Learning Freely Network

by Suzanne Malakoff   In Life Learning mag.

Once upon a time, a teacher stood in front of my 10th grade English class with a copy of The Old Man and the Sea hugged to her chest and asked, “Who can tell me what Ernest Hemingway was trying to say?”

A couple of [...]

From the ‘Washington Times’

While the freedom to home-school in America continues to expand, the opposite is true in Europe. Since 1982, 38 U.S. states have adopted home-school statutes or regulations that have removed restrictions on home-schoolers. This year, two more states, North Dakota and Idaho, made significant progress in recognizing the value of home-schooling.

North Dakota, [...]

When Elizabeth Dean was four, her mother took her out of kindergarten to teach her at home because she could already read the children’s classic "Charlotte’s Web" while the other kids were just learning how to write the letter "C".

Elizabeth "Bitsy" Dean and her brother Teddy study in the basement of their home in Columbia, [...]

Naperville area homeschoolers negotiated with school authorities, and common sense prevailed. A potential district policy revision demanding that a “district-approved external accrediting agency” certified any homeschool credits and grades transferred onto a public high school transcript was dropped.
The Naperville Sun reports this news from Indian Prairie School District 204’s school board meeting:

D204 compromises on home-school [...]

Contribute your Experience and Understanding to a world of parents and children seeking a real alternative to forced schooling

LFN needs persons to volunteer, people who are enthusiastic about spreading the opportunities of free and natural learning, and who will participate in this project by sharing, through communication, their experience and understanding of learning with freedom [...]

It seems that everywhere we turn these days, higher education statistics get a tad uglier. A recent article promoting online education had this sad introduction:

Alarming statistics have been put forward showing the increased rate of college dropouts. Back in the 1960s college dropout rates were as low as one (1) in every five (5) students, [...]

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
Albert Einstein
Ask Naomi
Parenting Without Struggle 
by Naomi Aldort
Q: Our daughter is four and a very curious and social child. Even though we are planning to homeschool and I am at home with the baby (her brother), we signed her up [...]

Home educating families in England are going to have to register annually, as the government has accepted the recommendations of a review.

Families should be better supported, the government says.
The review also says local authorities should have the right to visit any child taught at home.
The government commissioned a review to find out whether local councils [...]

Those who attended the ‘HeTof’ gathering in The Netherlands may have heard hat elective HE would be debated this week in the English House of Commons.

This is due to the great anxiety that English Home Educators have over the investigation currently being done by a Mr Badman to see whether or not HE may [...]

"There are no plans to change parents’ well-established rights to educate their children at home," says the government.

Yet it has clearly decided that long-standing arrangements in England surrounding home education require closer attention.
A review due to be published shortly is based on concern some local authorities are neither monitoring home educating families, nor offering them [...]