Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier
 
Wendy Priesnitz is a book author, award winning journalist, editor, former broadcaster and mother of two adult daughters. She is the owner of Life Media, which she co-founded with her husband Rolf in 1976 as The Alternate Press to publish books and Natural Life Magazine.
 
Trained as a school teacher in 1969, Wendy quickly rejected the factory model of processing children and became an early proponent of experience-based, self-directed learning. She founded The Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers in 1979 as a national support and advocacy organization that kick-started the homeschooling movement in Canada, cooperating with John Holt as he breathed life into a parallel movement in America. In 1987, Wendy is the author of School Free -- The Homeschooling Handbook, which is now in its fifth edition and has become a bestselling classic around the world, and Challenging Assumptions in Education is a controversial look at what's wrong with public education and at the need to de-school society.
 
Her work in politics and journalism has given Wendy an understanding of the environmental and social dangers inherent in the globalized corporate mindset and of the transformative power of local small business. In the mid 1980s, she began to help life learning families create home-based businesses -- as she and Rolf had done a decade earlier in order to unschool their own daughters. So she founded The Home Business Network, a source of advocacy, information and support for home-based businesses. Her book Bringing it Home -- A Home Business Start-Up Guide for You and Your Family was published in 1996 and is still helping people balance work and family life.
(www.wendypriesnitz.com)
 

 
Topics include:

• Why our assumptions about children and education aren't preparing them for life in the 21st Century
   
  
• What "life learning" is, why it's growing in popularity and how it differs from stereotypical homeschooling,
   
  
• How life learning fits into natural parenting, and its significance for individuals and society in the 21st Century
   
  
• What can happen when children are allowed to personalize and control their own learning
   
  
• Some things parents need to know in order to found their own home-based business and start 'unschooling' their own children.