Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education with or Without School

Excellent book with great information for all parents. A child's education should not be left up to "experts".

I am new to the homeschool idea, and my daugther is 15 and hates high school. I found so many useful ideas in this book that I recommend it to anyone considering homeschooling and obtaining a better education for their kids in general.

"This book helped me relax and do less about my kid--less worrying, less trying to cram information into him when he wasn't responding as I wanted him to. Using the approaches recommended by Llewellyn and Silver, I now have fun observing my little boy, guiding him gently, and enjoying his forays into the world as he explores and learns on his own."

For most of us who grew up inside a public educational institution, it is difficult to imagine alternatives. Indeed, it may difficult to imagine anything at all. After twelve (in my case 19) years of absract inundation, most of us have lost the trees in a forest of abstractions. We inhabit a vacuous matrix of unispired, cynical defeatism, where teachers can't level with us as human beings and test questions bear no resemblance to reality. Until graduation day, that is. Then the world opens up before us, free for the plunder of active, self-interested engagement. What if we had never left that world from start? What if from birth to grave our lives were naturally interesting and piquant? What if we didn't educate ourselves for the test, but instead focused on the context of our life and followed our natural curiosities? Einstein (a college drop-out) certainly thought this was the right approach to education: "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet strangle the holy curiosity of inquiry." This book a refreshing, imaginative, and likewise extremely practical guide to context-driven education. All my life I had been vexed with the notion that contemporary education is utterly wrongheaded and thwarting, but until now I had never had the language or facts to back up my intuitive, gut feeling. Whether you are thinking of making the great experimental leap and homeschooling your kids, or whether you simply want to better understand how to get the most out of your local educational institution, this book is essential. Although you cannot relive the wasted years, it will send you in the right direction for future learning, and help you give your children an education that will truly unlock their deepest potential. Isn't that what education is supposed to be about: unlocking our native potential and stimulating genuine growth? With this book the relationship between information and the world becomes transparent again, as it should have been from the very beginning.

While the book is about HOW your child(ren) can begin to love life and learning, whether enrolled in school or not, loving learning is presented in a much larger context: transforming your family relationships so that they themselves are based on love, trust, responsibility, and the love of learning. The authors lay out the characteristics of a child who is uninspired in or has been "turned off" by school. Because loving to learn develops in a family context, adult readers are asked to consider their own experiences as children when their own expressions of creativity were thwarted or interrupted. They are even encouraged to resume their own love-of-learning project. In five chapters, adults are quietly introduced to what it takes to support their childrens' innate curiosity and love of learning. The book does not preach, cajole, or seek to proselytize. Instead, it "merely" lays out some options for the characteristics of family life in which it is asserted that children learn and grow and love it. The book is beautifully written and some of the vignettes of real families taking a stand for their childrens' love of life and learning are inspirational. Finally, the authors say something important about the "standards" movement sweeping the country's schools: the tests which are implementing that movement have little or nothing to do with your kid's education. Of course, they, the authors, have a special definition of education and ask the reader to consider the schools' definitions. The pages of the book are poorly formatted, a matter I hope the publisher will correct in subsequent editions.