THE INTRODUCTION of JUMP, FALL, FLY- from schooling to homeschooling to unschooling

Introduction

This book started out as a book about schooling, or to be more precise our children’s learning. Which up until the around the time they were born we had expected would involve an ongoing relationship with what is commonly described as schooling, in a school or series of schools.

Very early in the writing process it became clear that to write about the subject of learning for our children meant to write about a wide variety of topics related to it. These turn out to cover all of life and with hindsight this was always going to be the case. Obvious in retrospect!

A life involved in raising children is not just about the ideas of formal education but to the entire idea of learning and living which includes everything.

This is as much a book about raising and living with children as about learning and education. To be clear it’s not a book about raising children to max their grades, or win at sport or get into the finest universities. In here you won’t find a focus on how to get the kind of edge that its popular to sell in books about children’s education. This is not a book about wealth as it is commonly meant, the kind in your bank account or investment portfolio, although we certainly do talk about money and prosperity. We are concerned with a wider look at ‘wealth’ that covers all those assets that are perhaps not as cherished in educational systems as those that can be seen materially and measured but are none the less as, if not more, important. We are talking about attributes such as emotional intelligence (now emerging as more significant to life wellbeing than IQ), creativity, self-actualisation, divergent and convergent thinking, self-directed learning, insight, intuition and so on.

At the core of this book is one of the most enduring of all questions asked by parents, carers and supporters of the young.

How can we best equip them for the world that we will most likely never see or know, that we will probably never understand as well as they will and which will contain all kinds of unknowns?

An excerpt of ‘Jump, Fall, Fly’ Click here to find out more about the book