Join this panel of home education, unschooling mamas who are here to support you, answer your questions, and share their diverse experiences. Are you thinking about or just starting out with home education and/or unschooling and want to know more about what it looks like for different families? Are you finding some struggle in balancing family life, work, and supporting your children? Do you have questions that have come up regarding home education or unschooling that you would like to ask people who have been experiencing, living, and practicing this for years? This is your chance to ask your questions and learn more about how homeschooling and unschooling can serve your child and help build community, virtually and globally.

What does it take to make and then keep a commitment to raise free people amid the pattern of anti-Black racism and the pervasive myth of white supremacy?

During an hour-long interactive session, Akilah, a well-respected voice in the unschooling community and author of the forthcoming  Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, will offer some of her ideas and experiences and invite discussion focused on and for people raising BIPOC young people today. Come learn and share liberation language for partnership-centered ways of living with our children, protecting their freedom, and fashioning our own.

The virus shut down schools and after-school adult-directed activities for kids. So, what happened? Kids suddenly had free time that they didn’t have before. They experienced boredom and found ways to overcome it. Mind-building, body-building, resilience-building ways! Because that’s what kids do when they have free time. Parents, seeing their initiative and competence, gained new appreciation of their children’s capacities for independence, so they granted them new opportunities for such. In this webinar, Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray, of the Let Grow nonprofit, will describe the results of a survey of how 1,600 families have dealt with children at home during the pandemic. They will also describe how Let Grow has been working with schools and communities to bring childhood back to children and will suggest ways that families and society as a whole might apply the lessons learned from the pandemic in creating a better post-pandemic future. 

As state and local governments consider plans for reopening schools for 2020-2021, many parents are considering the possibility of not sending their children back to school. Many families have found that their children learned very well at home, during the school closures of this past school year, in ways that are more meaningful and enduring, and less stressful, than the ways they had been learning at school. Everyone knows that the threat of Covid-19 is going to be present for some time to come, and children indeed do spread the virus to one another and to family at home. Is homeschooling a reasonable option for your children? What are the legal requirements for homeschooling in the United States? What does research show about the success of homeschooling? What are the family and community conditions that maximize the success of homeschooling? Why has the variety of homeschooling commonly called “unschooling” grown so rapidly in recent years? These are among the questions that the panel will address so you can make the right decision for your children.

Suddenly, many kids have more free-time at home to explore and play, and now more than ever families are spending increased time together. Many families are witnessing their young people engage in new activities that speak to their own passions, while others are experiencing the difficulties and struggles of forced school-at-home.

In a follow-up session to Peter Gray’s webinar “Education is Much More Than What is Taught in School”, three prominent leaders of the Self Directed Education movement will address the specific questions, puzzlement, and situations coming up for you in your relationships with your kids, and how the values of raising free people, unschooling, and self-directed education can be applied to our various situations.

A pandemic is a terrible thing, but it never hurts to look for silver linings. Professor Peter Gray has, for years, been writing about the harm created by our over-scheduling of children’s lives. We have gradually, over decades, been increasing the time that children spend at school and school-like activities outside of school and decreasing their opportunities for free play and other self-directed activities. The consequences include record levels of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among schoolchildren. Now, suddenly, the schools and all those after-school organized activities are canceled. Suddenly, children have free time. How are they using that time? What will they learn from this new-found freedom? How might this experience lead parents, educators, and all of society to reassess our obsession with keeping children so busy with adult-directed activities and so deprived of free play? Might we regain an appreciation of what childhood is all about?In this session Peter will address these questions and make time available for questions, comments, and discussion.