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AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Illich and Us, and Miscellanea

As a homeschooling parent, I marked Ivan Illich’s death earlier this week with sadness. So did AKMA who went on to discuss these great homeschooling strategies

Then too, we haven�t deployed elaborate stratified appointed-hours lesson plans to impose order on our young ones. We simply made space in which they might learn (a shade easier in our context, as we don�t watch television at home). They read, and read, and take classes that interest them outside our home, and read, and do interesting stuff. (One of our favorite tactics has been leaving books in prominent places: in the middle fo the floor, on the dining room table, in the hall. Sooner or later someone almost always picks up the book, begins leafing through it, and eventually becomes engrossed by this unanticipated visitor.) And in so doing they learn a lot, and they don�t learn a lot. They never learn that their primary social group is a herd of other children exactly their age; they�re acutely tuned in to adults as social partners. They don�t learn that they�re supposed to stop thinking when summer comes, or that they aren�t supposed to want to learn, or that guys (or girls) who learn a lot are geeks or dweebs or whatever opproprobrious nickname their classmates might throw at them.