as a way to address the COVID-19 pandemic,” but most schools and teachers’ unions did not attempt to do so. A few school districts successfully stayed open, showing that one size does not fit all when it comes to closing schools, so a more regional or district-wide approach to limit viral contagion is called for rather than complete lockdowns.

Further, the pandemic shows that childcare is more vital than school instruction: instruction can always be caught up in weeks or months by learners if they want or need it. Feeling safe, having friends to be with, and being cared for is vital for a child’s growth, and the lack of those basic human needs can take years to heal, if at all.

The pandemic has made it clear that we, as a society, care more about making a school run on its academic schedule than letting children learn and play together during a worldwide crisis. It has also made clear to more parents that unschooling is a good option when conventional schooling fails their children.

AEROx YOUTH CONFERENCE: Nov. 6 & 7. A two-day, virtual AEROx conference that is a youth-led and facilitated event where people of all ages from around the globe will connect to uplift youth voices and work together to address the major issues of our generation. 21 & under come free, there's a pay what you can option and full adult registration option. REGISTER: www.aeroconference.org

DO-NOTHING PARENTING: Jinan Kodapully is offering a unique workshop, Do-Nothing Parenting. It is aimed at parents and grandparents of children below 7 years, and would-be parents. Jinan writes, "Parenting, as a deliberate and stressful activity, is what prompted the term ‘do-nothing parenting’ the way ‘do-nothing farming’ was in response to the toxic farming that we established in the 20th century. My main inputs come from years of being with indigenous communities where neither 'parenting' nor teaching happens. But learning does happen choicelessly as learning is the nature of life." For more information: http://ekfoundation.in/do-nothing-parenting/

UNSCHOOL ADVENTURES: Blake Boles has announced some new homestay and exchange opportunities for self-directed teenagers who are ready to travel across the world on their own. https://www.unschooladventures.com/exchange/?fbclid=IwAR2r8WIfzrjnefKWmDrNQ5i8AsI42mD4FZudjodbRM9XdiA5IeJlpH8Gt7M

Teach Your Own is available for sale and can be found or ordered in local bookstores or online. When we started the online session for Teach Your Own we were so surprised by the large turnout and old friends who appeared that we forgot to record the session and just started talking. You can listen and watch my post-event recording of my speech on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/RDzxifYBgdk

During the question and answer session, I was asked about homeschooling in Mexico and South America and I couldn't remember the names of the groups I wanted to mention. Here they are, as well as other resources on the topics of self-directed education outside of the USA.

The University de la Tierra https://unitierraoax.org/english/

Modelos De Auto-Organizacion Del Aprendizaje, Educacion Autodirigida, y Educaciones Sin Escuela started on September 13 and continues to November 10. This event is presented online. For more information: Programa de Extensión y Educación Continua Facultad de Ciencias Humanas | Sede Bogotá Universidad Nacional de Colombia 316 5000 Ext.16294

Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures, by Madhu Siri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva. This important book explores education through the lens of those who are the social majority on our planet: the uneducated, the undereducated, and the illiterate, challenging the idea that education is a universal good and human right.

When I told Peggy Durkee, John’s office manager, that I couldn’t get my head around Teach Your Own—parents teaching their own children? Letting children figure things out on their own?—she suggested I read his first book, How Children Fail, to see where he was coming from. Grounded in the classroom and expressing how students feel and act when being instructed, How Children Fail gave me common ground to see where John was coming from. I identified with his descriptions of students blustering their way through confusing lectures, misunderstood instructions, and unfair tests, and it gave me a foothold into John’s thought and my own experiences of school. I read a few more of his books before I can say read and understood Teach Your Own, and when I did it’s message about how adults can trust children to learn instead of policing them to learn made sense.

But John went well beyond trying to make schools more humane institutions for children–he encouraged more institutions and public areas for children to access instead of just the school silo. He eventually stopped advising parents to form small, alternative schools and urged them to unschool—to create clubs around shared interests and other social experiences instead of getting bogged down with the administration and politics of funding and operating a school. When John died in 1985 he didn’t think homeschooling would grow to more than 2% of the school-age population; in this pandemic time, the conservative estimate is that about 6% of students will be homeschooled in 2021. The delta variant may cause an increase in homeschooling well beyond 6%, but regardless of how much growth occurs, there is no doubt homeschooling has crossed into a new level of acceptance for families since the pandemic.

With my colleagues at Holt Associates, particularly Donna Richoux, Susannah Sheffer, and Meredith Collins, the subsequent editors of Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine after John died, I helped nurture and grow homeschooling over the years. My work as ad manager and then publisher of GWS led me to speak at education conferences and to the media about homeschooling and unschooling and to meet an incredible array of families who choose to nurture learning over schooling. I treasure the friendships I’ve made through my work and homeschooling our children, and I look forward to seeing self-directed education continue to grow, generation after generation.

Please note the new edition's revised title: Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at Home. It will be available in stores on September 28. You can preorder a copy at Amazon.

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]]>Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at HomeHomeschooling Current IssuesHomeschooling researchLegal IssuesPatrick FarengaFri, 04 Jun 2021 16:23:02 +0000https://www.patfarenga.com/pat-farengas-blog/2021/6/4/is-child-abuse-greater-at-school-or-homeschool505a620584ae16fcf130a3f6:50e88570e4b093fe737fd54b:60ba47b301af7d64b5690db2Harvard University’s ongoing 7-week conference, the “Post-Pandemic Future of Homeschooling” continues as I write this. You can sign up to watch the past and upcoming sessions here: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/taubman/programs-research/pepg/events/future-homeschooling.

Yesterday’s event focused on whether child abuse is greater at homeschool or school and it was a surprisingly frank session. The event was sparked last year when Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor, called for a ban on homeschooling due to its potential to hide child abuse. The panelists and commentators for this session firmly said there is no need for further regulation of homeschooling on child abuse grounds based on all the data they had.

We also learned that there is very little data that is accessible to researchers from public and private schools, police records, and other reporters of child abuse, so we don’t have a good accounting for the bullying, suicides, and other abuse-related factors that children face in school.

Charol Shakeshaft made the interesting point that the reason she thinks these issues are not explored fully by schools is that children are not trusted or believed as much as the adults are, and that adults, such as union leaders or school administrators, routinely put adult interests and institutional concerns over children’s health in these matters. Another interesting piece of information that came from the panel is that most sexual child abuse is done by adults who are not in caregiver roles, which further challenges the belief that school is the best place for all children to be.

No one mentioned giving children enforcable rights they can act upon as individuals. Mandatory reporters and other methods of assessing child abuse continue to be the preferred methods for handling abuse claims. Commentator Martin West raised the important point that the issue of child abuse in homeschools and schools should be reframed as "How do we reduce child abuse throughout our society?," but this was not discussed much. Getting children reintegrated into adult society, making them more visible in the daily lives of our homes and communities, and providing them with easier access to healthcare, activities, and opportunities is still a bridge too far for most adults to cross in our society.

Blake Boles invited me to do a couple of podcasts with him, where we analyze and opine about the Harvard panels. In this first episode we discuss weeks 1–4 of the conference: Should homeschooling laws change? Who is homeschooling today? Are homeschoolers prepared for life? And—are homeschoolers socially isolated? We get into some spicy discussions regarding homeschooling regulation, Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s ideas for protecting vulnerable children, the nature and limits of academic research, and political factions within the homeschool movement. Listen by searching for "Off-Trail Learning" wherever podcasts are found.

Soundcloud

Apple

Spotify

You can read French homeschoolers response to their situation in this press release. It is written by a cooperative of French homeschooling groups that are fighting the bill.

In the United States the rise in homeschooling over the years has often resulted in laws and regulations that clearly separate homeschools from private schools in most states. But the increase in homeschooling in response to COVID-19 has given this issue more salience. If two families pay a teacher to regularly work with their children in their homes is that considered an unlicensed private school? Do hybrid schools deserve public funding? There is a bill in WI to create "microschools," which totally blurs the lines between private and home schools. Homeschooling should remain a distinct practice from private schooling, as the Wisconsin Homeschooling Parents Association ably argues.

The latest bit of attention that homeschooling is receiving comes from Harvard University. You can register (it's free) to livestream its 6-week program, The Post-Pandemic Future of Homeschooling, here. The program starts May 6.

Not all the heat and attention is worrisome. I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of companies that are completely unrelated to conventional schooling that are contacting JohnHoltGWS.com for information about homeschooling for their customers, or to have their content on the HoltGWS site. I have many concerns about paid advertising and posts on my site. However, I am happy to spread the word about homeschooling, so I contributed a short piece about how homeschoolers create grades and transcripts for Porch.com, a home improvement site.

As the education and political establishments continue to push back on homeschooling, more parents are independently organizing homeschooling at the local level. A mother in Canada, Phyllis Thompson, and I had a long conversation that she taped as part of her free online event, "How to Thrive While Homeschooling." Phyllis has a good motto: "We don't have to be perfect, we just need to try." This is a good thought to hold as we move into the uncertain future.

The hidden curriculum is not what is taught in school, but what we learn through our experience of school. Our school attendance conditions us to accept unspoken assumptions about the meritocracy of school, such as if you fail it is your fault, not school’s; a school degree is important for everyone, but degrees from wealthier schools are more important than others. Recognizing this in my own schooling and in my experience raising three daughters, I didn’t have to struggle with the concepts that schooling was not the same as education and that learning is ultimately the result of the activity of the learner, not the teacher. However, I’m humbled to learn that I never recognized the hidden curriculum outside of school settings until Black Lives Matter called my attention to structural racism.

Systems are created by humans, so human assumptions about how the system should operate and be controlled are automatically baked into the system. Even high-tech systems are not immune to this human frailty. In the field of artificial intelligence, unspoken assumptions about gender, race, test scores, wealth, and other metrics imbue the final software product and skew its functioning. If human bias occurs in software development, why wouldn’t it also occur in the development of our laws and customs? As I reflect and learn about Black American history the more I see the social and legal structures and unspoken assumptions that favor whites over minorities throughout society.

As a young man, I could easily see the need to address systemic bias and authoritarianism in the school system but not outside of school. Though I developed a different view of race relations than my parents and the culture of middle-class households I grew up in, I realize how stunted my understanding of race still is.

As a young man, I would often be around the adults invited to our home, at my dad’s office, or at a restaurant, and their conversation would veer into jokes or smears against Blacks, Jews, or other ethnic groups. I would laugh along with them, but when I entered my teen years and met more Black people as I worked, played, and went to school in the Bronx I slowly realized how mean those jokes and comments were. I also realized that many of the men and women who used those slurs were part of the professional classes in our neighborhood. Though a young man was in their presence, none ever spoke out that those sorts of jokes and comments were beyond the pale for polite society; no one was chastised for using racial slurs in their conversation. Instead, I received the message that polite society spoke and laughed exactly like that.

I can’t remember a single sermon at church or any teacher in my parochial and public school experiences who tried to make us aware of the Civil Rights Movement, or the unfair treatment of minorities in America. There were subtle mentions of the unrest and politics by some of my more daring high school teachers, but nothing really challenging or memorable to me. We were often admonished to help the poor through church donations, but the poor were often presented as those in other countries. It’s possible that I don’t remember an adult discussing race issues with me because they wanted to protect my youthful innocence, but there’s that hidden curriculum again. One learns from silence and omission, too.

In my twenties, as I grew into my work at Growing Without Schooling magazine I also grew in my understanding about how minorities are especially mistreated and ill-served by our public and private school systems. Building on John Holt’s example, my colleagues and I sought and sold books and materials through the Holt catalog about Blacks, indigenous people, and other minorities living and learning without, or despite, going to school.

After I was married and had children, our daughters dated Black and Brown men and we encouraged their relationships, though we worried about telling their grandparents about their boyfriends. We give money to causes that help minorities, supported Obama’s presidency, and that seemed like enough.

Now I know it is not enough.

I am humbled, again, by how many blind spots I discover in my education. Just as I didn’t connect structural racism to the hidden curriculum until recently, I also didn’t grasp how interconnected slavery, education, and policing are.

Throughout my childhood in the 1960s, I saw the police beating Blacks and war protestors on television, radio, and in the newspapers, while hearing from the adults near me that the troublemakers were making the police beat them up. Since then, police brutality against minorities has gotten worse. The NAACP notes:

Despite the fact that more white people have been killed by police, Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately impacted. While white people make up a little over 60% of the population, they only make up about 41% of fatal police shootings. Black people make up 13.4% of the population, but make up 22% of fatal police shootings. This does not take into consideration other forms of police brutality, including non-lethal shootings.

Black Lives Matter has also led me to learn about the history of the police in the United States and their origin as patrols to intimidate and capture slaves. Historian Jill Lepore has a short, strong article about the invention of the police.

The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.

The horrible, and increasingly visible, amount of police brutality against Blacks in America needs to end, and the United States must come to terms with the stain of slavery we inflicted on ourselves in 1619. Western civilization needs to reckon with the stain of slavery, too.

Ancient Greek and Roman political philosophy, which is revered and taught in our schools, is based upon the assumption that an elite group of men can and should command, control, and exclude people considered unworthy of citizenship, such as women, foreigners, prisoners, and freed slaves. Creating a vibrant democracy from such a constrained vision of democracy is impossible unless we confront the truth that slavery is still influencing our relationships, our laws, and our economy. It is baked into our economic, political, and legal systems.

The Empire is striking back as I type this; it won’t be an easy way forward. The racist dog whistles are no longer subtle and White supremacy is clearly visible in the politics of today. But Black Lives Matter is making us view things in a more objective, historical frame of mind. Statues of Confederate warriors, among other things, can no longer be seen as quaint, interesting relics from the past; they are also symbols of intimidation and grievance towards emancipated Blacks.

If the people inspired by Black Lives Matter continue to march and swell their numbers with new supporters and if, individually, we continue to learn about the history of slavery and its reach into our social, political, and economic systems, we stand a chance to contain the stain of slavery and expand the promise of shared prosperity for all Americans.

I went to the screening already knowing that Peter was upset with his portrayal in the film and it's over-riding narrative of “kindly white person saves inner-city minority youths.” And I see why Peter is upset: by focusing on him and the pushback he receives as he grows the Natural Creativity Center the film diminishes the case that children can be trusted to learn on their own, which has always been the purpose of Peter’s work. Peter Gray sums it up well in this section of his FB post about the film :

"However, for people who are seeing this as their only exposure to Self-Directed Education, it can give the wrong impression. The focus of the film was on how Peter Bergson and the other adult facilitators very patiently and lovingly helped these young people come out of their shells. But normally that is not how SDE works. If this film had focused on younger children or on teens who had been less harmed to begin with, the role of adult staff would have been much less and the focus could have been more on the ingenuity and abilities of the kids, not the staff."

So, yes, it is a disappointment that a movie titled Unschooled didn’t really show what unschooling is like to the general public and was edited to fit into a conventional Hollywood marketing campaign. (I suggest the films of Jeremy Stewart and Clara Bellar for how children learn on their own at home and in their communities with unschooling.) I was prepared for this before I watched the movie and I think it is a valid criticism, but not a totally disqualifying one.

I think this film shows some things very well, namely the importance of empathy, patience, and how it takes considerable time to build trustful relationships with children and parents.

Educators and a lawyer in the film criticize Peter’s efforts as just another white guy who wants to help but doesn’t understand the real problem: these kids need credentials and discipline to succeed in the future, not free time, play, and a sense of being accepted for who they are now.

All three teens had trauma in their lives that public school was contributing to or ignoring, and they came from struggling families in struggling neighborhoods on top of that. Nonetheless, patience, kindness, and respect for each teen is shown to pay off educationally in this film.

Though not the main story, a strong storyline I find in this film is how adults become unschooled over time. We watch as these children and their families struggle with conventional school’s demand that children must learn a particular set of skills at a specific time and place, and how the Natural Creativity Center’s (NCC) approach is in direct contrast to the conveyor-belt of school.

The time and effort NCC puts into building trustful relationships causes the families in the film discomfort. They openly express their doubts that letting their young teenagers play and talk freely is somehow educational, and Peter listens to them closely. Peter’s resolve and abilities not to let anyone’s doubts undermine the deschooling, trust-building, and development of self-confidence processes we watch unfold for each of these young people is remarkable.

I think the movie title refers to the adults in it far more than the young; the adults are having their ideas of what schooling should be challenged and, like most people, they resist change. I know from my years in unschooling that self-directed learning is a tough idea for most parents and educators to grasp, often because they don’t understand what their role should be if not instructor or director of education: “If children learn on their own, then what do I do?” This attitude is clearly shown in the film as various professionals criticize the lack of direct instruction and how such permissive ideas about children and learning are not educationally worthy, especially for inner-city youth.

But NCC has a long-term view of how people learn, and when the young people return for a second year at NCC we see them using games and mentoring much more actively now that a baseline of trust in the NCC staff and process has been established. All three teens flourish in different ways and their parents recognize and appreciate the changes.

Nonetheless, one family is told by a school official that their previously quiet and withdrawn 14-year-old son Miles—who developed an interest in photography at NCC, studied it with a mentor, and put on a successful gallery show—must return to public school. Miles couldn’t do grade-level math despite years of public schooling, yet, despite improvement in his social behavior and his good work with film, he gets yanked out of NCC after just two years for not being up to grade level in math.

Peter shows that patience and listening to what a child is saying is often more important than giving them direct instruction, and that putting yourself in the child’s shoes—getting to know their family, neighborhood, and personal interests—helps inform how you can help them better than a school transcript and standardized tests can.

Anyone who wonders how to facilitate learning instead of directing learning can benefit from watching how it is done at NCC. Peter doesn’t respond immediately to every question or request from a student with a quick, definitive reply; he is often quiet before replying, allowing silence to exist for thought and reflection. The small teacher-to-student ratio is deliberate; personal conversations are made easier in small, less regimented environments, as is getting to know the families of the students.

This film does a good job of showing this, and that’s no small thing. The year-long deschooling process for these children and their families is fascinating to watch as it captures the common doubts and anxieties so many people express about letting children learn on their own schedules and refutes them with the positive outcomes that unfold. This is made more dramatic because we see the distressed homes and districts where the families live, a stark contrast to most films I’ve seen about unschooling which usually feature middle-class, suburban, white families.

The noise, drama, and sheer energy of children drives many people crazy, as we can read each day in the media’s pandemic parenting stories. But it is exactly those qualities that most children need to express, and NCC demonstrates and Peter discusses how to work with those qualities rather than stifle them.

At the end of the showing of Unschooled there was a good panel discussion about the film and it included Miles, now 17. He reflected on how weird it was to see himself on film when he was younger and that he couldn’t believe how he behaved then. He’s now working with young artists in Philadelphia to help promote their work and his own; his exposure to photography and film certainly paid off. We didn’t learn, or at least I didn’t hear, if he was still in public school and what he thought about it; at the end of the movie it notes that Miles’ mom still hadn’t found a public school that was a good fit for her son after four months. But Miles’ confident presence on the panel further boosted the legitimacy of NCC’s approach.

Peter has retired and works as a consultant to NCC and did not participate on the panel. NCC’s co-director, Krystal Dillard, was on the panel and did a great job advocating for self-directed education.

I recommend Unschooled for people who want to know how unschooling ideas can be incorporated into learning centers and other alternatives to school, particularly in low-income areas. Future presentations of Unschooled will be announced at https://unschooledthemovement.com/[][4].

NOTE: This is my first blog post in nearly a year. In that time my two younger brothers and my mother-in-law passed away, I got my dad into a nursing home and mom into assisted living, and I developed my own medical issues, which are now on the mend. I'm glad to be back!

I think homeschooling is getting a bad rap during the pandemic. Parents are pulling their hair out trying to teach their children at home and cursing homeschooling as a result. However, participating in daily classroom lessons sent from school to do at home is remote learning, not homeschooling. However, for most of the public, homeschooling is simply doing school at home and now that perception is further primed by our school’s need to supply conventional schoolwork through the internet. This is why many homeschoolers use the word unschooling to describe what they do: learning at home doesn’t have to occur only at home nor resemble learning in school.

Experienced homeschoolers and those who study education alternatives know you don’t need to use grades, standardized test regimens, and school’s seat-time metrics to judge how well a child is learning. You know because the child can demonstrate knowledge and mastery of topics by performing and documenting their ability to do the science, history, math, and so on.

Homeschoolers see how reading, writing, science, and math are integrated and learned outside of school settings—often in the course of participating in the tasks of daily life. (Fixing things, cleaning, cooking, using the computer, and so on.)

Children want to join us in our efforts to make things, do things, learn things, and we can invite them. If there are things children want to learn that parents can’t help with, they find school classes, outside help from friends or relatives, online courses, books, videos, or tutors to help them.

Duplicating the Problems of School at Home

When your children resist their schoolwork, they will probably ask why they have to learn something that you don’t remember from school and that you’re struggling to teach them. If you say, “Because it will teach you self-discipline” or “Because the school said so,” or some other excuse that doesn’t truly answer their question. Children eventually get the message that though we adults don’t really believe this particular thing is important, we’re forcing them to do it “just because.”

Children can revolt from such treatment in school—silently through self-harm, openly with their parents and society, or through passive-aggressive tactics.

For example, Chinese students in quarantine and learning the state curriculum at home had to download and use an app called Dingtalk for all their schoolwork. The students organized a large-scale effort to post one-star reviews of Dingtalk to get it removed from the Apple App Store. This effort was copied by American students who targeted Zoom and Classroom apps.

The students made the news but lost the fights, but their fights are worth noting for their creativity and effort. What students present to us externally as compliance is not necessarily what’s happening inside them: resentment, anger, humiliation, revenge for being made to do busywork during a worldwide crisis–those are likely the thoughts and emotions percolating inside in them.

We don’t have to teach nor structure schooling so it feels constraining to so many students, which is why I see homeschooling as a hopeful path for education. Homeschooling shows us the many possibilities that exist when children are reintegrated into the real world. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

Since schooling seems stuck in the economic and social models of the 19th century—education as a factory where schools manufacture children into educated adults—shouldn’t we be updating our model?

Being Me and Also Us

The curriculum of the pandemic cannot be ignored. It is forcing us to face how we live alone and together, how we can provide socialization and privacy at home and in the world. This is a difficult dynamic for homeschoolers in the best of times, but it could easily be mitigated with visits to friends, family, and events. The pandemic has seriously curtailed socialization, and this can be disastrous for children’s learning far more than missing time in school. Children learn deeply from conversation, play, touch, feelings, animals, nature, their environment, and other people, young and old.

The virus is scary but it is also a learning moment. Some children will naturally want to study the science and history of the virus, but others will want to pitch in and help do something about it. Here are two stories of young people whose efforts are making a difference in this pandemic. After reading these, can you say what they did outside of school was less important than what they would be doing in school?

Seven-year-old Zohaib Begg spent three years in the hospital when he was younger and when he learned about the strain the virus is putting on his local hospital, he decided he wanted to do something to help them. ABC News reports:

“He said he learned that some hospitals were running short of headgear. ‘I thought they could use shower caps – and I knew that they were at hotels,” he said. First he collected shower caps from the hotels, but it turned out the hotels also had gloves and face masks to donate. Zohaib was able to collect more than 6,000 caps, masks, and gloves.”

The New Yorker (March 30, 2020) notes the achievements of Avi Schiffmann:

“A seventeen-year-old from Washington state, launched a homemade Web site to track the movement of the Corona virus. Since then, the site, ncov2019.live, has had more than hundred million visitors. “I wanted to just make the data easily accesssible, but I never thought it would end up being this big,” the high-school senior said . . .” Shiffmann taught himself to program when he was seven, mainly by watching YouTube videos. His mother says, “His brain is constantly going from one thing to another, which is good, but I also try to focus him in . . . I’m not techy at all myself. I see it as just really boring. He sees it as an art form.”

“Schiffman created the virus project during a family ski weekend… When he finished building it (he’d skipped a ski day), “he was beaming as though he’d discovered the cure for cancer.” Flattening the curve has been an isolating experience for many, but Schiffman has never had so much attention.”

When his school decided to shut down for the pandemic, Schiffman “had already skipped the last week of classes to focus on the site, he said, “when it kind of blew up.” His mother, whose medical colleagues use the site, had given up coaxing him to return. “Maybe learning algebra can come later,” she said. (Her son is a C student.) “Schiffman took the virus threat seriously before many others did. “I’ve been kind of concerned for a while, because I watched it spread very fast, and around the entire world. I mean, it just kid of went everywhere.” . . .

“Now that the grownups of the world are finally, and appropriately, freaking out, it is hard for Schiffmann not to feel righteous vindication. “If you told someone three months ago that we should spend, like, ten billion dollars in upgrading the United States’ health care, they would have been, like, ‘Nah,” he said. “Now, everyone’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, yes.’ But this is the kind of stuff we should have done a long time ago.”

Children learn more from how they are treated by adults than by what they are taught by adults, and it’s refreshing to see parents who see the value of supporting their children's self-directed learning and efforts.

In Teach Your Own, John Holt wrote:

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that is a better school than the schools but that is isn’t a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make “learning” happen and in which nothing but “learning” ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental institution, one might easily say and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions. We can imagine and indeed we have had human societies without schools, without factories, without libraries, museums, hospitals, roads, legislatures, courts, or any of the institutions which seem so indispensable and permanent a part of modern life. We might someday even choose, or be obliged, to live once again without some or all of those these. But we cannot even imagine a society without homes, even if these should be no more than tents, or mud huts, or holes in the ground. What I am trying to say, in short, is that our chief educational problem is not find a way to make homes more like school. If anything, it is to make schools less like school.”

Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children

is now available in Spanish thanks to a new publisher, Utero Libros. Utero is also going to translate and publish What Do I Do Monday? and Freedom and Beyond in the near future.

Learning All the Time

is now available in Romanian from the publisher Editora Trei.

Education Transformation Jam 2019

YES! connects, inspires, and collaborates with young and intergenerational leaders for thriving, just and balanced ways of life for all. This is a unique opportunity to co-learn, co-create and JAM with a diversity of folks from around the US and beyond, who are transforming education in dynamic and meaningful ways. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May, 1, 2019. The 2019 Education Transformation Jam is July 8–14 in Twin Cities,MN To register: https://www.yesworld.org/edjam2019/

AERO

Blake Boles and Kerry McDonald, author of Unschooled are among the many fine presenters this weekend in Portland, OR, June 26 to 30. To register: https://www.aeroconference.org/

Panka Academy

This school is in Finland and is founded on the concept that teenagers can address the big issues that concern them by working with people from other countries who are asking similar questions. It offers exchange or gap year programs for 13 to 17 yr. olds. Panka is run on a sociocratic model, giving every member a voice when making decisions together. To register: https://panka.academy/panka/

Ecoversities

The Ecoversities Alliance is a collection of “learning practitioners from around the world committed to reimagining higher education to cultivate human and ecological flourishing in response to the critical challenges of our times.” For some interesting travel and experiential education, teens and older folks can explore a great number of options from all over the world. To view: http://ecoversities.org/ecoversities/