Guest  Blake Boles Official Bio: (From his website.) Blake Boles is the founder and director of Unschool Adventures and the author of Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?, The Art of Self-Directed Learning, Better Than College, and College Without High School. He hosts the Off-Trail Learning podcast and has delivered over 75 presentations for education conferences, alternative schools, and parent groups. Blake and his work have appeared on The New York Times, The Christian Science...

Guest  Philip Mott Philip is a former elementary school teacher who now offers parenting advice for busy and frustrated parents. He and his wife home school their three young children. He’s a regular contributor to Fathering Together and First Time Parent Magazine. www.philipmott.com www.fatheringtogether.org https://www.firsttimeparentmagazine.com You can also hear an interview with him on the podcast Front Row Dads. There are two parts:    Part One  ...

Guest  Victoria Ransom  Victoria Ransom is a serial entrepreneur from New Zealand. She has developed four companies including Wildfire Interactive, a social marketing SaaS company, where Ransom was CEO until it was sold to Google in 2012. She was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Zealand in 2011. Fortune Magazine honored her as one of the Forty Most Powerful Women Under Forty in 2012. In 2013, she was invited to the White House by President Barack Obama to...

Jae says he reached the breaking point in 2020. With the pandemic in full swing and talk of schools opening back up that fall, he started to realize that parents were not focused on their child as much as they were needing teachers to return as babysitters so the parents could go back to work. He didn’t want to be a glorified babysitter. Five months later, he quit.

Guest  Sophie Christophy Sophie is the CEO for a charity called Phoenix Education. An organization that is working to change the education system so that schools are more collaborative and offer rights respecting spaces. She is also co-founder of ‘the Cabin’, the first consent-based education setting in the U.K. - a self-directed learning community for children aged 5-11. She runs courses on consent based education and works with people of all ages on changemaking/education activism and...

I’m really excited to introduce today’s guest. Vincent Pugliese is an entrepreneur who began his career in a very self-directed manner. Feeling as though he had no options in his 20’s and no clear direction, he took up his father’s advice to take on a photography class. In his story, you’ll hear how he went from completely apathetic toward learning to deeply passionate about sports photography.

And since I’m doing a solo show, I also want to share a bit about my intersection between financial and educational freedom. For us, they are inextricably linked so I feel compelled to share how one leads to the other and vice versa - together they provide us with a powerful gateway to liberation. Essentially any time you rely on an outside entity or person to fulfill your most basic needs, you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position. 

This week, I have a very special guest co host joining me on the show. Meghan is an unschooling mother of three and the podcast host of The Unschool Files. She has interviewed a number of amazing guests too and I’ve had the pleasure to get to know her and talk with her over Zoom.

I am a mostly self taught successful glass artist and entrepreneur who has had absolutely no formal education or instruction of any kind. I am a student of life itself, and I could not have had a better teacher. Not only was I unschooled, I was raised by the most incredible woman, whom I am honored to call my best friend and mother.

Join me on the Show! Leave a Voicemail! Show Notes On today’s show, Chris and Jenna wanted to talk about their takeaways and experiences after one full year of unschooling. Chris shares how he had expectations in the beginning that homeschool would be a replication of the schooled environment, only more customised, lively and fun. He now admits that it was a pretty silly idea. He realized that everyone learns differently and therefore we require different learning environments.

Emily got started in self directed learning years ago. In fact, she earned her degree in self directed general studies. When she had children, she realized she was going have to find a different way because her husband, who is a chef, had very abnormal working hours. She began reading and researching education styles that were more focused on holistic learning models. In Nevada, a program became available to individual students where they could receive $5,000 as a voucher to use for...

Mara actually had dreams about one-room schoolhouses and she got curious about that. So she investigated that further and discovered they were still a thing. She read some books written by people who were running them. She went to visit one of them off the coast of Maine and actually got hired to open the school for three students. She stayed for three months before resigning due to the extreme isolation the island had from the mainland. 

Jessica was an educator for several years, working with children in preschool thru elementary school. After having her twin girls, her perspective on education changed dramatically and she began researching and reading more about alternative education. She read ‘Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom’ by Kerry McDonald, Teach Your Own by John Holt and Pat Ferenga, and The Call of the Wild and Free by Ainsley Arment.

Heidi grew up on a farm with a large family. She remembers meeting and greeting people often and spent the majority of her time outside. When she became a mom, she felt the need to choose between adventure, career, or motherhood and decided that would not be her story. Heidi defines adventure as anything that creates a new experience and something that feels like a risk. (As in you may try and fail) She thinks it’s important for families to adventure together because

Sue shares how unschooling really saved her and her son. After sending her son to kindergarten for a week, they decided public school wasn’t for them. Her son didn’t want to go each day and was running away from the classroom. Rather than addressing her son’s concerns, the teacher blamed Sue for her son’s behavior. After pulling him out of the traditional kindergarten classroom, she opted for a hybrid homeschooling program.

Lucy is a mom of two, a 10 year old daughter and an 8 year old son. She is originally from London, but now lives in New Zealand. They moved there to bring out a little more of their wild. Her kids have never been to school. The moment her daughter was born, they began thinking about life without school. Her and her family took a year-long trip around Europe and one of the things they firmly decided on during that trip was that their kids were not going to attend school.

Jenna has Erin Rosemond joining the show today as a guest co-host. She has been home educating for 18 years and has four children. She became interested in home education early on when a friend of Erin’s mentioned she’d be home educating her son. That conversation happened when her oldest son was just a baby. Erin explains how they were self-directed from the beginning as her family is very self-directed anyway. She would describe herself as unschooling,

Zak Slaybach started the Deschool Yourself project with his co-host Jeff Till. They talked with a handful of people who had experience with education in k-12 and higher education. Zak’s interest in doing the podcast came from his unique experience of working with young adults from different backgrounds and placing them in jobs that required degrees, although these young people didn't have degrees.

Show Notes Announcement: Jenna is looking for guest co-hosts to help her with the key takeaways from her guest episodes as she currently does with her husband. You can connect with her here if you’re interested in finding out more information. Jenna will be giving away 1 book for every 5 reviews given on Apple Podcasts. If you leave a written review and want to win a copy of Changing Our Minds by Naomi Fisher or Free to Learn by Peter Gray.

Show Notes The fifth optimizing condition is free age mixing with children across all ages. Throughout history, children have spent most of their time in the company of other children, not adults. Sudbury Valley School offers this model. Children learn from one another. Kids don’t inherently self-segregate if they aren’t forced to.

Dr. Peter Gray has spent years researching how children naturally learn. He focused on play and what children are doing when they play and the function of play. He’s interested in play from an evolutionary perspective, children’s nature that comes about by natural selection to serve the function of education.

Show Notes Jenna starts the show by describing her family's learning philosophy and home education style. My family has been home educating now for approximately 9 months and we’ve chosen self directed education as our approach to learning. What does that mean exactly? Well, it basically means that our children control what, when and how they learn. We actually refrain from labeling “learning” as we believe as humans we are always learning and there aren’t particular subjects or skills that...

Show Notes | Part I   Jenna first discovered Naomi Fisher’s work through the Offtrail Learning Podcast hosted by Blake Boles. She then discovered the comprehensive YouTube video produced by The Phoenix Education Trust called The Psychology of Self Directed Learning by Naomi Fisher. Her most recent work, a book she wrote called  ‘Changing Our Minds’  was published in February 2021 and is highly recommended by Jenna as a comprehensive guide to self-directed learning.  Naomi and Jenna had an...

Show Notes   Chris and Jenna share their takeaways from episode 009.  Selling your house and beginning a co-housing project of this scale is commendable and courageous. It takes a lot of effort to take the alternative path and create a life more aligned with your values. If we stick with the school system, we by default assume the values of that system. Every step toward living a life that’s in line with your values is a step in the right direction. It will eventually lead you to the...