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Wendy Priesnitz | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupations |
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| Known for | Homeschooling and unschooling advocacy |
| Political party | Green Party of Canada (leader, July 1996 - January 1997) |
| Website | Official website |
Wendy Priesnitz is a Canadian advocate of alternative education and environmentalism. [1] [2] She was leader of the Green Party of Canada from July 1996 to January 1997. [3]
Priesnitz originally trained to be a teacher. She then decided to educate her children at home.
She founded the Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers in 1979. [4]
She focuses on lifelong learning and biomimicry as a reason to look at decentralised or home (or autonomous) education. [5]
She is known for her advocacy of homeschooling/unschooling and home-based/green business. She describes the educational benefits as, "[unschooling] children generally live and learn, with the support of their families, based on their own interests and their timetables, and without curriculum, tests, or grades.". [6]
Priesnitz and her husband run Life Media (formerly The Alternative Press). Since 1976, she has co-owned and edited Natural Life (magazine), an award-winning sustainable lifestyles magazine. In 2002, she founded Life Learning Magazine, which she owns and edits.
She is the author of several books on homeschooling.
Priesnitz is married with two children. [7]
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 an 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 can vary. 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.
Unschooling is an informal learning method that prioritizes learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschoolers learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Often considered a lesson- 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. While unschooled students may occasionally take courses, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, fixed times at which learning should take place, conventional grading methods in standardized tests, forced contact with children in their own age group, the compulsion to do homework regardless of whether it helps the learner in their individual situation, the effectiveness of listening to and obeying the orders of one authority figure for several hours each day, and other features of traditional schooling.
Home education in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is often termed "elective home education" ("EHE") to signify the independent nature of practice from state provisions such as education for children with ill-health provided by the local authority in the family home. EHE is a collective term used in the UK to describe education provided other than through the schooling system. Parents have a duty to ensure their children are educated but the education legislation in England and Wales does not differentiate between school attendance or education otherwise than at school. Scots education legislation on the other hand differentiates between public (state) school provision and education "by other means", which includes both private schooling and home education. The numbers of families retaining direct responsibility for the education of their children has steadily increased since the late 1970s. This increase has coincided with the formation of support groups such as Education Otherwise. Home education may involve an informal style of education described as unschooling, informal learning, natural or autonomous learning. Others prefer to retain a structured school at home approach sometimes referred to as homeschooling although the terms are often interchanged.
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
An alternative school is an educational establishment with a curriculum and methods that are nontraditional. Such schools offer a wide range of philosophies and teaching methods; some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, while others are more ad hoc assemblies of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education.
Alternative education encompasses many pedagogical approaches differing from mainstream pedagogy. 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.
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.
Sandra Adams Dodd is an unschooling advocate. Her articles have been published in homeschooling journals, in her books "Moving a Puddle" and "Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling", and are available on her personal website. Articles she has written have been translated into several languages, and her "Public School On Your Own Terms" was featured in "The Homeschooling Book of Answers". She was frequently invited to speak at homeschooling and unschooling conferences and announced her retirement from conferences in 2017.
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 was inspired by the writings of the Bible, John Amos Comenius, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.
Patrick Farenga is an American writer and educational activist. He is known as a leading advocate of the modern homeschooling movement which started in the 1970s.
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. It is the largest charity organisation in the United Kingdom. The organisation derived its name from the 1944 Education Act, 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 Christian topics. She is best known for her homeschooling works, but has also written on women’s roles, computer technology in education, parental rights, and new age thought from a conservative evangelical perspective. 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 an activist in the Christian Quiverfull movement.
Natural Life is a Canadian magazine, founded in 1976 by Rolf Priesnitz. It is owned by Life Media, an independent Toronto-based book and magazine publishing company owned by Wendy Priesnitz who is the magazine's editor. The magazine is published by the Alternate Press three or four times a year. It was formerly published on a bimonthly basis. The website of the magazine was started in 1994. It has won awards for its balanced reporting of environmental issues and published its 30th anniversary issue in November 2006.
Informal education is a general term for education that can occur outside of a traditional lecture or school based learning systems. The term even include customized-learning based on individual student interests within a curriculum inside a regular classroom, but is not limited to that setting. It could work through conversation, and the exploration and enlargement of experience. Sometimes there is a clear objective link to some broader plan, but not always. The goal is to provide learners with the tools they need to eventually reach more complex material. It can refer to various forms of alternative education, such as unschooling or homeschooling, autodidacticism (self-teaching), and youth work.
The legality of homeschooling in India and a plethora of alternative education schools spread over different states has been debated by educators, lawmakers, and parents since the passing of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) which makes formal education a fundamental right of every child between the ages of 6 and 14 and specifies minimum norms for schools. While the legality of homeschooling still remains a grey area, there have been petitions by parents and alternate schools in the past for granting relief. As per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which India is a signatory, quote: "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."
The School of Hard Knocks is an idiomatic phrase meaning the education one gets from life's usually negative experiences, often contrasted with formal education. The term originated in the United States; its earliest documented use was in 1870 in the book The Men Who Advertise:
... his misfortunes were largely owing to the inexperience of youth. Trained, however, in the school of hard knocks, he now had learned the theory of success".
The Free School is the oldest independent, inner-city alternative school in the United States. Founded by Mary Leue in 1969 based on the English Summerhill School philosophy, the free school lets students learn at their own pace. It has no grades, tests, or firm schedule: students design their own daily plans for learning. The school is self-governed through a weekly, democratic all-school meeting run by students in Robert's Rules. Students and staff alike receive one equal vote apiece. Unlike Summerhill-style schools, the Free School is a day school that serves predominantly working-class children. Nearly 80 percent of the school is eligible for reduced-price meals in the public schools. About 60 students between the ages of three and fourteen attend, and are staffed by six full-time teachers and a number of volunteers.
Susannah Sheffer is an author, editor, and activist, focusing on issues of education, prisons, and the death penalty. She is a leader in the unschooling, deschooling, and homeschooling movement. She served on the board of Holt Associates, edited the newsletter Growing Without Schooling (GWS) for many years, and edited the book A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt. She is currently a staff member of North Star, an alternative to middle school and high school in Massachusetts.
In Canada, homeschooling has increased in popularity since the advent of the 21st century. It is legal in every province, with each province having its own regulations around the practice. In some provinces, funding is available. In 2016, the number of homeschooled children in Canada was approximately 60,000 ; this corresponds to approximately one in every 127 school-aged children. In 2020, the average growth rate of the practice amounted to more than 5 per cent per year. Canada has a large proportion of non-religiously motivated homeschoolers compared to some other countries. It is also one of three countries worldwide, along with the United States and South Africa, that hosts an organization with lawyers on staff which serves the legal needs of home educators.
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