"What About Qualifications?"

Education Otherwise (U.K.) video:

Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think

Joyce Fetteroll sent this:

There's a very unschool friendly article in the NY Times today— that isn't even about unschooling. :-)

Written by a researcher, she's discovering what we already know but with the added patina of science to give it more weight.

Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16gopnik.html

(At one time you needed to register to see articles. Not sure if that's still true.)

Excerpt:

Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.

The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through

Informal Learning: An Interview With Dr Alan Thomas

This is the second in the series of videos commissioned by Education Otherwise.

Dr Thomas is a developmental psychologist, author and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education. Interviewed at HESFES, Dr Thomas explains about his research into how children learn and his investigation into autonomous, or informal learning.

Visit http://www.education-otherwise.org for more information and subscribe to our channel http://www.youtube.com/EducationOtherwise

"...a Soviet-style government-run monopoly "

U.S. 'Soviet-style' education system not cutting it
by Clark Howard, CNN.com

While this article is not about homeschooling, it does make points of which homeschoolers have long been aware. It's brief, it has grace and humor, and it has truth.

One quote that takes it beyond unschooling, homeschooling OR school, to tax expenditure, is:

Do you think this whole issue doesn't affect you because you don't have kids? Think again. Huge amounts of your taxes are still spent to support schools that are failures.

"Yes," and reading, and thinking

"Yes"
Joyce Fetteroll on Logic (and unschooling)

Brenna McBroom, on video