Jump, Fall, Fly, from Schooling to Homeschooling to Unschooling

In Jump Fall Fly, Lehla and Anthony Eldridge-Rogers, parents, coaches and creatives argue, from their own experience, for the right of children to pursue their own interests and learning through natural curiosity, play and joy. Their children's learning and education is led by the children themselves, driven by their interests, their passions, and their own innate problem solving abilities. Respect, democratic principle, equal dialogue, collaboration and kindness replace coercion, instruction, disciplining, obedience, competition and fear mongering. To bring about this family journey they navigated from schooling to homeschooling and then to unschooling. A challenging, counter intuitive, courageous proposal for abandoning our mainstream education system and systems of teaching, Jump, Fall, Fly suggests we need to abandon a broken unfixable system that is causing misery for children. It shows how doing this is, counter intuitively for many people, a joyful and fulfilling way to prepare children for the future world approaching at breakneck speed. At the same time there is more laughter, less toxic stress, better adult child relationships and a happier family life. All parents are confronted with a dilemma when they have children. How do they face up to the reality that almost all schooling institutions are not fit for purpose? And what is that purpose when it comes to raising children? In short, preparing them to live and thrive in a world that will be utterly changed again over the next 20 years and beyond. But more than that it is becoming increasingly clear that schools, schooling and the constant crack of the competitive educational whip are causing untold misery for many children, robbing them of childhood before it is hardly established. That theft starts when children's own natural curiosity and desire to learn is quashed by the demands of the system as they are told to sit still, pay attention, pass tests and learn, not what they are interested in but that which has been prescribed for them. As soon as we can, we start to imprison their minds within curriculum and targets and anxieties. And the irony piled high on all this coercion and stress is that most of what we are still teaching children in those curriculum's will be obsolete or unusable within the next few decades. If the educational system can claim anything consistently it would be that it is masterful at evoking a destructive axis of boredom and anxiety accounting for the increasing levels of mental health problems in young people. Play, that vital natural force has been relegated to being a tolerated indulgence and even then stripped of its childish pleasure by being over regulated with anxiety about all kinds of risk. Jump Fall Fly sets out the 7 keys to pursuing a free and unschooling way of life and explains why they matter. All the insights arise not from educational theory but from actual practical parenting. It is quite one thing to debate these ideas, many of which people agree about but quite another to plunge the whole family into a new way of life that the mainstream just is not ready to accept. This book offers companionship to parents making these changes and offers support through identification of both the challenges and the solutions. The benefits are overwhelming with childhood, as a natural period of life unencumbered by overbearing responsibility, protected. As importantly, the questions about how to navigate the future are developed out of a discourse between adults and children, led by the children. Jump Fall Fly is a courageous, thought provoking book and ultimately a call to action for all parents willing to take a clear-sighted look at the world around them and to set their children and themselves free from the fear based acceptance of a broken educational system. In this way it shows how we can contribute as parents to building happier, more fulfilling lives for children.