It’s Back to School time, or Not Back to School among many of the people I know. I generally cringe at the jokes made at children’s expense regarding this time, but I do have a soft spot for Bill Waterson and Calvin and Hobbes. In fact, I have discovered that some fine soul has created a website of Calvin’s Not Back to School antics!
I spent the first half of this summer immersed with people working to create alternatives to traditional school at three conferences: Liberated Learners, AERO, and Blake Boles’ Young Professionals. The vision and commitment among these colleagues to change the established system feels revolutionary, and so I spent the past week of vacation reading about a group of people who preceded us by over a century: The Modern School Movement.
This past weekend I had the fun opportunity to play the role of “Old Wise Guy” at Blake Boles’ weekend retreat for Young Professionals in Self-Directed Education. The event aimed to bring about twenty young people together from a range of programs and democratic schools that support students to follow their interests rather than a mandatory curriculum.
Jeremy Stuart traveled the country looking for teens who did not attend school while growing up and homeschooled in the open-ended manner described as unschooling.
Over the past weekend of June 21-23, 2019, we held our annual Liberated Learners Conference for people who are working at the various programs across our network. This year we welcomed about twenty-five people from nine programs. For me, this weekend has become a celebration of having colleagues on this adventure of supporting teens and families to live without school.
If we were building an educational system from scratch today, I doubt many of us would choose a compulsory system focused on standardized test scores as a measurement of learning. One way of sharing my doubt is through the following analogy. Just to be clear, I do not endorse the following plan. This piece is satire.
On April 16, 2019 I was invited to make a presentation to the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley.
An introductory post from Ken Danford on a recent interaction with a struggling teen