Radio Free School

Radio Free School's blog is worth a bookmark of its own.
http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/

This week's news is an interview of Grace Llwellyn, by Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko who does some great interviews!

http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/2007/09/radio-free-school-interview-grace.html


And here's an older piece, in which someone else interviewed Beatrice herself. It's really great:

http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/2006/12/devil-in-details.html

The beginning....

How long have you been doing Radio Free School? How did you start doing it?

We're into our fifth consecutive year of Radio Free School. I had done a social justice and environmental spoken word show on campus/community radio for a few years, and love the medium; we thought that it would be fun to do a show with our kids. There isn't much radio featuring children, especially shows that have kids as primary agents; we applied for a half hour spot on CFMU and got accepted.

How many people are involve with each episode?

Sometimes as few as two people, interviewer and interviewee, sometimes more, like when we go to visit a science lab we take along some friends, there might be ten people or more. The way the show developed over time is that producing it became a family project primarily.

Could you talk about the distinction between Free/Un schooling and homeschooling, and I guess what the show is about; why you do it?

We started radio free school as a way to follow our childrens' interests and give them a forum to be heard. Since we weren't sending them to school, the show was a way to pursue anything and everything we wanted, very free form,while enhancing their experience of the world. This nicely aligned itself with the philosophy of unschooling which doesn't impose set courses to follow, but follows naturally the child's interest. It is a challenge as people like myself who grew up with schooling (my dad was a public school principal) to realize that we don't need schools as the model for learning,in fact, the way schools are structured they actually kill initiative and the joy of learning in many many children. My permanent record at highschool probably reflects my innate rebelliousness against arbitrary authority, and I really don't expect my kids to be forced into such a position.

Read the rest to learn more about this wonderful and long-running project.

Trashing Teens

Although this isn't a homeschooling article, it discusses schools and school-related problems in ways that will be very revealing and freeing for homeschoolers.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM (Hara Estroff Marano): Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.

The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20070302-000002&print=1

Dependence Nurtures Independence

A researcher at Carnegie-Mellon University has shown that attachment theory (referred to in La Leche League and among Unschoolers as "attachment parenting") works with married couples too. Things we've been discussing among unschoolers for years has research now! How cool. Part of my purpose in posting this here now is so I can find it again more easily when my world finally settles from this upcoming conference and Kirby's move to Austin (he's going to Sacramento with me; we get back Monday afternoon; he leaves town Wednesday morning).

The Thinkers: CMU prof shows benefits of emotional support

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Monday, June 04, 2007

Brooke Feeney has discovered that the same thing that works for
crying babies also works for adult couples and for parents and their
teenage children.

http://www.postgazette.com/pg/07155/791406-51.stm

There are audio files at that site too, as described below:

Carnegie Mellon relationship researcher Brooke Feeney says parents'
emotional support of children is more important than giving them things.

Ms. Feeney explains why people's behavioral patterns are hard to
change.

Ms. Feeney talks about why people who avoid emotional involvement
often pair with those who are anxious about relationships.

Minnesota Public Radio interviews the Traaseth Family

The latest trend in education: Unschooling
Minnesota Public Radio Thu, 17 May 2007 11:02 PM PDT
Unschooling is an unstructured approach to education. Children don't have classes, text books or teachers. Instead they pick their own areas to study. They learn about the world by living in it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/05/16/unschooling/?rsssource=1

Roya Sorooshian is quoted there too.


The obligatory naysaying "expert" is particularly irritating in this one, but it seems to be what all reporters think they MUST do to "be fair," which is ask someone who has no real idea about unschooling.

Sarah Sobonya says unschooling led to creativity

"When I look back on our eight years of unschooling, what strikes me most is how much fun we’ve had. I never expected unschooling to be so much fun. In a way, it’s been a kind of an endless summer: eight years of watching Rain follow her whims and her dreams and of learning and growing alongside her.

"With unschooling, no two days are the same. Some days we rise late and spend the day puttering around the house, maybe baking pancakes and reading together, gardening or watching movies. Other days we’re up early and off to museums or classes or berry-picking or visits with friends."

(the article continues... http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/may/13/first_person_sarah_sobonya/>)

Lawrence Journal World
May 13, 2007

Pittsburgh City Paper

SEPTEMBER 28, 2006
Learning Curves
Education is no longer a simple line from "A" to "B." How do students feel about the dizzying array of choices their parents can make?

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=28620

"In his 2005 book It Takes a Family, Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum argues that home-schooling, and not mass education, is really the norm.

"Santorum has a point. While it seems as if school buses and back-to-school shopping have been with us for eternity, our public education system is relatively new ... about 150 years old. And while mass education is hardly on death's door, it does appear that families are increasingly choosing alternatives to traditional public and private schools: from "cyber-schools" and charter schools to parent-led home-schooling. The National Home Education Research Institute reported this July that there were between 1.9 and 2.4 million children home-schooled nationwide during the past school year, an increase of about 10 percent from the year before. Home-schooling is growing even more quickly among non-white families; about 15 percent of all home-schooled families are non-white.

"In Pennsylvania, about 15,000 students were home-schooled in 1995; today more than 23,000 kids are being home-schooled, about 1.2 percent of the state's student population. ...."

The article has a section of questions and answers with teens, the intro to which is

"In late August, City Paper sat down with five Pittsburgh-area students who have participated in at least one of these forms of alternative schooling: charter-schooling, cyber-schooling, home-schooling and "un-schooling." If the students in our discussion group are representative, we may be witnessing the birth of a new fluidity between traditional and alternative forms of education."

Laurie Chancey and Valerie Fitzenreiter

http://thestory.org/

Podcast and links.

From their intro:

Valerie Fitzenreiter's daughter Laurie never spent a day of of her childhood in a traditional classroom. When she was pregnant with Laurie, Valerie read a book called "Summerhill," about a progressive school in England where students were given such a vast amount of freedom they weren't even obligated to go to class. It changed her philosophy on parenting forever.

If Laurie wanted to spend the entire day reading a book or playing computer games, Valerie allowed it.

I remember growing up feeling like I could try school if I wanted to. But I never remember wanting to.
- Laurie Chancey

Dick talks to Valerie and Laurie about life in an un-schooled household.