I guess I was just built this way, but I question everything. I wasn’t particularly fond of school growing up and always wondered why I had to learn all day every day, sitting in a desk indoors. I guess that’s why they call it compulsory education 🙂
While seeking alternative educational models for my own children and learning some key insights from my wife, I came across the work or Pat Farenga and Growing Without Schooling.
Patrick Farenga brings more than 34 years of fieldwork, advocacy, and personal experience (he and his wife unschooled their three daughters) to help parents and children learn in their own ways. Pat is a writer and education activist who addresses academic and general audiences about working with children, not on children, to help them learn.
Farenga worked closely with one of the founders of the modern homeschooling movement, the late author and teacher John Holt, and published Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS) from 1985 until it stopped in 2001. GWS was the nation’s first periodical about learning without going to school, started by Holt in 1977.
In today’s episode we are going into the educational system, and then unpack what the unschooling revolution is all about.
We dive into topics like
- How the educational system is long overdue for an upgrade
- What is unschooling?
- The origins of unschooling and deschooling
- Growing Without Schooling
- The conditions we have set up around how to learn and why it’s not the most optimal
- The true statistics of how many Americans actually have college degrees and what that really means
- How education is actually part of the problem of our social structure
- The truth about college debt
- The power of letting learning evolve for the student
- Having patience the parent of a self-directed learning student
- Working with your child and not on them
- How Pat’s daughter learned how to read through Nintendo
- Trusting your children to learn on their own
- Helping your children find what they want to do and moving them directly towards it
- Learning what you need to learn when you need to learn it – Pat’s story of his older daughter
- How to relax into the journey of parenting on this journey
- What actually determines the type of adult we become
Click to Tweet Pat’s quote
– John Holt
Connect with Pat on social media
You may also like these episodes
- Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play with Mike Lanza
- Living More Connected, Rooted and Grounded In a Fast Pace Hustle Kind of World with Dallas Hartwig
- The Truth About Youth Entrepreneurship and Business Fundamentals with Scott Gerber
Subscribe to The Next Level
Like what you heard?
Strike up a conversation here on the blog, leave a comment below with you biggest take home point.
If you like the show, please take a moment to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they’re super helpful for the ranking of the show and I read every single one of them personally!
AND, remember to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live!