Homeschooling swap for books, music, video games and movies

Homeschoolers are always seeking bargains for learning materials and I have found a new site (to me) that makes online bartering fast, cheap, easy and green. Swaptree lets you swap books, music, movies and video games, one for one, at no cost to you. Your only expense is shipping your item to the person you swap with. I found a lot of school texts, both teacher and student books, as well as a plethora of homeschooling books here: http://www.swaptree.com/books/home-schooling-books/593/

Here is a description of the site from a press release of theirs:

In 2009 alone, Swaptree.com members conducted more than one million swaps on the site; saved members $5,549,058; and enabled members to reduce their carbon footprint by 5,011,078 pounds, in total. Swaptree.com is often referred to by mainstream media outlets as “the eBay of Swap.” The swapping platform offers an easy, feel good way for people to recycle the stuff they have and get things they want while reducing consumption of new products.



The Learning Revolution is already happening Sir Ken!

Sir Ken Robinson gave a popular talk at the TED conference in 2006 titled “Schools kill creativity.” He has just released his latest TED talk, “Bring on the learning revolution!”, and I have embedded it below for you to enjoy.

Sir Ken, an expert on creativity and the author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, is championing ideas that unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers have been acting upon for decades (I’ll refer to all these groups as “homeschoolers” for the rest of the article), as this summary indicates:

It’s not about scaling a new solution. It’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum… technologies combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education and I urge you to get involved in it. Because it is vital not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from an Industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow; that’s where children experience life or at home if that’s where children choose to be educated with their family and their friends.

It is refreshing to hear someone with influence support homeschooling, even if ever so delicately, but this support is inevitable given Sir Ken’s thesis that personalized education is the coming revolution. After all, what can be a more personalized education than homeschooling? Every day, for decades now, many homeschoolers have developed their own solutions to create personalized curricula, often using external support; this external support is typically not a public school, but rather a fellow homeschooler, private business or for-profit school.

It is easy for me to be jaded about Sir Ken’s ideas: after all Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and many others I read or have known have said similar things in their works decades ago, and look how much more intense and unfulfilling school has become for children since they wrote. Indeed, I recall that the agricultural versus industrial metaphor was also used by Holt and others long ago, so why am I enthusiastic about Sir Ken’s version of this argument?

Because he is talking to a very influential and international audience of “thinkers and doers” who actually applaud his comments, rather than react with calls to further support conventional school by outlawing alternatives, such as homeschooling (see my posts about Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden to read how some countries are responding to “the learning revolution” in a negative fashion). As these ideas gain acceptance by elite social groups and businesses not only will homeschooling become a mainstream option for more families, but the entire concept of learning as something people willingly do throughout their lives, instead of learning as something we must compel young people to do, will also begin to take root for more people.



British Homeschoolers and The War on Kids

Two interesting things happened to me in the past two days: I went to a screening of Cevin Soling’s documentary, The War on Kids and I learned that British homeschoolers were able to help defeat legislation that would have severely curtailed their rights to raise and teach their children as they wish. The connections between these events for me are the strategies and tactics being used to control both kids and parents who don’t conform to school regulations.

The War on Kids documents many of the major problems children face just by attending school, from zero tolerance policies to the extreme overuse of drugs to control their behavior. I watched the movie on DVD on my own earlier, but seeing it with an audience is a different experience, and one I’m glad I had. First, I got to hear and speak with the director, Cevin, who is an extremely articulate and thoughtful man. His descriptions about his own education, and how he learned so much more outside of school than in school, were honest and interesting. Second, I got to hear some audience reactions to the subject matter of the film. Most of the college students in attendance—it was screened at Tufts University—seemed interested in the material though not particularly moved to action by it. I got the sense that many felt the problems presented in the movie did not apply to them and their schooling, though it seemed to resonate with a few. Waking people up to the real issues of schooling—they are about how we treat children, not how we teach and grade them—is nearly impossible because we’ve all been schooled and learned helplessness in the face of authority as a result. As a homeschooling mom wrote in the 1920’s, “You can’t learn democracy in a place that doesn’t practice it.” Fortunately, we can deschool ourselves and unschool our children or, if you can afford to and want to, you can find private schools or other alternatives that allow for more personalized learning. However, as the recent brouhaha over homeschooling in Great Britain shows, we in the US may be in for serious challenges to our homeschooling freedoms on the grounds of psychological, educational and physical abuse.

In the late nineteen eighties I became aware of a new psychological illness that was noted in Britain, School Phobia. I can’t remember the book title, but Holt Associates/Growing Without Schooling sold a book from Britain that challenged that diagnosis at the time. This diagnosis is now used in the US. Since then I’ve heard about homeschooling parents and children who, when they get belligerent in the face of authorities who challenge their homeschooling, are told they have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Further, Graham Badman, the man whose report spurred the restrictive homeschooling legislation in Britain, remarked that he felt many homeschooling mothers probably suffered from Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. He also noted that homeschooling parents are twice as likely to be child abusers as non-homeschooling parents. Apparently one does not need to provide any data to make such claims, just evidence that the child or parent disagreed with you in an excited manner. Why use a certified psychiatrist to make these judgments when they’re so evident and easy to do yourself?

Indeed, Dr. Peter Breggin and other professionals interviewed in The War on Kids, make the point about how easy it is for a child to be diagnosed and put on behavior modifying drugs in the US. I read an article about “smart pills” in The New Yorker last year; Ritalin is considered to be such a pill because it enables the user to stay up late and focus narrowly on their work. Ritalin has become a drug of choice for many college students as a result, and they don’t need a black market to get it. Students interviewed in the article noted how easy it was to pretend they had attention deficit disorder in order to get the doctors to prescribe Ritalin for them.

As homeschooling grows there will be more “push back” from the education establishment, including from homeschoolers who share many of school’s assumptions about how and why children learn. Apparently one of the primary cheerleaders for the Badman Report in Britain was a homeschooler who didn’t think other homeschoolers were doing it the correct way, i.e. like conventional school. Homeschoolers, and unschoolers in particular, need to be acutely alert to the dangers of teachers, politicians, and social workers applying psychological diagnosis to people just because they do not use conventional education.

It is shameful that psychological problems that are very real for some people are being used as a rationale to force or shame healthy people into staying in school or to punish them for trying something different for their children. Yes, there is a War on Kids occurring, and I urge you to see this movie to learn more about it (Disclaimer: I appear in this movie). However, there is also a War on Parents occurring, and both wars are attempting psychological warfare to subdue parents and kids.