School Free: The Home-schooling Handbook

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

The appearance of this innocuous-looking little book, the cover graced
by a photo of two tiny, beautiful girls looking at a picture book
together, belies the true nature of the text between its pretty
pale-blue covers; it is in reality a radical tract expounding
revolutionary thought.

Wendy Priesnitz, founder of the Canadian Alliance of Homeschoolers and
editor of Natural Life magazine, has updated her 1987 handbook on
keeping, or taking, children out of school. Variously called home-based
education, deschooling, unschooling, or (Wendy’s favorite) life-based
learning, homeschooling (the term least accurately descriptive of but
most commonly used for this phenomenon) has changed considerably in the
nearly 10 years since the Alternate Press first published this handbook,
which manages to be at once philosophically challenging and eminently
practical.

Priesnitz, whose own daughters learned at home for many years and are
now both independent young women, gives Canadian families a superb
overview of the basics: why families choose home-based education, what
they do all day, how to deal with legal issues, and ways to address
those old bugaboos “evaluation” and “socialization.” She
includes information on teenage learners and computers for home-based
learners.

Priesnitz’s approach and beliefs are close to those of the late John
Holt, the educational reformer whose book How Children Fail turned the
world of education on its ear in the 1960s. She is an advocate not just
of home-based learning, but of freedom and autonomy for children.

A strong believer in children’s civil rights, she makes an
impassioned but reasoned case against compulsory education. The book
concludes with a note to educators regarding home educators’ views on
the role of government in education. As more and more Canadian families
investigate and choose this educational option (some 50,000 children
were being home-educated at last estimate), this new version is timely
and welcome.