the teenage liberation handbook by grace llewellyn

If you have helped with or supervised your children's homework, or stayed in close touch with their teachers, homeschooling need not drain your energy any more than that. Nevertheless, you will probably find yourself more involved than before with your son's or daughter's education. (A freshly unschooled person may at first be a lousy learner, like cigarettes, school-style passivity can be a slow habit to kick.)

Homeschooling parents of teenagers are rarely teachers, in the school sense of the word, and this book never suggests that you forsake your own career or interests in order to learn calculus (etc.) fast enough to 'teach' it Healthy kids can teach themselves what they need to know, through books, various people, thinking, and other means. You can peel the labels off, you can start making real choices, you have the rest of your life to live. You can't change the past, but you can change the present. This funk, if you get it, will eventually give way to a new sense of freedom - at least mine did. You went to school, after all, and in contrast to your children's unexpected freedom you may feel overwhelmed by a sense of loss - all the things you could have done with that time, all the choices you never thought you had, all the labels that stuck when schoolpeople put them on you. Depending on your own background and schooling, you may undergo a period of depression, anger, and bitterness. You will feel less harshly evaluated according to teenage fashion magazine standards. You will see family relationships heal, uncomplicated by displaced anger about school. If the experiences of pioneering homeschoolers can predict your future, you will see family relationships deepen a teenager without eight hours of school and homework has time to make friends with her parents. Yes, if your son or daughter leaves school, it will change your life. I have written this book anyway, in the hope that after careful thought, you will see fit to honor the choice he makes. No, I have not forgotten your child's 'place.' I know that if you want to, you can probably prevent him from leaving school. In short, I wrote it for teenagers because they are the experts on their own lives. I wrote it for teenagers because I found an appalling dearth of respectful, serious nonfiction for them. I wrote it for teenagers because my memory and experience insist that teenagers are as fully human as adults. I wrote it for teenagers because I wished that when I was a teenager someone had written it for me. Ralph Waldo EmersonĪGAINST THE ADVICE of lots of people, I didn't write this book for you.

The teenage liberation handbook by grace llewellyn