The World Is Our School | Learning by Land, Sea and Air | Unschooling and Deschooling Our Children | Archive

Nature Deficit Disorder: Is It the New Black?

“What was your favorite thing today at school?” I’d always ask them at 3:30. “Recess!” they’d say. Or “Lunch! ‘Cause after that, there’s recess!”

We all know to take such remarks with a grain of salt. Get enough grains of salt together, though, and you will have a salt shaker.

Roadschooling: The 5-Month Mark

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As our time in Central America draws to a close, we’re reflecting on our choice in 2010 to leave institutional schooling for a less structured, more relaxed life as an unschooling family.

What have been the benefits? What have been the drawbacks?

I find that my answers differ from the boys’ answers.

Keep Out — The International Edition

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All over the globe, people have made it their business to keep other people off their land. Out of their yard. Away. We’re learning how this plays out in Costa Rica and Nicaragua as compared to what we’ve come to know in various places in the U.S.

Why We Are Going to Nicaragua

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Demonstrating to the kids that rendering aid can take many forms: the shape of a hot pizza, the length of a park’s perimeter by carriage, the heft of a backpack filled with toys.

Question: What Is Infrastructure?

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Over the summer, we witnessed major bridge repairs along an oft-used highway coming out of Portland. “It’s such a drag!” the kids always said, as we lingered in orange-barrel traffic. Well, kids, we’re living differently now in Costa Rica. Paved roads—and safe bridges—would be quite nice.

Northern California as Science and Math Teacher

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We talked distance, elevation, heights and widths in our journey from the Lost Coast to the Sierras of Plumas and Lassen Counties. Thrown in a bit of geology, cartography, zoology, botany, and ecology, and you’ve got more than enough material for a month. The review is organic, consistent and constant.

The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet

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It’s 1927. Newly widowed mother of five Muriel Wylie Blanchet packs her family onto a 25-foot boat in order to explore the coastal waters of British Columbia. It becomes tradition each summer, all summer, for a dozen years. The Curve of Time, Blanchet’s account of their adventures, is well written, delightful, and inspiring.

Mr. Laszlo and Company

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I fell in love with foreign language to the sound of hammers and saw blades.

What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.

~John Holt

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