Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

Susan Wise Bauer's Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education shows parents how to flex the K-12 system – regardless of what method of education your family is using.

Challenging the standard school framework that fits changeable, growing, individual children into a system that refuses to take into account individuality or shifting daily needs, she encourages parents to look outside the paradigm of grades and subjects to a more intrinsic style of learning…particularly for children who struggle in the "normal" classroom environment.

With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child.

In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to alter the K-12 system, rather than the child. She analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from "giftedness."

As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work. Her advice here is comprehensive and anecdotal, including material drawn from experience homeschooling her own four children and more than twenty years of educational consulting and university teaching.

Rethinking School is a guide to one aspect of sane, humane parenting: negotiating the twelve-grade school system in a way that nurtures and protects your child's mind, emotions, and spirit.

288 pages.