By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Every summer we hear from educators about the “summer slide” in academic learning (e.g. here and here). The claim is that children lose much of what they gained from school during the summer break, so time is lost catching up in the fall. Some even […]
Education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person being educated. Let’s start with the term education. In everyday language people tend to equate education with schooling, which leads one to think of education as something that is done to students by teachers. Teachers educate and […]
By Idzie Desmarais / I’m Unschooled. Yes I Can Write! Most of what I share is advice and theory, deeply rooted in my personal experiences, but not often about my own learning journey. So as the new year starts–and thanks to a bit of inspiration from Sue Patterson’s unschooling manifesto–I wanted […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. I don’t want to trivialize the roles of adults in children’s lives, but, truth be told, we adults greatly exaggerate our roles in our theories and beliefs about how children develop. We have this adult-centric view that weraise, socialize, and educate children. Source: publicdomainpictures.net Courtesy of […]
By PATRICK FARENGA I recently saw the film Being and Becoming with a group of veteran and new homeschoolers and it was a valuable evening in many ways. First, the film is excellent and provided our group with a lot of material to converse about afterwards. The film has a […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. In many previous posts I have contended that children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. The evidence comes from observing the amazing learning capacities of children before they start school (here), the ways that children and adolescents in hunter-gatherer cultures educate themselves (here), and […]
Imagine a school with no year levels or set curriculum – could it work? Imagine two teenagers. Let’s call them Jack and Alaysa. They go to Imaginary High School somewhere in Australia. There are no year levels or set curriculum. Students move on to the next stage when they are […]
By Manish Jain Let us start with a story about the state of our education system to help set a context for this Fellowship… Many years ago there lived a wicked and greedy Emperor who cared only about his designer-labelled clothes and about showing them off. One day he heard from two swindlers […]
People often talk about how their preferred educational method (be that traditional schooling, homeschooling, or unschooling) teaches children "how to learn." With unschooling, children learn how to learn, I've heard more than once. I appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn't really sit right with me. Mostly because it seems to be […]
by Peter Gray The best practices for teaching reading in school do not mimic natural learning. Progressive educators have always believed that methods of classroom instruction should be based on children’s natural ways of learning, that is, on the ways that children learn in life outside of classrooms. This has […]