Here is a treasury of intelligent,
penetrating, and often good-humored conversations about
learning between a mother and a father, each well-educated
and successful, who want the same success for their own
children and for yours. Free of jargon and cliché, you are
certain to be clearer about your own ideas from listening to
theirs.
~ John Taylor Gatto, Author, Weapons of Mass
Instruction, An Underground History of American
Education, Dumbing Us Down, The Exhausted School, and
A
Different Kind of Teacher
As veteran homeschooling parents and a
delightful pair of writers,
Joyce Reed and David Albert play off each others'
experiences with and ruminations about society, schools,
children and learning. Their keen observations and wise
insights give the reader much to consider. Joyce writes,
"There is no separation between living and learning. Life is
just the curriculum. Learning is our path through it." With
these few words, she encapsulates the essence of
homeschooling and charts a course for the rest of the book.
David responds enthusiastically: "Experience is the best
teacher. Problem is, it doesn't teach you until you've had
it." This is wonderfully thought-provoking stuff; engaging,
enlightening, and encouraging! Whether sharing their own
homeschooling experiences, comparing notes on what's wrong
with society's approach to “education” (David writes, "I
hate to even grace it with that word anymore."), or
analyzing and challenging what's happening in today's
homeschool movement, Joyce and David show by example in this
book, portraying a love of learning for their readers as
they learn from each other and share what they learn.
~ Helen Hegener, Co-Publisher, Home Education
Magazine
Reading David Albert and Joyce Reed's new book What Really Matters is like sitting under the kitchen table
and eavesdropping on a conversation about the true essence
of learning and education. The discussions range through a
spectrum, from the mundane and everyday to the profound and
predictive. If you want to get a deep feeling for the
essence of schooling and unschooling, or just plain living,
read this book!
~ Jerry Mintz, Director, Alternative Education
Resource Organization
What
Really Matters is a beautiful, heartfelt book about
homeschooling by two deeply experienced practitioners. Joyce
Reed and David Albert were out doing it with their kids
before the advent of the Internet and networks of support
for their practices. Reed’s recollections of her children
learning to learn in their rural setting on the Big Island
of Hawaii are particularly evocative and meaningful—children
doing real things to help the family survive, and to satisfy
their own immense minds and curiosities. All the seven
children described by the authors have become extremely
successful and admirable adults. This is a book that will
give confidence to any parent considering homeschooling
their own children, and will be a welcome
sitting-down-with-elders for those who are already deeply
engaged in learning without schooling.
~ Kirsten Olson, author of
Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and
Standing Up To Old School Culture
Guiding your children through the standard
academics is usually the first hurdle you contemplate when
you are homeschooling or considering the idea. Take it from
this longtime homeschooler and David and Joyce: What really
matters is far beyond the three Rs. This conversation
between two unschooling parents, each with grown children,
delves into the unwritten curriculum of humane education.
Joyce and David discuss the educational, emotional,
psychological, spiritual, and cultural aspects of what we
desire for our children’s future as contributing members of
a community and society. Joyce and David converse in depth
so you will see the advantages of allowing your child to
grow in his own way — no, not just allowing, but also
mentoring that growth to its potential. If you are new to
homeschooling, this book will open your eyes to the vast
opportunities waiting to be explored by you and your
children. For those already homeschooling, this book will
inspire you to reach further into the awesome possibilities
that abound around you whether you unschool or follow a more
traditional path.
~ Jean Reed, co-author of The Home School Source
Book, 3rd edition, and The Lifetime Learning
Companion
Every child is born with two fundamental
drives; the drive for safety; which is the bond to mother,
and the drive to explore his world; which is the search for
the known within the unknown. This exploration is natures
plan for learning and the driving force of human life
itself. Readers will be sitting at the feet of two masters
of self-directed learning as they share their individual
experiences, beliefs, and theories in an intimate dialog.
Depth, wisdom and love exude from every page of this book.
David Albert and Joyce Reed have offered us the heart and
soul of what really matters with how children learn and what
parents can do to create the best conditions for their
children. They have shown how intention is the forerunner of
skill and how to allow the process to unfold. Albert and
Reed’s book is a definitive summary of Homeschooling and all
it implies. It is magnificent, profound beyond words, and a
delight to read. It synthesizes an encyclopedia of
significant understandings into a brilliant yet simple
package. These pages contain what parents and our culture
need so desperately today. I have watched David’s
literary output for many years and this book is his apex.
(So far.) I love Joyce’s direct, straightforward and simple
style in other works of hers and she too out performs
herself in giving us… What Really Matters.
~ Jeffrey L. Fine, Ph.D., co-author with his wife Dalit Fine,
MS, The
Art of Conscious Parenting
I devoured this insightful and remarkable
dialog between two supremely experienced and deeply
thoughtful homeschool parents as they reflect on the
evolution of parenting, culture and educational norms. Included are retrospective windows into their own
childhoods, the raising of their own children as
homeschoolers, and the myriad challenges and general
dysfunction that face so many 21st century children and
families. From a
critical discussion on the value of trusting children to
sharp critiques on modern schooling and societal values,
David and Joyce have offered up much food for thought here.
When taken to heart, this one book could keep a
person immersed in personal change and reconstruction for a
good long time.
~ Barb Lundgren, producer of the Rethinking
Everything conference and co-publisher of Rethinking
Everything Magazine
What Really Matters shows us that we have
overlooked the obvious: that if you institutionalize
education, you subvert it, the child serving the institution
rather than the institution serving the child; that if you
take the home out of the child's education and the child's
education out of the home, you take the
child out of both. Thus What Really Matters is the
most persuasive argument for home schooling I’ve yet seen,
the parent as the child’s first and main teacher, the world
as his home, and every institution from a museum to a sandy
beach his school. What Really Matters shows us indeed what
really matters: the child, his needs, aspirations and
interests not as we see them but as he sees them. In What
Really Matters, the child is not only seen, but heard. To
educate him we must learn from him, and the authors show us
not only how to do it but how they did it. In the authors’
world of homeschooling—art and science, thinking and
feeling, life and learning are as naturally integrated as
they are in the child’s life and mind. In the tradition of
Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, A. S. Neill’s
Summerhill,
and the works of John Holt and John Taylor Gatto, What Really
Matters nevertheless ventures well beyond them. This
personal, accessible, marvelously readable exchange of
letters between David Albert and Joyce Reed, stone by
inspiring stone one atop another, culminates in a castle of
enlightenment around which the child’s entire world is his
for the taking. Make no mistake about it, his education is
about our liberation as much as his. What Really Matters is
Isaiah’s Prophecy made manifest in the plural: children will
lead us if only we follow them. No one has done it like
David Albert and Joyce Reed.
~ Bernie Schein, author, If Holden
Caulfield Were in my Classroom
Readers might feel as if they’re
eavesdropping on a conversation between two people who have
taken different routes to the same destination. And that’s
okay, because it’s a conversation that needs to be heard by
every parent who has thought about the value of his/her
child’s education. Joyce Reed, retired Associate Dean of The
College at Brown University and homeschool mom of five, and
David Albert, writer, budding opera singer and homeschool
dad of two, bring to bear on this vital conversation the
wisdom of experience complimented by the perspective of
hindsight, distilling the essence of “what really matters”
in life and learning. Their conclusions about what really
matters, shared today by millions who similarly experience
“the road less traveled” through homeschooling and
unschooling with their families, defy the common western
societal norm in education, revealing it as a narrow,
limiting, unsatisfying approach when compared to
alternatives. Do your family a favor today. Read What
Really Matters so that instead of your offspring’s
childhood being more than a decade locked inside an
institution, it is transformed into the liberating adventure
of becoming fully human. Trust me; they will thank you one
day.
~ Linda Dobson, homeschooling speaker, author of
The
First Year of Homeschooling Your Child, The Ultimate Book of
Homeschooling Ideas and others, and
advocate via the Parent at the Helm website
This is not the kind of book you
won't be able to put down; on the contrary, I found myself
constantly putting it down to pause and ponder, to marvel,
and to occasionally chuckle or weep from yet another
eloquently presented insight that touched my heart. I found
myself wishing it could be absorbed by everydamnbody who
ever begins to homeschool, and, for that matter, by every
teacher and educator. Most people come to homeschooling
asking all the wrong questions, but these two veteran
homeschool parents, with seven grown homeschooled children
between them, have cut directly to the most profound answers
with exceptional candor and wisdom in addressing the vital
question of What Really Matters. If I could recommend
only one book for familiarizing oneself with the joys and
unique possibilities within homeschooling, this would have
to be the one.
~ Lillian Jones, creator of BestHomeschooling.org,
mother of a happy and successful homeschool grad, and
longtime volunteer for HSC, the HomeSchool Association of
California
These essays by David Albert and Joyce
Reed, written as letters to each other, contain warm and
insightful thoughts about teaching, learning, and living
with children. As parents of grown homeschoolers they
reflect on how they raised and educated their own children
and as older adults they reconsider their own educations and
upbringing in light of their homeschooling experiences.
Along with intellectual heft, the authors share
encouragement, resources, and practical advice that can make
homeschooling easier and more fun for anyone.
~ Patrick Farenga, co-author, Teach Your Own:
The John Holt Book of Homeschooling
David Albert and Joyce Reed transparently reveal
stories of their individual homeschool journeys. Readers will glean from
their wealth of experience and acquired nuggets of wisdom. They spare no
words in challenging parents of this generation to take a close look at
“what really matters” and to risk breaking free from the status quo long
enough to give their children the true gift of learning. What Really
Matters is guaranteed to affirm the veteran homeschooler while inspiring
others to the great benefits of self-directed learning. This truly is a
must read for parents in this century.
~ Grace Jorgensen, Executive Director, BC Home School
Association
I read the book cover to cover and found within
its pages useful tips and encouraging words of wisdom as well as
liberating ways to think about how people actually learn. Most of all, I
felt energized and inspired by Reed and Albert's living examples of the
wonderful world that can unfold when we trust our kids; that they are
learning what they need to and want to. How do we do this? And what does
it look like? These two 'elders' share their beautiful stories with us,
and it makes everything seem so much lighter. As we read through the
pages of these essays, we can look at our own children's learning paths
in new light-and be heartened that they are capable of forging just as
an extraordinary a path as the children of these advocates have done. We
can do our best to help them along the way-but not too much. Like Albert
and Reed did (and continue to do, I'm sure), we need to offer; expose
and then step back so that they can explore and discover what they are
passionate about. This is a book that I would give to anyone who wants
an in-depth depiction of what joyful learning and living, authentic
education looks like.
~ Beatrice Ekoko, Radio Free School
Homeschoolers easily get bogged down in the minutea of their everyday
lives. We risk spending more time worrying about doing the right things
for our children, instead of actually doing things with them.
What should be an experience filled with joy and freedom becomes a
drudgery laden with frustration and disappointment. What Really Matters: Two veteran homeschooling advocates discuss what
learning is really all about...
strips away all the extraneous matter we tend to add to our
homeschooling lives, leaving us with what really matters: fostering the
love of learning.
~ Sarah J. Wilson, Homeschool Review
