Welcome,

For over 25 years I have enjoyed helping people succeed at learning outside of school by applying John Holt's ideas, often referred to as unschooling, to their situations. A goal of this site is to show you ways to overcome obstacles to learning besides more intensive conventional schooling. The received wisdom of our time is that school is the best place for children to be for social, academic, and political reasons. I question this conventional wisdom by offering other ways and means for children and adults to learn and grow in our society.

I will also update this site with material from my Teach Your Own seminars, as well as from other sources, so please check back regularly and tell your friends to visit here too!

Best wishes,

Pat Farenga

PS: I offer private consultations about homeschooling by telephone and occasionally in person when possible.

April 28, 2008. Structural Issues. I often hear unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers twist their thoughts into pretzels over the issue of how much structure their days should have. Radicals like to brag their days have no structure, traditionalists point to how each lesson is carefully structured to build on the previous day's work, and most people find themselves caught between these two poles. I don't ask my kids to do math every day, but are we really "unstructured" if instead they practice singing on a daily schedule?

The fact is, as John Holt wrote years ago in his book Freedom and Beyond, "As there is no life without structure, so there is no life without constraints. We are all and always constrained, bound in, limited by a great many things, not least of all the fact that we are mortal. We are limited by our animal nature, by our model of reality, by our relations with other people, by our hopes and fears. It is useless to ask if life without constraints would be desirable. The question is too iffy even to think about—what is important is... Click here to continue