A few important articles to get you started.

More discussion with a radical unschooler on the subject of education and coercion.

A charming story for everyone who has a bed-making issue.

The implication of saying that there are things children must learn to study is that the children may not want to learn them, because they won't know that they are valuable until later. But if you can't enumerate them all, then how do you know, when you are forcing your children to do one of them, that you are not preventing your children from doing another? Also, if you can't enumerate them all, how do you think the children are going to learn the ones you are unable to enumerate? In fact, I believe that not only can you not enumerate them all, but you can't KNOW

What Karl Popper has to say that is relevant to education.

To ensure that your child loves visiting the dentist, read this!

Despite having been influenced by our very own David Deutsch, John Holt was not as close to TCS as we might have hoped.

How close is the thing we TCS folk call “coercion” to “coercion” in everyday usage?

Do not assume that a child is acting irrationally just because he or she wants to go to school.

The history of TCS.

An argument about children's legal rights, addressing the issue of how children might be protected under the law even if their legal rights were the same as adults'.

TCS parents do not force their children to study. They do not try to manipulate them into it. They do not push them. They do pay attention to what seems to interest their children and facilitate their exploration in that sphere, and in any related spheres the parent thinks the children might find interesting. But if children are not pushed, how could they ever become, say, a mathematician? What would this process look like? David Deutsch paints a word picture that may help.

Unschoolers have an aphorism, “Never offer, never refuse”, and think of that as being at one end of a continuum, and school or “school at home” being at the other. In this 1995 post, I explained why this continuum misses the point. I was rather delighted to be told that TCS education is somewhere other than at the extreme end, though. ;-)

It is often asserted (usually by school teachers) that if children are not forced to go to school or, at the very least, to study an externally-imposed curriculum, there will be big gaps in their knowledge at the end of their education. Is this true? Is it any less true of children subjected to a standard curriculum? Is it a problem? And if so, which children will be better able to fill any gaps later: those who have been subject to a curriculum, or those who haven't? Mike Fortune-Wood has the answers.

Correcting a few common misconceptions about TCS.