Don't repeat history at home

"The media" is a broad topic, and usually refers to the frontier edge of "the media." Newness is often reviled. If you look back at what was "objectionable" and forbidden, it's video games and internet now, but was TV, and comic books, and paperback novels, and radio serials, and ANY novels or secular books, and writings by authors unapproved by the church. People have been arrested and punished and had their materials confiscated for centuries. If a teacher ever took a comic book or a Gameboy away from you, you probably remember the anger and frustration.

Much of the damage schools do to kids can be reproduced by parents at home, but it's not a good idea.

SandraDodd.com/panel
photo by Sandra Dodd

More happy childhood

There are things I would love to go back and redo, but though I'm not completely satisfied, I'm not ashamed either. When I said "okay" to Kirby I was saying okay to the little Sandra inside me who might otherwise have built up some jealous resentment about this new kid getting to do things I never got to do. It was healing to imagine that if my mom had been fortunate enough to have other influences and better circumstances maybe she would have said yes to me more often too.

... By sharing my children's lives, there has been more happy childhood in my own life.

SandraDodd.com/youngadults
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Any old thing

Ronnie Maier described strewing beautifully:

"Strewing involves making a wonderful variety of resources available to your kids with no expectation or requirement that the resources ever be used. These can be books, toys, or supplies left casually on tables or in bathrooms or presented quietly or with fanfare directly to your child. They can be posters hung on walls, craft or music or gaming activities that *you* start, Web pages left open on the computer, magazines subscribed to, alternate driving routes taken, etc. It is SO fun to do, and it creates an environment of discovery and fun in your house. The things you strew can be in support of interests your son has expressed or about just any old thing you think of."

SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd

Not so many rules

"Rules within the home tend to be entirely for the children to 'follow,' whereas Principles apply to everyone in the family, and to other people with whom we all interact. Principles are ideas like Kindness, Safety, Respect, Honesty."

—Robyn Coburn

SandraDodd.com/robyn/rules
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Ideaflow

I was studying education in the early 1970’s, having wanted to be a teacher since first grade. The university was a hotbed of radical new thought about learning, spirituality, the value and valuing of the human life and spirit. I was in my late teens, and eager to take my turn at trying to change the world. We read all the then-current discussions of classroom failure—James Herndon, A.S.Neill, Jonathan Kozol and John Holt—and I lived and breathed in their hopeful vision of the future of free schools and open classrooms. I taught hard, and after six years I quit. I never did quit learning, though.

Newer John Holt books were waiting for me fifteen years later, when my firstborn son was expressing his distaste for organized activities and formal learning.

While I was making him little medieval costumes and taking him to feasts and tournaments where I set him down to play with his collection of could-have-been-medieval wooden and clay and metal toys, he being part and parcel of that ongoing work of performance art which is the Society for Creative Anachronism, I started to think that maybe school wasn’t going to benefit a child who was resistant to group control and already surrounded by learning opportunities which my distant impersonal gurus of education would have approved. Homeschooling seemed part and parcel of the respect for individuals and the attachment parenting which had flowed so freely from my previous experiences.

SandraDodd.com/HippieShirt
photo by Sandra Dodd
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The full plate club!

"The empty plate club," referring to kids who successfully clean their plates, sounds so sad.

"Full plate" sounds much more nurturing.

SandraDodd.com/eating/grapes
the image is a painting by Pierre Mignard in the 1640s

Wishes

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

I wish things for our family had been different earlier than later, but it is what it is. Unschooling really helped make us better people. I can't even imagine, or rather I can, how different things would be with our relationships with our kids if they'd been in school all these years. Kids absorb the good and the bad. Unschooling really focuses on the good, and that's, well, GOOD! —Jenny Cyphers

"If Only I'd Started Sooner..."
photo by Sandra Dodd
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