I was going to write about the book Yo Miz! by Elizabeth Rose. I was going to tell you that it looks good to me. A substitute teacher taught in 25 schools in one year and then wrote about how messed up schools are.
She has good bullets in her promotional material.
We all believe in freedom. That’s why we take our kids out of school. We take them out because we want the freedom to raise our kids the way we think is best.
Many of us also want our kids to have freedom to learn in a self-directed way. After all, the data is nearly universal that self-directed learning is the most effective way to educate kids. But of course that’s only feasible in a home environment, so the data never drives a discussion in a world that insists on sending kids to school. Read more
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2.
When my mother had me, she became the first generation in our family to stop passing abuse on to her kid. And I am the second generation that’s stopped, and by the time my kids have kids, the effects of abuse will not exist. Read more
Personality type is an important part of homeschooling because personality type provides guideposts to how your child learns and how he or she finds fulfillment.
Microsoft just bought Minecraft and made it an educational site. It’s education for a lot of reasons, but the core reasons Minecraft is educational is because kids are able to learn in exactly the particular way they are interested. It’s a near-perfect opportunity for self-directed learning. Read more
If you are poor now, you will be poor later; school does not get kids out of poverty. One reason we know this to be true is that schools systematically move poor kids from the classroom to the jail cell. But the other barrier to lifting kids out of poverty is that rich kids score high and poor kids score low, and this doesn’t change if you put a rich kid in a poor-kid school or vice versa. Read more
The human race started out somewhere between the emergence of primates and the development of cuneiform script—sometime in that period of a bazillion years—great at learning by doing. And we dominated the Neanderthals by being highly social, which means we learned by watching as well.
When your son says he wants to be an astronaut, and he’s already wearing glasses, why do you tell him that he can do it if he works hard? He can’t. No one can be an astronaut with glasses. Read more
In creative writing courses, you always hear the advice, “show don’t tell“. This is because people tune out when you describe something to them, but they pay attention when they watch something happen. Read more
My son is selling 3D graphics online. He is teaching himself via YouTube and marketing his services via multiplayer game chat sessions. When I used to think everyone should be an entrepreneur, I would have encouraged my son to grow his business. Read more
I am constantly writing about the connection between education and careers because that’s pretty much all I think about. How could I not because they are so clearly connected. Look, if you are just wanting your kid to love learning, independent of the need to have a career, then you don’t have to worry about education at all. The human brain is made to learn. Kids will learn no matter what. So you can stop thinking about education at all. Read more