Review: Free Range Learning by Laura Grace Weldon

Posted by Hannah | 0 comments

“A natural education is complex and purposeful.  When each person is empowered to learn as it suits him or her, the process of discovery is invigorating.”

Quoted from  Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything:

This book is a meaty one, textbook size and three hundred and four pages long and I steadily plowed through it while nursing our new daughter and homeschooling our other five, admiring some aspects of it and raising my eyebrows at others.

Let me share first what I loved.  The author and I share a similar, and I believe statistically supported, view that children are not all created in cookie cutter fashion and replicating a public classroom inside our homes is probably the least effective manner of homeschooling.  Though not an unschooling handbook, the title of Free Range Learning is appropriate, urging parents to think outside the standard classroom model and help their children love to learn.  There is a wealth of ideas and resources inside each chapter.  I loved reading all the excerpts from homeschooling parents and children on each different topic which are generously sprinkled throughout the pages.

The qualms I have with this book come from the differences in faith and world-view between the author and myself.  While the author encourages parents to let their children choose their own religious path, even suggesting attending services of other faiths, this goes against what my Christian faith teaches. Our children have learned about other religions from a Biblical perspective.  The Biblical view that mankind was smart from the start also does not seemed to be shared with the author.

In chapter six, in which she writes of the need for affection and touch in a child’s life and correlation of lack of affection and violence, all of which I agree with, the author writes:

“The data included presence of physical punishment, freedom or repression of sexual practices, social status of women and degree of affection towards children in those cultures... In the article “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence” Prescott writes, ‘The reciprocal relationship between pleasure and violence is such that one inhibits the other…’.

These quotes in the chapter could easily be misconstrued as suggestive that children require sexual pleasure in order to be non-violent adults.

So the question I have been mulling over, with book in hand, is should I pass it along to a girlfriend who is just beginning her homeschool journey?  Even with the differences in world views, I will pass this to my discerning grilfriend, knowing she is wise enough to pull the wisdom from it and leave the rest aside.

Hannah Hagarty is a relaxed homeschooling mama of five. Her and her family are big on the outdoors, big on family days, and big on making memories in everyday small ways. She loves handcrafts, iced lattes, re-arranging furniture and counts falling into bed exhausted a sign of a really great day. She and her husband make a home in upstate New York with their energetic children and a menagerie of animals. Hannah blogs at Cultivating Home.