Spawned off the back of reading School Without Tears, this blog post explores a different educational paradigm and its possible implications

Many moons ago now it seems, I attended an understanding autism course; autism 101 if you will. One of the main messages given on that course was that "all behaviour is a form of communication". They propounded that as parents of autistic children, one of our most important jobs was to be a "behaviour detective", to understand the root cause of the behaviour, in other words, decode the communication. SPOILER ALERT: what has become very apparent to me since then is that absol

Autonomy is considered one of three fundamental human psychological needs within Self Determination Theory, alongside competence and relatedness. Autonomy is a person's ability to act on his/her own values and interests; it equates to self governance and self legislation. Having autonomy leads to people being happier, more successful, have better social functioning, better mental health, developing a strong sense of personal responsibility and having an internal locus of con

This title kept coming up again and again as a "must read" if you are interested in education. So I bought the book and delved right in. I have to say, it's not a long book, but it's not the easiest most flowing book to read in places. But, it is very well worth persevering through. Written in 1971, it surprised me that it was as relevant (and if not more so) today as it was then. Illich offers a savage critique of industrial society with institutional compulsory schooling ge

How taking a moment to calm, be present and conscious when we are in a situation can foster connection and build relationships.

With Unschooling/life learning we learn as we live our lives. We do not grind skills or knowledge now, just in case they may be helpful, useful or relevant at some point in the future. Obviously, if some knowledge or skill is not useful now but is interesting to us now, we learn it now. I was forcibly reminded of this earlier this morning in MusicMan's football session. He was mastering a football activity and increasing speed each round. We got to a point of wondering how mu

We know that children learn far more powerfully from what they experience, than from what they are told. Being conscious, therefore, about how we are conducting our own learning is important when we Unschool. We are acting as powerful models for our children, whether they (or even we) are consciously aware of it or not. We want to be creating an environment our children see learning happening all the time. Where they can see us following our interests and passions and challen

It used to take us a very long time to leave the house. With two PDA children, getting everyone onboard, meeting all needs, getting all preparations done and everyone out, without precipitating overload, was a challenging, patience requiring, and time consuming task. Those days are, largely, in our past. However, I was reminded this week of those times, and it made me revisit my strategies from that period. Let me set the scene from this week. The weather has been glorious, w

This morning my youngest was playing a video game. He had a particularly challenging task to complete and as each attempt and strategy failed, he grew increasingly frustrated, angry and negative about his performance. After a while he quit, turned away from the research he'd been doing into it, wanted to be left alone and withdrew to watching familiar videos. From the outside he looked like he was "doing nothing", was "passive" and "wasting time". The "old me" would have been

I am not a unit of product I am not something to which you “add value” I am not something to be quality assured I am a child. I am not the sum of my data set My worth cannot be condensed into one number I cannot be reduced to an arbitrary grade I am a child. I am not a blank slate, ready to be written on I am not an empty vessel, to be filled I am not clay, waiting to be moulded I am a child. I have a body, you cannot control it I have a mind, you should not hijack it I have

My youngest just came to me asking if he could have some fresh mango. I said I'd need to check whether our mango was ripe. He came over and asked what I was doing, so I explained. I showed him the mango, he felt it, we did the same for the pear and kiwi, we talked about how we could tell a whether the bananas were ripe and then ... that was it ... his curiosity was filled. He went off to continue playing whilst I sliced and diced the ripe mango. There was a moment when I cons

One of the many wonderful things about life learning has been to be able to step away from the notions of my children being "ahead" or "behind". It has been truly liberating and has allowed my children to thrive at the pace, and in the way, that's exactly right for them. Having some space from the school paradigm and relentless school curriculum pace has allowed me to take a fresh look at the idea of being "ahead" or "behind". It became clear to me that the concept only reall

"But if you don't have a curriculum won't children be limited to learning only what the parents know about?" Or sometimes put "how will children know what they don't know if you don't expose them by teaching it?" These are questions I have been asked on more than one occasion. If you view learning through a school lens i.e. that children can only learn something if it is formally taught, then I can totally understand why this would be a concern. Whilst I can see however that