Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning

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Faces came and went, and we only got to know each other if, by chance, we were sent on our break at the same time. She gives courage to parents who conclude that enough is enough and who decide to withdraw their child - either to create a more self-directing environment at home or in a different kind of school. I’d love to love this book but the absolutely uninformed bull snot of this chapter has delegitimized the rest of the book for me.

It can feel hard to be the buffer between cultural norms and unschooling and this book contained so many snippets which I have personally experienced with my child and so has reassured me. Naomi Fisher's book, Changing Our Minds, shows us why and how we can use other ways of living, learning and sharing knowledge with children besides the usual method: Sit down. We tend to parent and teach the way we were raised and taught, which is why changing our minds about how children learn and grow is so hard to do. It opens our eyes to the way in which the education system fights basic human nature and the psychology of learning, all too often manifesting in a level of anxiety which actively prevents attendance. An essential guide, informed by educational theory and personal experience, which presents accessibly the evidence and argument for self-directed learning, getting the child to lead where their curiosity and interests should be developed.And was anyone else seeing how differently children learnt when they weren’t at school – and the implications that this had for everyone? Whilst reading this book I have been recommending it to everyone who I meet within education who should have an interest in this topic. When Greta started to act, starting a school strike which spread around the world, she started being able to eat and live again. I jotted down notes on my phone when an idea came to me, and wrote little pieces about seeing my children’s learning in action because I knew that otherwise I would forget. The conveyor belts went faster and faster in my dreams, with me running desperately behind, trying to get the mandarin oranges perfectly straight.

The excerpt is from her new book, Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning. The book concludes with convincing case studies that show that 'education' and 'schooling' are not synonymous.I was horrified that it could be published when it was so mediocre and that a new home educator might pick it up without realising that it wasn’t really about home education. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. What I did not expect is the power this would have in transforming my life and enabling me to release trauma I had been completely unaware I was not only carrying but inadvertently passing onto my children.

Alan Thomas, Harriet Pattison, Peter Gray, Gina Riley, Rebecca English, Blake Boles, Pat Farenga – to my surprise most of them said yes, and I spent an hour by Zoom talking to them and then many hours transcribing what they said (I did not yet know about transcription software). It was backed up by lots of scientific evidence, anecdotal stories and examples of different options.There is another way other than breaking children's will to fit a system that is leaving behind scarred kids and mental health issues year after year. Biography: Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist who specialises in trauma, autism and alternative education.