Homeschooling post

As per a request from Perfidy...here are some thoughts + books around homeschooling.  If you're going to be homeschooling, I count there as being some number of authors that constitute required reading. Before my reading list though, there is 1 REQUIRED activity if you're homeschooling.  If you don't do this, it is 10x as difficult.

Find the local homeschoolers.  There are almost guaranteed to be a bunch of them, and a bunch of different groups.  The online homeschool community is huge.  States with friendlier homeschooling laws make it easier to find them. 

Now, on to the reading list:

1. Daniel Greenberg, et. al.:  Free at Last, The Sudbury Valley School Experience. This is the sales job.  If you don't find it beautiful...you probably don't like children.  OTOH, Daniel Greenberg + Friends are genius-level experts, and they make it look MUCH easier than it is, and don't seem to address any of the factors that actually make it work (Their personal presence is a full 50% of it).  I've been on the periphery of 4 other Sudbury schools, and none of them worked anywhere near as well as the original.
2. John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, others.  This is the get-angry sequence.  How can you even consider letting kids go to school in this circumstance?  Simple...you want them to learn to be submissive...or you dismiss the book as hyperbole (it's not)....or you think you can counteract the school's pressures (hard)...or you're a genetic determinist.  Not a lot of other choices.
3. Maria Montessori: All of it.  She thinks more deeply about teaching/learning than anyone else.  If you don't understand Montessori, you don't understand learning yet.  Really.  The test question is: what did Montessori do that (effectively) none of the Montessori schools now do.
4. Alfie Kohn: Punished By Rewards.  This dude is my favorite communist.  Not kidding about his being a communist, and not kidding about how important of a book this is.  I don't expect most folks to quite believe him at full steam (I mostly do)...but you ought at least shift your probabilities substantially.
5. Farber & Mazlish:  How to Talk so Kids will listen ......  Besides being the best book ever on communicating with children, it's also the best book ever on communicating with people.  And it's got cartoons.
6. John Holt: How Children Fail, How Children Learn, and the rest of it.  This guy shows the thought process, the learning process as you become a homeschooler.  The dude rocks. 
7. Sigfried Englemann: Assorted.  Truly the heir to Montessori in education.  Let's use empirical methods to get better.  Smart guy.  When it comes to 88% of education theory, he and I independently arrive at the same place.  Then it's implementation.  I personally don't like how his stuff moves to the classroom.  Though it is effective at school's nominal goal of teaching stuff, it triples down on all the bad stuff Gatto calls out.  I'd kinda expect my formalist and HBD interlocutors to like him.  Zig's Reading instruction book was bad for my 6yo, back when we did it...and she learned to read off the McGuffey Readers instead, much more easily.  My 4yo didn't go anywhere with the McGuffey Readers in 3 months, but is doing great with Zig's book.  Go figure.  My now-14 yo learned to read by playing Everquest, back near 2000.  
8. Wise & Bauer: The Well-Trained Mind:  If I wasn't an unschooler, I'd probably go in the direction of Wise and Bauer.  But I'm a sucker for the classics, and if I hadn't been such a math geek, I'd have considered St. Johns Great Books program for college.
9. Michael Strong:  The Habit of Thought.  I'd actually go read his website's education section too...but he's politically awfully close to me, and thinks similarly about education...so I may be biased.  Again, Engagement and 10 School Designs are excellent if you're thinking about education.
10. Taking Children Seriously .  This will screw with your head.  It's brilliant.  It has deep, important, partial truths.  And these folks take "children are people" more seriously than ANYONE else.  I don't expect anyone to take 100% of these folks' position.  But if you read them and don't learn something, you're in denial. 

 Apart from books...there's really only a few (serious) positions in homeschooling:

1. Motivation wins.  This is a pure unschooler position.  It's also mostly where I sit. Provide a rich environment, and offer options. 
2. Coercion is bad.  This is also a pure unschooler position, and where more unschoolers sit.  They're not all libertarians though, which confuses me to no end.  Done well, it's beautiful.  Done poorly, it's passive-aggressive crap.  Everyone doing it thinks they do it well. They're not all right.  I'm largely here, but imperfect in practice.
3. School is bad.  This is where a bunch of unschoolers sit.  This crowd has taken to calling themselves "radical unschoolers"...and often this means they don't actively help their kids learn things the kids have interests in.  I'm not so keen on this.  They haven't read enough Montessori.
4. Schools is ineffective.  This is not uncommon either.  If you want your child to have an education, it clearly won't happen at any reasonable pace in the schools (even most of the "good" ones), and so keeping them at home can allow them to actually learn something.  Most common path here is Well Trained Mind.  I reached this position somewhere near 16 (vowing to never send my kids to this useless of an institution)...and stayed for a couple years before moving to 1+2.
5. School is corrupting.  John Gatto pushes this, though the anti-competition left and the religious right agree as well.  Also those folks who live near schools with drug/violence issues that they know about.  These folks care about their kids, and prefer that they not be exposed to drugs and violence on a daily basis.  Education is an aside....but they usually try to follow some curriculum or other.  
6. School is bad for MY child. About 1/2 of this is overprotective parents.  Almost all of it is correct.  I've seen kids come out for medical reasons, special needs reasons, racist teachers, and a dozen others.  Usually, they have no plan. 
7. The State corrupts school.  Libertarian lunatics like me think that one of the biggest problems with education is that it's run by the state.  If you're going to be a principled libertarian, you can't very well let your kids go to public schools.  If you have more than a couple kids, you're not power-earning, and one of the parents likes kids for real, it may well be cheaper to homeschool than to private-school.  The formal manifesto is here.