A happy outcome of publishing my book has been having some older alumni read it and sending along some kind words. One of the first to do so was Laura Gilbert. Laura teased me a bit that her story wasn’t included in the book, and I offered to include her in this blog as an “Alumna Profile.”
This month I have encountered several close friends and family members going through the throes of the competitive college admissions process. Coincidentally, I also read the book Excellent Sheep: the miseducation of the American elite by William Deresiewicz (2015) that questions the impact of competitive college admissions on the young people involved in that process.
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.