As I have mentioned before, I’ve been involved in an ongoing email “forum” over the past five years with fellow members of the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). Topics revolve around youth, learning, and our societies educational institutions and possible alternatives to those institutions. Admittedly, we forum participants can be guilty of arguing perhaps from more of an ivory tower rather than from the trenches at times, but then again you have to be able to see the entire forest at times to best take care of all the trees.

One of the topics that keeps coming up and engenders a lot of impassioned prose on our forum is the reality of compulsory education for youth and the possibility of making it non-compulsory instead. The opinions on what would result from this change run the gamut, even among this self-selected group of alternative educators and other supporters (like me) of learning alternatives. Some of the forum participants (like me) take a more left-libertarian position and argue that our schools and the formal education process in general would be transformed for the better by shedding coercive elements of compulsion. Other list colleagues think that though in some ideal world this would be the way school should be, in our all too real and non-ideal world ending compulsory school attendance would be a disaster, and particularly for poor families that live in dangerous neighborhoods with little other infrastructure to offer youth.

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Starting in third grade with learning the multiplication tables, our son Eric started having a problem with school. By seventh grade he would not do any homework, had been diagnosed with ADD, was taking Aderall, had been through an IEP, and had had a number of sessions with an educational therapist. When he got to the point in eighth grade of writing “F**k Math” on his standardized math test, we pulled him out of school. (more…)

There is an extensive article in today’s online edition of Education Week, Critics Question Alaska Home-Schooling Success, from the Associated Press on issues with home-schooling, particularly state regulation of this educational path in Alaska.

The article starts out stating the issue clearly and succinctly… (more…)

I want to start by acknowledging the first two people to post on and support my blog… Emily and Joan. Emily is a friend through Unitarian-Universalism, who has a son in middle school and reports that her son is having difficulties with that learning environment. Joan is a long–time activist for holistic and humanistic education and one of the people a few years back that inspired me to get more involved in the cause.

So Emily… as Joan indicated in her comment, she can speak with wisdom and experience as a holistic educator, working in profoundly alternative Waldorf schools. I have never been a formal educator, and my experience is all from the perspective of a parent and is in the area of homeschooling, particularly the more self-directed “unschooling” flavor of it.

Emily… your situation with your son recalls for me my own middle school years (we called it junior high back then), plus what I went through with my own kids, particularly my son. But before I say more about that I would like to recommend three resources for more information about homeschooling… (more…)