College After Homeschool

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Many families who are homeschooling or planning to do so wonder about what the future will hold for their young people. Will they be able to go to college or university? How will they do there? Will they be able to make good choices for their future working lives?

Life Learning Magazine publishes many articles about that topic. Here are links to two helpful articles about college:

And here is an article that details why and how unschooled young people will flourish in the working world.

Homeschooling Research: Fish Climbing Trees

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by Wendy Priesnitz, Editor of Life Learning Magazine

There’s an Albert Einstein quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” I thought of it as I read a tiny new Canadian study (overview is here) comparing schooled kids to homeschooled and unschooled kids.

The twelve unstructured homeschoolers did poorly on those standardized tests. Of course! Those fish in a tree-climbing competition were bound to lose the race. The question for me is: Why were they involved in the first place? The whole premise of “unschooling” is that learning happens as a result of the learner’s interest, rather than somebody else’s agenda or timeline, and doesn’t rely on testing or accountability to anyone but the learner. The researchers do give a nod to that, wondering if “the children receiving unstructured homeschooling” might eventually “catch up or surpass their peers given ample time.” But they don’t say if they want to study that. (Nor do they say if the unschooled kids were coached in testing writing techniques, which is important, since testing tests test-taking skill as much as anything.)

Such studies happen because academics believe that academic achievement – that is, the best performance on standardized tests – is desirable. These particular researchers define the goal of both schooling and homeschooling as “accelerating a child’s learning process.” Although they make much of the fact that “very few independent (i.e. nonpartisan) studies have focused on the academic achievements associated with home education” and that their study “was conducted by an independent research body that has no ties to homeschooling organisations,” they don’t understand that they are not “nonpartisan.” They work at academic institutions that are obviously biased toward, well, academic institutions. Like school.

I will be happy when someone designs a study using unschooled kids as the norm and figures out how to measure schooled kids against that. I’m not holding my breath; there’s too much money at risk in the school industry to have someone prove schools don’t need to exist.

(cross posted from Wendy’s blog)

Food and Fellowship

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As the pace of life increases and the need for efficiency rules, it seems that the culture of eating is one of the first things to erode. But fast food restaurants nurture neither the soul nor the body. Easy-to-prepare packaged food numbs the palette. Solo eating on-the-run dulls the art of conversation. And heaven forbid anyone takes the time to offer hospitality to their increasingly distant friends and family! However, for many people, discontent with speed and its dangers have spawned the Slow Food movement. At the same time, the increasing cost of food and our troubled economy are causing many people to look for ways to economize. The result is a re-energizing of food buying clubs and batch cooking clubs, which nurture the culture of eating by sharing the tasks of shopping and cooking with others in our communities.

Collective food buying and preparation can address all kinds of social, economic, and nutritional barriers. There is a rich history and diversity in what are often called “community kitchens.” English monks in the sixteenth century cooked together as part of their daily ritual; for Sikhs throughout the world, cooking together in large communal kitchens is part of temple life; and that North American aboriginals have always created and shared meals in their ceremonial gatherings.

The modern community communal cooking phenomenon seems to have started a few decades ago as a grassroots movement in Latin America, with activists organizing thousands of community kitchens to help low-income people prepare healthy food inexpensively.

Some community kitchens have a social service bent – renting public or semi-publish space to prepare donated food for street people, train unemployed people to become cooks, help the elderly or disabled to eat economically and well. Some act as business incubators, offering specialty food processors, farmers, and caterers a relatively inexpensive place to license food processing activities. Some are formal non-profit organizations, some are affiliated with service organizations or municipalities.

There are vegetarian kitchens, kitchens for new moms, and kitchens that cater primarily to psychiatric consumer/survivors. Still other groups are just informal gatherings of friends who come together regularly in each other’s homes or a local community facility to cook and learn new skills from each other. Other groups meet weekly to prepare a week’s worth of food to take home to their families, or once a month to cook in batches and share among themselves in order to stock their freezers and lighten the daily load for busy parents. And some groups work together only in the fall to preserve produce or before Christmas to bake cookies.

What they all have in common is the desire to save money and time, eat healthy food, have fun, and build community. Those goals are shared by the author of a new book that has just been published. Food and Fellowship – Projects and Recipes to Feed a Community by Canadian author Andrea Belcham is the second book in Natural Life Magazine’s Green Living Series. More information is here. And an excerpt is here.

There’s something about buying, preparing, and sharing nourishing food that encourages us to communicate with each other, while slowing down and enjoying both the food and the company…and sometimes even launching social movements.

Integrating Your Home Business With Family Life

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These days, many more people are running small businesses from their homes. They include moms wanting to stay at home with their children, retirees looking for some extra income and stimulation, downshifters leaving hectic corporate jobs, people who have been laid off from jobs, families needing some extra income, and young people unable to break in to the workforce.

The home business owner wears many hats and has to deal with many conflicts between home life and business life – especially when their are young children at home. Wendy Priesnitz has worked from home for over 35 years, and helped legitimize home-based business in Canada in the 1980s.When she began her first home business, her daughters were two and four years old.

She has some valuable tips for starting and running a home business, especially with children at home. Here’s an article that describes how to deal with the migration of business into your family’s personal life and of family life into your business space.

The Smell of Ice

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Andrea Cameron is a mother and teacher living in eastern Ontario. She writes a regular column for her local weekly newspaper and is the author of Natural Life Magazine’s Natural Family column. In her most recent column, she writes about how she hopes we are able to solve the climate change problem so that she can share her love of the far north with her young son…and not have to apologize for being part of its demise. Her article begins,

“My son may never see a polar bear in the wild. Among the great tragedies of the world, this is perhaps a minor issue, but it means two things. First, we’ll experience significant change in our planet’s ecosystems within this lifetime – it’s already happening. Second, we haven’t protected the earth for the next generation. In fact, we’ve done a fine job of screwing it up. I have this dream of my family on the rocky shoreline of Ellesmere Island. My husband stands on one side of Kieran and I stand on the other. With the tiny community of Grise Fiord behind us, we look out over the bay and tell him our story, the story of how we met.”

You can read the rest of the essay here.

Review: New Book About Respecting and Trusting Children

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For the Sake of Our Children is a powerful memoir of a life led respecting and trusting children, from the naturalness of home birth and breastfeeding on demand, through learning by living and working together on a small farm and in a natural food store.

French Canadian author Leandre Bergeron has woven passionate ruminations about his philosophies of attachment parenting and unschooling throughout a series of journal entries describing the daily life of his family of three daughters – from their home births through to their teenage years. The result is a wonderfully warm, sometimes funny, always wise potpourri of advice and inspiration about natural parenting and unschooling. The cornerstones of the author’s philosophy are freedom, respect for children, and trust in them and belief in their ability to regulate and educate themselves.

The foreword is written by well-known author and homeschooling advocate John Taylor Gatto who is very enthusiastic about the book. He writes, in part, “You are about to encounter the amazing tale of Léandre Bergeron and his three born-at-home daughters as they educated themselves on the family farm. If you attend sharply while you read, you will discern under its quiet style a profoundly revolutionary narrative which, if imitated widely, would turn the North American education world (or any other) upside down, with incalculable effects…Bergeron’s commitment to full human rights for the young is so unstinting it challenges many child-rearing conventions that most of the rest of us take for granted. In that very surprising commitment resides much of this book’s power. It inspires reflection, causing the reader to ask as he or she might have done on their own account long ago: ‘Why are we doing this?’ ‘What do we hope to gain?’ Bergeron’s text compels such introspection.”  

 The preface is written by Wendy Priesnitz, the Editor, Natural Life and Life Learning Magazines and author of the book Challenging Assumptions in Education. The book is a translation from French, lyrically managed by Pamela Levac, herself a homeschooling mother.

For the Sake of Our Children is published by The Alternate Press, a small Canadian publishing house specializing in books about unschooling, green living, and natural parenting. It is available online through Natural Life Books.

Commercialized Kids

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Advertising directed at children is estimated to be worth over $2 billion in Canada. And, unfortunately it works well.

A new study just published in the journal Psychology & Marketing reports that three-year-olds recognize product brands and what they symbolize. Researcher Bettina Cornwell, a professor of marketing in sport management at the University of Michigan, found that kids between the ages of three and five show an “emerging ability” to use ads to judge which products will be the most “fun” and make them popular, even though they are unable to read. “Not only do they understand what the brand is, they understand that this is something they can use in their day-to-day lives.” says Cornwell.

The researchers showed 38 children logos for 50 brands like Coca-Cola, Looney Toons and Band-Aid and asked, “Have you seen this before?” and “What types of things do they make?” as well as other questions about the products’ value. The average recognition rate was 39 per cent, and the most commonly recognized brand was McDonald’s (93 per cent), followed closely by toys such as Lego (75 per cent) and soda products. Fast food was described by the three to five-year-olds as “fun, exciting and tasty.” Cola brands were fun because “the bubbles are fun” and “lots of people like them.”

The researchers also showed another 42 children a board featuring brand logos, including McDonald’s, and asked them to pick out images associated with the company – a French fry box, “drive thru” sign and the character Hamburglar. Many of the children were able to match the logos with products.

This is good news for marketers, but not such good news for kids and their parents. Other researchers have suggested that marketing is a factor in the childhood obesity epidemic and encourages eating disorders, precocious sexuality, youth violence and family stress.

A study of materialistic values among children by psychology professor and author Tim Kasser found that materialistic children are less happy, have lower self-esteem and report more symptoms of anxiety and less generosity. The study also found that more materialistic children report engaging in fewer positive environmental behaviors such as reusing paper and using less water while showering.

Another study, reported by sociology professor and author Juliet Schor, found that for children, “High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them.”

Cornwell and her co-authors want lawmakers to take a closer look at fast food branding aimed at young children, and to consider regulating it. But there is much that parents can do to help kids avoid or withstand the effect of corporate advertising. A good place to learn more is the Ottawa-based Media Awareness Network.

Adapted with permission from Natural Life Magazine, which publishes articles about natural parenting,  unschooling, green living, organic gardening, simplifying life,  sustainable housing, and more in print and digital formats. It is a Canadian magazine with international readership, and was founded in 1976. Visit their website at www.NaturalLifeMagazine.com to learn more.