Education Commentary

Informal Learning

by Alan Thomas Infants start learning informally from (or before?) birth, mainly through interaction with the mother or other caregivers. Part of this is learning how to behave in culturally appropriate ways, e.g., how to deal with emotions, how to interact with others in the family and wider community, and the acquisition of cultural values and attitudes. This alone requires a vast amount of

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Advice for Home Educators

Natural Learning in Action

By Susan Wight Natural Learning is not ‘Doing Nothing’ Confession time: Sometimes I get ‘the guilts’ and think I’m not really educating my children at all. This feeling usually creeps in following someone’s wide-eyed response when I tell them that I home educate. “Wow, I could never do that! You must be so organised!” The overawed responses vary but the words ‘busy’, ‘dedicated’ ‘organised’

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Education Commentary

Jean Lave’s Problem

by Dr John Peacock Jean Lave had a problem. She knew that the best scholarship said that schools were better than other places of learning because in schools skilled professionals taught general principles that were objective and unbiased because they were not dependent upon particular contexts or situations. That same scholarship said that other sorts of learning, such as go on in the home

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Home Ed Styles

Eclectic Heretic Homeschooler

By Lisa Donnelly I read with great interest the article in a recent home education magazine defending unschooling to structured schoolers. In my neck of the woods, the shoe seems to be permanently on the other foot. I can’t count the times I’ve heard my fellow homeschoolers, most of whom unschool, utter conventional proverbs such as, “when you’ve homeschooled long enough, you’ll unschool.” Statements

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Home Ed Styles

Head, Heart and Hands

Weaving Waldorf Education into Home Learning By Brenda J. Armstrong Receive the children in reverence, Educate them with love, Send them forth in freedom – Rudolph Steiner I watch our nine-year-old daughter as she eyes the many baskets of wool yarn in the small store near our home. The rainbow of naturally dyed colored skeins is plentiful as we search for the “right yarn”

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Home Ed Styles

60 Minutes Segment on Unschooling

This was aired in 2014 and republished as part of the 60 Minutes archive in 2020. Also available ‘Extra minutes’ are on YouTube Channel 9 Mornings with Sandra Dodd The Clark family were interviewed with The Chronicle and the website contains a video with them as well Issue 140 of Otherways magazine carries stories from both Carleen Sing and Rachel Clark and their 60

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