Is Educational Freedom Really So Hard To Understand?

So by now anyone involved in the homeschooling community has heard about the homeschooling piece produced on Good Morning America, which was specifically about unschooling. If you haven’t seen the video, here’s the link.

After this aired, they received such a response, they had the parents back on and they were able to explain a bit more about unschooling and what they do. Here’s the link for that interview.

Then Joy Behar interviewed them which gave them yet another chance to explain their view of the unschooling philosophy. Here’s the link to the Behar interview.

All of this created a lot of action online. What I found most interesting is how so many people were making definitive judgments about a topic based on a 5-minute news story based on a single family.

The judgmental people exhibited no inherent curiosity to learn more, to dig into the topic further in order to get a broader understanding of what to them was a completely new idea about learning and education.

And that in itself says all we need to know about the present-day state of education. Our system teaches students to react exactly in this manner. To listen to a 5 minute lecture from the "teacher" who is the "authority" and supposedly gives them everything they need to know about the topic.

However, I know there are those out there who do understand that learning about something new takes time and requires looking at a variety of resources.

So that’s why I wanted to do these interviews, to create a fun and comfortable place where people could grab just a glimpse of what it’s like to live with lots and lots of educational freedom and see how differently it plays out in each individual family.

Many people who have responded to my interview request are self-proclaimed unschoolers, but the most important thing is not unschooling, it's freedom.

Freedom is what creates the specific educational environment that works well for each family.

That’s the main lesson I would like for the general public to learn.

Was John Holt Libertarian?

Finally, finally, finally, someone did a "history" of sorts on John Holt and his developing philosophy as he studied and analyzed the topics of learning and education.

This video discusses Holt and how he "reasoned himself into libertarianism," which was something that I always thought must be the case, and also because I feel as if I did the same thing and it began by reading many of Holt's writings.

I highly, highly recommend this podcast for everyone whether you think you know all about John Holt or somehow have never heard of him until now.