a free e-letter from
Wendy's company
Life Media
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About Me
I am (in no particular order of importance) a book author, journalist, editor, former broadcaster, social entrepreneur, mother of two adult daughters, and step-grandmother of two. I co-founded my company Life Media with my husband Rolf in 1976 as The Alternate Press to publish books and Natural Life Magazine. Rolf and I still love, live, and work together. I also consider myself to be an agent of change. When I was barely out of my teens, I recognized the need for rethinking how we work, play, and educate ourselves in order to restore the planet’s social and ecological balance. For the last forty years, my mission has been to help people understand the interconnections within the web of life on Earth and to encourage everyone to challenge the assumptions inherent in the often conflicting choices we make in our daily lives. Trained as a school teacher in 1969, I quickly rejected the factory model of processing children and became an early proponent of experience-based, self-directed learning – or "homeschooling" as it was called in those days. It's now called "unschooling," but I prefer "life learning" or "living as if school doesn't exist." I founded The Canadian Alliance of Homeschoolers in 1979 as a national support and advocacy organization that kick-started the homeschooling movement in Canada, cooperating with John Holt as he breathed life into a parallel movement in America. In 1987, I wrote School Free – The Homeschooling Handbook, which is now in its fifth edition (with a revised e-book version in the works) and has become a best selling classic around the world. My second book on unschooling, Challenging Assumptions in Education: From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society (2000), is a controversial look at what’s wrong with public education and at the hows and whys of deschooling our families and society. It is on the reading list for college education programs internationally and was updated and reissued in 2008. After John Holt's Growing Without Schooling stopped publishing in 2001, I founded Life Learning Magazine as a way of encouraging and supporting families to trust their children to learn without being taught. Dr. Peter Gray, author of the Psychology Today Freedom to Learn blog, calls it "the leading journal of the unschooling movement." I am thrilled that this digital magazine has developed a strong subscriber base and is packed with well-written articles about the philosophy and practice of unschooling. In late 2008, I edited the book Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier, which is a collection of essays from Life Learning magazine. Natural Life Magazine is also prospering and continues to help its readers to integrate unschooling and natural parenting, green living, sustainable housing, socially and environmentally responsible self-employment, organic gardening, and natural healing into an ecologically responsible lifestyle. My work with Natural Life Magazine led to my being recruited to a successful run at the leadership of the Green Party of Canada in 1996. I resigned the following year because I felt there was too large a gap between the party’s stated goals and those of many of its members, and that I could be a more effective change maker as a writer and publisher. Nevertheless, my experiences in politics, advocacy, and journalism have given me an understanding of the environmental and social dangers inherent in the globalized corporate mindset and of the transformative power of local small business, social entrepreneurship, and "unjobbing." That is a field in which I've been involved since the mid 1980s, when I began to help homeschooling families create home-based businesses – as Rolf and I had done a decade earlier in order to help our own daughters learn at home. I subsequently founded The Home Business Network, a source of advocacy, information, and support for home-based businesses, and for the next decade helped legitimize and legalize home business, taught women to start home businesses, hosted a small business television show, and wrote a weekly small business newspaper column. My book Bringing it Home – A Home Business Start-Up Guide for You and Your Family was published in 1996 and is still helping people to plan home businesses and to balance work and family life. I recently published a fully updated e-book version. In 2008, as a continuation of my work with young parents, Rolf and I launched Natural Child Magazine, a spinoff from the Natural Child column that was published in Natural Life Magazine beginning in 1992. In line with changing trends in publishing, I now edit and produce it as a popular digital magazine. Although I don’t have time to write as much as I would like, I am a relatively prolific writer. And, indeed, I have contributed essays and chapters to dozens of texts and popular books including Linda Dobson’s The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling's Most Respected Voices, AERO's Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories, and an upcoming book about John Holt. My ninth book, Natural Life Magazine’s Green & Healthy Homes, came out in 2010. My most recent book (2012) is Beyond School: Living As If School Doesn’t Exist. It is a collection of essays about how families and individuals can live and learn without coercion or struggle, and with trust, respect, dignity...as if school doesn’t exist. Together, they create a case for a different way of helping children and young people learn about today’s world while becoming equipped to live in tomorrow’s world. I have also been a poet since I was a teenager and have two published books of poetry. I am, also, of course, a blogger. Currently, I am trying to find time to finish my eleventh book, a collection of memoir-style essays about mothering and daughtering, entitled It Hasn’t Shut Me Up. And I have just begun a new book, tentatively titled In Praise of Messy. What is most important to me in my writing is that I come from a place of experience, rather than of academic research. I aim to write plainly, concisely, and with clarity. One of the hallmarks of my life and work is my belief in cooperation over competition. As a result, I have served on the boards of countless non-profit organizations, provided advice and mentoring to many businesswomen, and helped many businesses begin and prosper. In recent years, in an attempt to slow down, simplify my life, avoid stress, and make more room for writing, I have reduced my level of participation in that regard. Thanks for your interest!
P.S. For a different perspective on my work, I am listed in the Canadian Who's Who and the Who’s Who of Canadian Women. You can read a history of my unschooling/life learning experiences
as published in the book Turning
Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories. You can read an interview with me that was published in Life Learning Magazine. You can listen to an interview with me on the Inspired Parenting Radio Show.
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