Unschooling Support and where are the mags going?
arun on Aug 12 2008 at 12:13 am | Filed under: links, looking out, others wisdom, unschooling | Click here to go HOME | or find out about SUBSCRIBING TO THE PIT |
Why have the unschooling magazines gone?
First Live Free Learn Free went electronic and now seems to be no more. Then more recently Life Learning Magazine got absorbed into its bigger cousing Natural Parenting Magazine.
Meanwhile Connections online magazine seems to be the last one standing but is very infrequent.
So if unschooling is growing what is happening to all the unschooling mags?
I suspect its a combination of three things:
- that the people putting them out are often unschoolers themselves and want to spend more time with their kids
- that it is difficult to find appropriate advertisers for an unschooling publication which by definition does not rely on curriculum or ‘out of the box’ solutions
- that there is a vibrant and growing blogosphere and email culture within the unschooling community
I personally hope that a new magazine or one of the ones mentioned stages a major comeback (hint hint Danielle… please get more Connections out!)…
Until that time if you are looking for inspiration and support as well as the many fantastic blogs you can access a range of great egroups where unschooling mums (they are pretty much always mums) offer their time and wisdom extremely generously. I still lurk on some egroup pretty much every day to help keep me on track.
To help find what might be right for you, I just did a major update to the Unschooling & Parenting Egroup review page which you can read here.
One of the most noticable newcomers is a social networking site for radical unschoolers, my post “Snapshots” below was part of the blog carnival that has been launched on that site, but there are many other options listed also.
Yesterday I mentioned to a friend that Home Education Magazine was the only one left, and she said the owners are trying to sell it, and told their staff that they couldn’t afford to pay them anymore (not that they were paying much anyway). I hope they held back enough to cover subscription liability!
I think you’re right that the advertising isn’t as lucrative (or even sensible) for natural learning magazines as for fundamentalist Christian homeschooling magazines (which Australia probably doesn’t have so much of as the U.S.).
Although people write to me and say they wish my site were a book (it would be like an encyclopedia, and too much of it is other people’s cool writings of the moment for it to be publishable anyway), the learning people do about unschooling (maybe about everything) is increasingly online. Sites like The Parenting Pit and JoyfullyRejoycing are goldmines for parents, and so subscribing to magazines is sometimes money that could be better spent on doing cool things with the kids. I still was subscribing to Life Learning Magazine when it ceased being.
I’ve often wondered if a paper published zine could make it. That would be fun to publish!
I am sad to see Connections no longer publishing. It was fun to be a part of that and I really wish it would start back up though Danielle is pretty dang busy with her farm.
I remember almost crying when Growing Without Schooling stopped back in the 90’s. It was the very first magazine I ever subscribed to and it was a breath of fresh air at the time.
Let’s do a zine….yes, yes.