Episode 63 Blake Boles on learning, curiosity and alternatives to school

Lars og Pål

In this episode Lars talks with Blake Boles, founder and director of Unschool Adventures, and an author, lecturer and podcaster focusing on self-directed learning and alternatives to school. He has written three books, The Art of Self-Directed Learning (2014), Better than College (2012) and College without High School (2009), and produces the podcast Off-Trail Learning.

We met up in Eugene, Oregon for a talk about common and uncommon conceptions about school and learning, what makes kids thrive, homeschooling and unschooling and other alternatives to school, and the importance of nature and what you can learn by going to summer camps as a kid, to mention a few things we get into.

Blake has an extensive experience in talking with teenagers and young adults who have gone through alternative routes to higher learning and adult working life, and lectures on this topic regularly across the US (and sometimes elsewhere in the world).

Though the ideas and ideal that we discuss here might not be of the kind most commonly held in the US or in Norway, we hope that it might contribute to broadening the perspective on learning and schooling.

Blake’s webpage is https://www.blakeboles.com/

The summer camp that Blake mentions at the beginning of the episode can be found at:

https://www.deercrossingcamp.com/

Some book recommendations mentioned in the episode:

Grace Llewellyn - The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education (1991) (ps. Blake is working with the author to publish a third edition of this book)

Kenneth Danford – Learning is Natural, School is Optional. The North Star Approach to Offering Teens a Head Start on Life (2019)

John Holt – How Children Learn (1964), How Children Fail (1967)

John Taylor Gatto – Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)

Daniel Greenberg – Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School (1991)

The film mentioned is «Captain Fantastic» (2016), directed by Matt Ross

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Logoen vår er laget av Sveinung Sudbø, se hans arbeider på originalkopi.com

Musikken er av Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, se facebooksiden Nygrenda Vev og Dur for mer info.

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