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An insightful video covering many issues home educators raise.

A video covering what you probably thought only you believed about schools.

Schooling was created at the outset of the industrial revolution. It was intended to create a compliant workforce, populous and military.

Despite what some believe, schools were never intended to foster creativity and independent thought.

Taken from John Taylor Gatto's book An Underground History of American Education.

Following a defeat Prussia developed schools as a tool to discipline troops on the battlefield.

The idea spread to the US and, eventually became so universal that today school is synonymous with education and education with school allowing politicians to claim "A child not in school is not learning."

What did you learn in school today?

An American video from the Innovation Playlist website, asking the simple question 'What is school for?" because if you look at what schools actually do and how they do it, there's a mismatch to what they actually do.

Free to Learn

A talk by Dr Alan Thomas on the topic of Informal and Autonomous education.

He explains in this videoed conference talk some of the fundamentals of autonomous or unschooling ideas and to some extent how they work.

Do Schools kill creativity?

An entertaining and engaging TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the subject of creativity in education.

Many home educators hold Sir Ken in high regard and do their best to incorporate his ideas in their own children's education.

This talk has been listened to by an estimated 200,000,000 people. It is, by far the most popular TED talk. It's influence in education and learning, cannot be over estimated.

How to Escape Education's Death Valley

Sir Ken Robinson

Another TED talk on the subject of schools failing children. Sir Ken introduces the concept of natural learning and the importance of curiosity.

Tests should enhancing and enabling learning. Instead the standardised testing used in schools today is a simple tool to grade and stratify students and measure teacher performance.

Changing Education Paradigms

A video produced by the RSA with

Sir Ken Robinson

An adaptation of a talk by Sir Ken which illustrates the failure of the current system to adapt to modern needs from it's enlightenment origins. As with all of Sir Ken's talks, this one is both engrossing and entertaining.

Sir Ken discusses alienation in school due to inappropriate teaching, testing and environment of school leading to the alleged 'epidemic' of HDAD.

Unschooling

A TED talk with:

Callie Vandewiele

A TED talk by a home educated young person, now studying for her PhD who advocates that the freedom unschooling (autonomous) education offers is the reason for her academic success.

It's also about frogs.