Life
Born in New York City, Farenga worked closely with homeschooling leader John Caldwell Holt on his Boston-based magazine, Growing Without Schooling (GWS). After Holt's death in 1985, he took over as publisher of GWS and president of the parent company, Holt Associates.
Farenga is a prolific writer, and has authored or contributed to many of the other educational publications by Holt Associates. He has written articles for numerous publications including Mothering, Paths of Learning, Home Education, and The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society. He contributed chapters to The Encyclopedia of School Administration (1988) and A Parent's Guide To Homeschooling (2002). Among his works, Farenga is perhaps best known as the author of The Beginner's Guide To Homeschooling (1998) and Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (2003). In addition to his homeschooling career, Farenga is also an accomplished pianist and saxophonist.
Though GWS ceased print publication in November, 2001, and his own three children have grown to maturity, Farenga continues to write and edit educational material, and remains an active homeschooling advocate and consultant.
Farenga has three children which he unschooled.
Homeschooling or home schooling, also known as home education or elective home education (EHE), is the education of school-aged children at home or a variety of places other than a school. Usually conducted by a parent, tutor, or online teacher, many homeschool families use less formal, more personalized and individualized methods of learning that are not always found in schools. The actual practice of homeschooling varies considerably. The spectrum ranges from highly structured forms based on traditional school lessons to more open, free forms such as unschooling, which is a lesson- and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Some families who initially attended a school go through a deschool phase to break away from school habits and prepare for homeschooling. While "homeschooling" is the term commonly used in North America, "home education" is primarily used in Europe and many Commonwealth countries. Homeschooling should not be confused with distance education, which generally refers to the arrangement where the student is educated by and conforms to the requirements of an online school, rather than being educated independently and unrestrictedly by their parents or by themselves.
The philosophy of education is the branch of applied philosophy that investigates the nature of education as well as its aims and problems. It also examines the concepts and presuppositions of education theories. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws inspiration from various disciplines both within and outside philosophy, like ethics, political philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Many of its theories focus specifically on education in schools but it also encompasses other forms of education. Its theories are often divided into descriptive theories, which provide a value-neutral description of what education is, and normative theories, which investigate how education should be practiced.
Unschooling is a belief of self-driven informal learning characterized by a lesson-free and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, under the belief that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood, and therefore useful it is to the child.
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
Alternative education encompasses educational philosophy differing from mainstream pedagogy and evidence-based education. Such alternative learning environments may be found within state, charter, and independent schools as well as home-based learning environments. Many educational alternatives emphasize small class sizes, close relationships between students and teachers and a sense of community.
John Taylor Gatto was an American author and school teacher. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling which criticize the modern education system and promote the concept of unschooling and a return to homeschooling.
Growing Without Schooling (GWS) was a homeschooling newsletter focused primarily on unschooling and deschooling. It was founded in 1977 by educator John Holt, and was published in Boston, Massachusetts. Reportedly the first such publication in the United States, it was read worldwide, and helped to catalyze the early growth and development of the homeschooling movement. Publication ceased in 2001 after 143 issues.
Deschooling is a term invented by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. Today, the word is mainly used by homeschoolers, especially unschoolers, to refer to the transition process that children and parents go through when they leave the school system in order to start homeschooling. The process is a crucial basis for homeschooling to work. It involves children gradually transitioning away from their schoolday routine and institutional mentality, redeveloping the ability to learn via self-determination, and discovering what they want to learn in their first homeschool days.
The Chalcedon Foundation is an American Christian Reconstructionist organization founded by Rousas John Rushdoony in 1965. Named for the Council of Chalcedon, it has also included theologians such as Gary North, who later founded his own organization, the Institute for Christian Economics.
Democratic education is a type of formal education that is organized democratically, so that students can manage their own learning and participate in the governance of their educational environment. Democratic education is often specifically emancipatory, with the students' voices being equal to the teachers'.
Anti-schooling activism, or radical education reform, describes positions that are critical of school as a learning institution and/or compulsory schooling laws; or multiple attempts and approaches to fundamentally change the school system. People of this movement usually advocate alternatives to the traditional school system, education independent from school, the absence of the concept of schooling as a whole, or the right that people can choose how, where and with whom they are educated.
Wendy Priesnitz is a Canadian advocate of alternative education and environmentalism. She was leader of the Green Party of Canada from July 1996 to January 1997.
Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason was a British educator and reformer in England at the turn of the twentieth century. She proposed to base the education of children upon a wide and liberal curriculum. She worked for five years under Fanny Trevor at Bishop Otter College.
Peter Kowalke is an American unschooling advocate best known for his work on grown homeschoolers and the lasting influence of homeschooling. He was one of the first authors to explore the lasting influence that homeschooling has on a person in terms of identity, and produced a large body of work on the topic from 1994 until 2013, after which he stepped back from the homeschooling community to focus on contextualizing the Indian Advaita Vedanta philosophy for American culture.
Education Otherwise (EO) is a registered charity based in England, which aims to provide support and information for families whose children are being educated outside school. Education Otherwise is the foremost Charity across England and Wales that promotes and supports the right of a parent or guardian to home educate their child should they wish to do so. EO is in fact the largest home education charity in the United Kingdom. The organisation derived its name from section 36 of the Education Act 1944, which stated that parents are responsible for the education of their children, "either by regular attendance at school or otherwise." This clause has been retained in subsequent Education Acts, and remains a clear acceptance of the parity and validity afforded an education otherwise than by schooling.
Mary Pride is an American author and magazine producer on homeschooling and topics from a theologically conservative stance within Christian fundamentalism. She is best known for her women’s roles and homeschooling publications, while she has also written on parental rights and the need to shelter children from what she has deemed "corrupting influences" from modern culture. For her role in authoring guides for the homeschooling movement, Pride has been described as "the queen of the home school movement" and as a "homeschooling guru". Stemming from her first book, The Way Home, she is also considered a primary source in the philosophy of the hyper-fundamentalist Christian Quiverfull movement.
How Children Learn is a nonfiction book by educator John Caldwell Holt, first published in 1967. A revised edition was released in 1983, with new chapters and commentaries. It is considered a prominent text in the homeschooling advocacy movement.
Slow parenting is a parenting style in which few activities are organised for children. Instead, they are allowed to explore the world at their own pace. It is a response to concerted cultivation and the widespread trend for parents to schedule activities and classes after school; to solve problems on behalf of the children, and to buy services from commercial suppliers rather than letting nature take its course.
There was a resurgence of homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic to help students return to school. Innovative parents sought to create solutions to their individual dilemmas by organizing local groups. These variations of homeschooling include micro schools and educational family co-ops. The first usually involves hired professionals to teach a small group of kids. The second is a parent-organized co-operative where families take turns educating and minding their kids during the week. Both are largely available only to the well-off, as costs in time and money are high. 'Pandemic pod' is the fashionable term used to describe one of these arrangements where all group members agree to participate under well-defined and strictly enforced health rules.
Samuel Blumenfeld was a phonics advocate and conservative writer. He frequently lectured in favor of systematic phonics instruction in the teaching of reading and wrote over a dozen books on education. Blumenfeld's critiques against having psychologies in the U.S. public education system is often quoted by Church of Scientology in their publications, and he serves in the Board of Commissioners of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology affiliated lobbying organization.
