Off-Trail Learning
Interviews with innovative educators, self-directed young people, and others who think differently about learning, teaching, and schooling. Hosted by Blake Boles (blakeboles.com), author of "Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School?" and founder of Unschool Adventures.
Episodes
November 10, 2024 • 13 mins
If you enjoyed Off-Trail Learning, check out my new podcast, Dirtbag Rich, where I dive deep with working adults who have managed to strike that elusive balance of time, money, and purpose—without giving up on their wildest dreams.
Find Dirtbag Rich wherever you subscribe to podcasts, or visit dirtbagrich.com.
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September 11, 2022 • 71 mins
Guest host Zen Zenith returns to interview Blake about his obsession with adventure. What exactly makes an adventure? How is adventure connected to self-directed learning? Is adventure just for privileged people? Why can’t Blake just settle down and lead a normal life? How do Unschool Adventures trips create a sense of adventure for both teens and trip leaders? Does adventure become harder as one grows older? Does Blake even have a...
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August 15, 2022 • 71 mins
Chris Balme (chrisbalme.com) is the founding head of school of The Millennium School and the author of Finding the Magic in Middle School. After briefly flirting with public school teaching, Chris ran an apprenticeship program for middle schoolers for a decade before creating The Millennium School in San Francisco, where he served for seven years.
We discuss Chris’ early infatuation with democratic free schools, how the Millennium...
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July 13, 2022 • 92 mins
Liam Nilsen (https://liam.media) is a designer and educator based in Åårhus, Denmark. He’s a former member of the LEGO Idea Studio, the founder of an Agile Learning Center, and a life-long unschooler who didn’t start reading until age 9 — at which point he fell in love with the written word.
Liam and I discuss our lives as readers, including the books that have changed our lives, how we discover new things to read, books vs. artic...
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June 10, 2022 • 68 mins
Grace Llewellyn is the author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, the founder of Not Back to School Camp, a one-time middle school English teacher, and a luminary in the unschooling movement.
In this episode we discuss the third (and final) edition of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, released in late 2021. Grace talks about writing the original book in 1991, how it became an underground classic, how her views on education (and he...
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May 13, 2022 • 64 mins
Takeru “TK” Nagayoshi was an AP English and Research teacher for seven years. In 2020 he was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year—yet after winning the award, he decided to leave the classroom in 2021.
We discuss Takeru’s early school experiences in Japan and New Jersey, how he become an educator through Teach For America, the daily realities of teaching in a “turnaround school,” the amazing AP classes he offered, the Teacher o...
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April 18, 2022 • 58 mins
Shortly after college, Jack Schott hit the road for two years to visit over 200 summer camps across the United States. He then co-founded a children’s sleepaway camp in upstate New York, Camp Stomping Ground (campstompingground.org), designed to inspire “radical empathy.” After co-directing Stomping Ground for many years (with Laura Kriegel) and consulting for other camps, Jack possesses a wealth of knowledge about the power and po...
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March 17, 2022 • 68 mins
Nate Singer is the Managing Director of Mission Holdings, a father of two, and the guy who first got me interested in alternative education. We discuss his early struggles at boarding school, getting rejected to UC Berkeley (but successfully appealing the decision), working hard as a math major, second-guessing conventional teaching methods, creating a class about educational television (where he and I met), John Taylor Gatto, and ...
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February 7, 2022 • 47 mins
Michelle Bruce is a mother of 4 who (along with her husband John) has been “boatschooling” since 2013. We discuss the evolution of her eclectic homeschooling approach, the family’s slow travel philosophy, the boat’s life-support systems and operating expenses, her kids’ “rollercoaster” social life, her impressions of the worldschooling community, what happened during the pandemic, and the judgment she received from other parents fo...
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January 12, 2022 • 63 mins
Seth Frey (enfascination.com) is a professor of Communication at UC Davis who focuses on the science of self-governance. We discuss our shared history in the Berkeley Student Cooperatives, Seth’s experience living in communities ranging from 4 to 400 members, his research on Minecraft and World of Warcraft communities, why benevolent dictators are surprisingly common, why children (and adults!) are surprisingly bad at self-governan...
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December 13, 2021 • 48 mins
Manue is a representative in the South of France of Les Enfants D’Abord (lesenfantsdabord.org), a home education advocacy association which is particularly committed to the rights of unschoolers. (The name translates to “Children First.”)
We discuss the organization’s mission to promote children’s rights over parental domination, the history of homeschooling regulation in France, home inspections, the growing power of French soci...
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November 7, 2021 • 74 mins
Nick Bergson-Shilcock is the CEO and co-founder of the Recurse Center (recurse.com), a self-directed and community-driven educational retreat for computer programmers. Nick describes his background as a lifelong unschooler (he’s the son of Peter Bergson, a recent podcast guest), as well as his early interest in gaming and programming and his transition into college, career, and Y Combinator (the startup incubator). We discuss how R...
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October 20, 2021 • 51 mins
Anna Smith and Mara Donahoe are the co-founders (with Natasha Morisawa) of the National Association of Home & Hybrid Education (homeandhybrideducation.org), a new advocacy organization that hopes to bring together all members of the alternative education movement in the United States. We discuss why Home & Hybrid Education (HHE) was created, whether the U.S. needs another homeschool organization, how HHE differs from other large or...
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October 12, 2021 • 25 mins
While biking through the south of France, I met Lilli and Elena, two 19-year-old German women who are also on a cycling adventure. (We shared the same Couchsurfing host.) We discuss their bike trip, their path through formal education in Germany, why they’re taking a gap year, how they spend less than $10/day, how they stay safe, and what the trip has taught them so far.
(Lilli and Elena have no website or social media -- kudos to...
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September 10, 2021 • 60 mins
Joel Malkoff (joelkmalkoffcircusartist.com) is a contemporary circus artist and 27-year-old grown unschooler from Indiana. We discuss Joel’s recent experience at the National Circus School of Montreal (“the Harvard of circus”), the job market for circus artists, and his new 3-person circus collective, La Quadrature (instagram.com/laquadrature). We also talk about Joel’s upbringing as an unschooler, his mother's influence, his child...
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August 23, 2021 • 39 mins
Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn.org) is the author of fourteen books and a well-known advocate of progressive education. Mr. Kohn discusses the purpose behind his 30+ years of advocacy, his critique of “grit” and “growth mindset”, and his take on the classic progressive school models (Montessori/Waldorf/Reggio) as well as homeschooling, unschooling, and highly self-directed schools & centers. He expresses concern over the extreme varieties o...
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August 1, 2021 • 72 mins
Catherine Fraise is the founder of Workspace Education (workspaceeducation.org) and 100 Roads (100roads.org). We discuss Catherine’s background as a Montessori educator, the pivotal trip to Japan she took as a 12-year-old, the Workspace co-learning and co-working center she created in Connecticut, and her newest venture, WorkspaceSky Teens: an online community for teenage self-directed learners. We touch on the trade-off between vi...
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July 18, 2021 • 65 mins
Peter Bergson is the co-founder of two self-directed learning centers in the Philadelphia area: Open Connections (openconnections.org) and Natural Creativity Center (naturalcreativity.org). We discuss Peter’s journey from creativity consultant to early childhood educator, his collaboration with John Holt, fighting for better homeschooling laws in the 80s, growing a tiny self-directed learning center in a bigger and better-funded on...
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Pat Farenga returns to talk about the second half of Harvard’s “Post-Pandemic Future of Homeschooling” conference, after which we discuss a different, secret, *invite-only* Harvard summit (hosted by Elizabeth Bartholet and James Dwyer) that proposed extremely restrictive reforms to homeschooling laws.
If you care about the future of homeschooling in the United States — and the reasons that some well-intentioned people may try to s...
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June 1, 2021 • 80 mins
In this special two-part discussion, Pat Farenga and I discuss Harvard University’s ongoing 7-week conference, the “Post-Pandemic Future of Homeschooling.” This free online conference brings together researchers and academics in the field of homeschooling, and Pat and I are here to share what they’re talking about, the arguments they’re making, and what we think of all this.
In this first episode we discuss weeks 1-4 of the confer...
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