School Survival

An opinion from a Newsvine article By TheF###Princess Unschooling can be a very controversial topic to discuss. But as with all topics, if you are unfamiliar with the subject, it needs to be explained. In short, unschooling is child-led homeschooling. But this deffenition does not always explain enough, though. Grown unschool blogger Idzie Desmariais describes […]

by Don Elwell, Ph.D. Director, Greylight Theatre This article was prompted by three significant experiences: ones that have really rewritten how I feel as an educator about what we’re doing. The first, as he title suggests, was getting sucked into playing World of Warcraft online. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an inveterate nerd, and did the […]

ALBANY -- Greg Henderson wanted to learn about astrophysics, so he told his teacher to design a class for him. The next week, he was talking string theory with his friends. Henderson, 16, is a student at the Harriet Tubman Democratic High School, which is housed in a restored row home that is a rare […]

by Jerry Mintz (originally posted here) In reference to: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-billionaire-donors-are-har.html It’s too bad that the school reformers and the billionaire funders have to make every mistake there is to make on their way to, perhaps, finding the real clue to how learning actually works. I think they mean well. Probably they feel a little guilty […]

Kate Hammer From Saturday's Globe and Mail It may sound flaky, but the ‘unschooling’ movement's ideas are going mainstream as parents are increasingly opting to keep their kids out of class. It has been Saturday in the Laricchia household for nearly a decade. The family's three teenagers, Michael, Lissy and Joseph, have known nothing of […]

Finishing high school online is a decent enough alternative to being stuck in a classroom with annoying people all day. It's not quite unschooling or homeschooling, but if your parents aren't open to those ideas, then it might be a decent compromise. Unlike homeschooling and unschooling, with online high schooling you get a diploma afterwards […]

by Peter Gray (originally published here) Many years ago, as part of my early studies of the Sudbury Valley School, I sat in on a school meeting at which the main agenda item had to do with a complaint made about a new student's clothing. A new teenaged enrollee had been coming to school wearing […]

The Creativity Crisis For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it. Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly […]

Parents can begin applying to set up their own "free schools" from today. The Department for Education (DfE) is publishing a proposal form for groups to fill out, setting out their reasons, the aims and objectives of the school, an outline of a curriculum, evidence of demand from parents and possible locations. Education Secretary Michael […]

I just read this on Idzie's blog: If you're an unschooler, or a homeschooler, or interested in alternative learning, and are even *slightly* involved in any of those communities online, you've most likely heard about the Good Morning America segment on unschooling. Unschooling has been moving steadily into the mainstream awareness in the last few […]