IDEAS TO SAFEGUARD HOMESCHOOLING
Message Sent to St. Louis Metro Area Homeschool Groups
Hi. (At the bottom I ask about collaborating & maybe visiting.)
… I'm glad to know about your homeschool group. I've been interested in homeschooling since 1980 and read John Holt's magazine, Growing Without Schooling, for a long time and more recently I read some of Peter Gray's articles at SDE.org. My career was in part-time occupations, like farming, grounds keeping and scholarship. I'm retired now and have free time that I'd like to devote partly to promoting self-directed education. I reckon it's good for parents to help direct kids' education at first, but it seems to be best to give them increasing control as they grow. I visited the St. Louis Sudbury School recently and was pleased to see that it's apparently fairly easy to start and operate such a school.
My computer's internet browser is Bing, which has added A.I. a few months ago. So I occasionally ask it to write things for me for ideas. I asked it to write about starting a Sudbury School and here's part of what it wrote, slightly edited.
<Quote>
If you are not familiar with Sudbury Schools, they are democratic schools where students have complete freedom to pursue their own interests and passions, without any curriculum, grades, or tests. They learn by doing, playing, exploring, and interacting with others in a supportive and respectful community.
Sudbury Schools are based on the principles of trust, responsibility, and freedom. They trust that children are natural learners who can decide for themselves what, when, how, and with whom to learn. They give children the responsibility to manage their own time, resources, and activities. And they grant children the freedom to follow their curiosity, creativity, and passions.
I believe that Sudbury Schools are a great option for homeschoolers who want to give their children more autonomy and social opportunities. They are also a way to spread the message of self-directed education to more families who may not be able to homeschool or unschool.
That's why I'm proposing that homeschool groups help organize local Sudbury Schools. We can use our experience, network, and resources to find suitable locations, recruit staff and students, and promote the schools to the public. We can also support each other in the process and create a strong community of self-directed learners, both kids and adults.
<Unquote>
Now, speaking on my own again, I'm concerned about all of the corruption in society, including the recent illegal mandates. I noticed that Illinois now says that kids can only get religious exemptions from vaxes if approved by a medical doctor, and you may have noticed that the governments have been mandating that doctors go along with whatever the CDC or WHO says. So they've pretty much eliminated opting out, at least in conventional schools in Illinois. Some states are even more dictatorial than Illinois, and some, like Missouri I think, are less so.
Many parents are starting to suspect that the states and federal government don't have the common people's interests at heart any more. Instead, they're practically owned by the big corporations, like Bill Gates' and Zuckerberg's and many others. And so I've read that homeschooling has advanced quite a lot in recent years, which is great. But the big shots aren't likely to let that trend continue without serious pushback on their part. So I think it's important that homeschooling supporters organize to thwart such pushbacks.
It seems to me that if we can organize something like Sudbury Schools in every county, we could attract many more parents to homeschooling and this would give us greater political clout so that we could get Illinois and other states to repeal bad laws and prevent such laws from ever being proposed.
I think Sudbury is a 501c3 non-profit, but I think it's possible to start such schools in other ways too. I guess just about anywhere can be made into a Sudbury School or similar school. Probably the main things needed would be a good location, safe space, internet access, adult supervision, security cameras, insurance and visitors.
(COLLABORATION.) If anyone would like to discuss such ideas, please reply. I may be able to visit various places. And I'd like to invest funds in such school startups.
PS, I write several Substack blogs. See below.