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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to education:
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 look very different. 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 includes the examination of educational theories, the presuppositions present in them, and the arguments for and against them. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws inspiration from various disciplines both within and outside philosophy, like ethics, political philosophy, psychology, and sociology. These connections are also reflected in the significant and wide-ranging influence the philosophy of education has had on other disciplines. 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 and normative theories. Descriptive theories provide a value-neutral account of what education is and how to understand its fundamental concepts, in contrast to normative theories, which investigate how education should be practiced or what is the right form of education.
Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates 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, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, 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 in the education of each unique child.
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
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 is considered to be his magnum opus by Vincent Kelley.
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. It is a crucial process that is the basis for homeschooling to work, in which children should slowly break out of their school routine and mentality, develop the ability to learn via self-determination again, and find interests to decide what they want to learn in their first homeschool days. Depending on the type of person and time the child spent in the school system, this phase can last different lengths of time and may have different effects on the behavior of children. Especially in the first days of deschooling, it is often the case that children mainly want to recover from the school surroundings and therefore will generally sleep very long and refuse any kind of intentional learning and instead search for substitute satisfactions like watching TV or playing video games, very similar to the behavior during early school holidays. Moving on in this transition process, children may feel bored or cannot cope well with the missing daily structure, until they eventually find out how to make use of their time and freedom to find interests, which in the best case results in them voluntarily informing themselves about certain things they are interested in, whereupon homeschooling can start.
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.
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.
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 respectively. 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 at least the right that people can choose where and how they are educated.
Homeschooling in the United States of America constitutes the education of about 3.4% of U.S. students as of 2012. The number of homeschoolers in the United States has increased steadily over the past few decades since the end of the 20th century. In the United States, the Supreme Court has ruled that parents have a fundamental right to direct the education of their children. The right to homeschool is not frequently questioned in court, but the amount of state regulation and help that can or should be expected continues to be subject to legal debate.
Wendy Priesnitz is a Canadian alternative education and environmental advocate. She was leader of the Green Party of Canada from July 1996 to January 1997, when she abruptly resigned.
Inclusion in education refers to all students being able to access and gain equal opportunities to education and learning. It arose in the context of special education with an individualized education program or 504 plan, and is built on the notion that it is more effective for students with special needs to have said mixed experience for them to be more successful in social interactions leading to further success in life. The philosophy behind implementation of the inclusion model does not prioritize, but still provides for the utilization of special classrooms and special schools for the education of students with disabilities. Inclusive education models are brought into force by educational administrators with the intention of moving away from seclusion models of special education to the fullest extent practical, the idea being that it is to the social benefit of general education students and special education students alike, with the more able students serving as peer models and those less able serving as motivation for general education students to learn empathy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
