Ren Allen

~~>>>cookie cutter unschooling life<<<~~

Wow.
Unschooling is anything but cookie-cutter! That really makes me laugh.
Unschooling is making up your own cookies. It's smashing the mold.
It's coloring outside the lines dancing to your own beat. It's
sculpting a life of passions. It's freedom. It's anything BUT
cookie-cutter.

Here's a couple definitions of "cookie-cutter" I pulled from the web:

Main Entry: cookie-cutter
Function: adjective
: marked by lack of originality or distinction <cookie-cutter shopping
malls>

Adj. 1. cookie-cutter - having the same appearance (as if
mass-produced); "a suburb of cookie-cutter houses"
same - closely similar or comparable in kind or quality or quantity or
degree;

Hmmmmm.....
Unschoolers are leaving the mass-produced, lack-of-originality world
BEHIND. I'm not really sure how this phrase got applied to
unschooling. It's really completely innacurate.

As a person heads into new territory with a lack of understanding,
it's easy to get sidetracked and think "how will unschooling work in
THIS situation?"
But it's really not about unschooling and more about healthy human
interactions.

When one asks oneself "how do I facilitate this situation FOR my
child?" it helps open new doors. Falling back on old, less-effective
tools like punishment and control is maybe comfortable, but fails to
move us forward in gathering new tools.

Learning how to mindfully parent takes patience (with ourselves too)
and a willingness to quit using cookie-cutter methods. Opening
ourselves up to the colorful world of creative problem solving might
seem overwhelming. But it leads to healthier relationships in all of
life and it helps provide a nurturing environment for joyful
unschooling to blossom.

Ren
learninginfreedom.com

mauratracy

Thanks again Ren. Glad I could make you laugh.

It's way too late for me to be up on the computer, but I wanted to reply to everyone who took
the time to reply to me, so I"m finishing up with this. I don't know how I'll be able to keep
this up though. Seriously, I don't have this much free time in my day? It's 2am!

So, anyway, very, very quickly, Ren. Please see my replies to Lesa and Karen for my
explanation of my use of the term "cookie cutter lifestyle." I appreciate the time you took to
look into this and reply to it, but I think you all have misunderstood what I meant by it.

Maura

--- In [email protected], "Ren Allen" <starsuncloud@...> wrote:
>
>
> ~~>>>cookie cutter unschooling life<<<~~
>
> Wow.
> Unschooling is anything but cookie-cutter! That really makes me laugh.