Learn Like A Pirate

Anna    Community, Resources     bach, book, books, buccaneer, buccaneer-scholar, buccaneering, james, Learning, marcus, passion, passionate learning, pirate, review, scholar, self-education

This is a discussion of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success, a book by James Marcus Bach.

“A buccaneer-scholar is anyone whose love of learning is not muzzled or shackled by any institution or authority; whose mind is driven to wander and find its own place in the world.” -p.9, hardcover edition

James Bach dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to pursue his own education. His book is a first person account of his learning methods and experiences.  His excitement over learning is contagious, and he presents his ideas in a way that’s easy to understand and appreciate. The buccaneer analogy of learning is followed throughout the book, illustrating concepts in a very vivid way.

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar is a great exploration of purposeful self-education that will set you on the right path to appreciate a self-directed approach to learning. It’s a book I recommend to anyone interested in learning.

The Misconception of Self-Motivation

Many reviews of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar argue one point: James is an unusually self-motivated learner, which is why he’s been successful. They argue that others (especially the average high school dropout)  might not be self-motivated enough to learn.

My argument is that those reviewers are missing the point. read more

Self-Ed 101: 5 Reasons Why You Should Unschool

Anna    Basics     101, 5, beginner, five, how to start, reasons, self-ed 101, self-education, should I unschool, starting out, unschooling, why, why unschool

It’s hard to say when exactly I chose unschooling. Looking back, it seems like unschooling always was my choice. I just didn’t know it. Most of my learning happened outside of school. Even when I was in elementary school I understood that. After a few years I started to question why I even needed to be in school at all.

Like a lot of families, I came to choose unschooling through a gradual process. In my first years at school, I enjoyed it. I loved the opportunity to learn. When the system started working against me, I started to question it. Why couldn’t I learn something the higher grades were learning? Why didn’t we read more than one chapter, if everyone was interested and concentrated on it? I didn’t know the world arbitrary then, but that’s what it felt like: a bunch of rules and regulations with no real connection to learning.

Then I discovered homeschooling. That made more sense to me. I already learned more at home than I did at school. A few years after my discovery of homeschooling, I discovered unschooling. That’s when I realized unschooling was what I had wanted all along.

So here I am.

There are a huge number of reasons to unschool. It’s likely there are as many reasons as there are unschoolers. My biggest reasons were not wanting to be stuck with my grade level subject matter. I wanted more.

Among everyone’s reasons to unschool, there are a few things we all agree on: read more