Join my new mailing list, The Adventures of Blake.
Below are the newsletters I sent from 2015-2023, packed with links related to alternative education.
(The service that hosted these newsletters has unfortunately shut down; I have download all of them, but not uploaded them yet.)
2023
- Kickstarter Announcement + the Actual-Final Newsletter
- AI, Obedience, and… the End of this Newsletter!
- Teaching Adventure
- Alternative Paths to College
- Ecstasy, Transcendence, Adventure, Empanadas
- The Small War of Parenting Teenagers
2022
- Reading, Writing, and AI
- Kids These Days
- Revisiting Rousseau
- Do What You Love and Die Trying
- Appropriate for Free People
- A Patagonia Retreat
- Variety, Self-Reflection, and Agency
- The Case for Letting 4-Year-Olds Run Errands
- You Don’t Have to Go to Work
- Hackers, Hippies, Hipsters, Adventure
- Boats, Bribery, and Book Burning
- Does Unschooling Prepare Children for the World of Tomorrow?
2021
- Risk, Adventure, and Travel
- Teenagers Need the Freedom to Take Risks in Order to Grow
- The Teenage Liberation Handbook is Back
- Missing School is Not a Problem
- Progressive vs. Self-Directed Education
- Becoming a Better Self-Directed Learner
- The Future of Homeschooling + A Walk Around Lake Tahoe
- Fierce Nerds, Universal Play, and Humans of México
- Rivers, Contradictions, and Real-Life Talks
- “We Believe in Unschooling, But Our Kid Demands School. What Now?”
- Pandemic-Friendly Possibilities for 17- to 23-Year-Olds
2020
- Adiós 2020, I’m Going on Sabbatical
- Read What You Love Until You Love to Read
- “What if my homeschooler never develops a real passion?”
- Can We Take the Schooling Out of Homeschooling?
- Skateparks and Essential Experiences
- Announcing a Microschool
- Lessons Learned, Shakeups, and Places Not to Travel
- Diving Deeper into the Controversy
- The Book, The Course, The Controversy
- Pandemic Homeschooling, a Bike Trip, and Questions of Utmost Importance
- School as Fiction
- Did We Really Need a Yale Survey for That?
- A 100-Tweet Critique of Unschooling
2019
- What’s Worth Unlearning
- Learning is Natural, School is Optional
- Announcing GrownUnschoolers.com
- Is Your 12th Grader Smarter Than an AI?
- Leave Your Child in the Forest
- Children’s Rights, Small Freedoms, and my AERO Keynote
- Grown Unschoolers and Anti-Colleges
- Should We Ban All Private Schools?
- Goldilocks and the Three Homeworks
- Love What You Do in Front of Your Kids
- The Bad News About the Bad News
- To Play Wild and Unmonitored
2018
- Sudbury, ALCs, and Liberated Learners, oh my!
- Swinging Axes, Playing with Fire, and Riding Bikes in Traffic
- Don’t Like High School? Then Quit.
- Unschooling = Love + Structure
- Yes, You Can Quit School and Everything Will Be Okay
- Is There Evidence for Self-Directed Education?
- To Fix Education, Make it Consensual
- How to Be a Badass Teen Homeschooler
- Hail the Almighty Diploma
- The Power of Signaling
- Spying on Children
2017
- The Value of College
- Gap Years and Anti-Helicopter-Parenting Missiles
- Anxiety, Giftedness, and Troublemaking
- Less Teaching, More Learning
- Smartphones: Friend or Foe?
- When Teachers Need Fidget Spinners
- The Summer Slide
- What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
- Those Crazy College Students
- Bridging the Darien Gap
- The Way of Adventure
- Boredom, Agency, and Empowerment
- Sharpening the Edge of Life
2016
- “They dislike abstraction; they dislike being sedentary; they dislike authoritarian control.”
- The Pursuit of Truth
- The Wildness of Children
- The Fortress of Tedium
- A Rare Interview with Grace Llewellyn
- Off-Trail Learning & How to Live Nowhere
- College Debt is Bad, But is Unemployment Worse?
- Elephants, Child Labor, and Intersectionality
- Adolescent Brains, Doing the Dishes, and Indebted Coyotes
- Creeping Concepts and Unschool Adventures Vegas
- Is Following Your Passion a Bad Idea?
- The $1000 Bachelor’s Degree + What to Do Instead of School
- Anyone Who Is Interested in a Tiny House is Interested in Unschooling
- “Why Do We Need to Learn This?”, Productivity, and How to Live Nowhere
- Walking Alone, Googling Everything, and The Cost of College
- Summer Camps for Self-Directed Learners
2015
- Radicalized Homeschoolers, (Un)safe Spaces, and Minimally Invasive Education
- In Which I Perform a Scene from High School Musical 2
- Mindset, Video Games, and New Unschool Adventures
- Open Master’s, MicroMaster’s, and The Martian
- Micro-schools, powerful books, and SpaceX
- Obama on College Coddling
- Join the Helicopter Tiger Parents
- Do We Coddle College Students?
- Most Parenting Advice is Worthless
- What If Everything We Think About Discipline is Wrong?
- If You Don’t Get a Diploma, You Will Go to Hell
- Good Reasons to Take a Crappy Job
- In Defense of Doing Nothing This Summer
- Minecraft & Duct Tape
- The Double Blade of Ambition
- Ask Me Anything
- Does Homeschooling Open or Close Doors?
- The Dark Side of “Finding Your Passion”
- Insert Witty Newsletter Title Here
- I Started a Podcast!
- An Interview with John Taylor Gatto
- What Makes a Self-Directed Learner?
- Teachers Who Don’t Cooperate and America’s Worst Mom
- One Step Closer to a Hogwarts for Unschoolers
- How a 16-Year-Old Homeschooler Got Herself Into a Yale Class
- Give High School Students the Same Freedom as College Students
- Blake Gets Serious