At the risk of seeming inconstant, I am going to amend what I said in my last post regarding having no leaders in the unschooling community.   The reason for this amendment is that I am reading Seth Godin’s book “Tribes”, and he describes how leadership is no longer synonymous with “management” (which is how most people still think of it).   It is in fact a good and necessary thing for groups of people who would like to institute some kind of change in the world.  He says:

Leadership…is about creating change that you believe in.  My thesaurus says the best synonym for leadership is management.  Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer.  Movements have leaders and movements make things happen.

If I took a poll among unschoolers, I would say that we are joined by the desire for our children to learn naturally, outside the failed  but ongoing experiment that is compulsory schooling, and also by the belief that this way of learning is best, not just for our children but for all children.  And if that is truly our belief,  then our goal should be to make unschooling a reality for as many children as possible.

How do we do that?   We create a powerful, vocal, and supportive unschooling movement.

Maybe some people don’t see unschooling as a movement, but if that’s not what it is, I believe that’s what it should be.   Movements have the potential to change the world, and in my opinion, the world of education needs changing.    Who better to do it than us?