To graduates of life-led home education.... You are invited to join us in developing the concept we have established here... Welcome to The Center for Independent Graduate Home Education Nature of the Entity University-Level Life-Directed Research-Oriented Learning Developed-Concept-Structure Being familiar with the life-directed, research-oriented learning that life-led home education has provided you, as our visitor, and us, as founders, we challenge you to look at the University-Level programs available after your Graduation and notice that each of the better universities has a flagship program in some better-idea made real in their program, from Environmental Engineering, to Organic No-till Agriculture, to Zero-waste Model Home Design, to Anti-corporate Criminology, to Intentional Community Establishing, to Bio-Fuel Sustainability Projects That Exceed Demand. Yet, once you get past that star-filled project at the chosen university, the rest of the program built around that flagship looks uncomfortably appalling, if not downright retro-grade. So what do you do when such expensive and disruptive life choices of university are the rule, not the exception? Alternatively you could weave together programs from multiple colleges but the price of cherry-picking and nomadic living going from campus to the next far away campus is truly also self-defeating, unless you have unseemly deep pockets and a lot of tolerance for being a stranger. So what's left? Giving up those university shellgame dreams and instead just living somewhere away from the home that you thrived in before granduation? Or try again to make that home work. With your, and our, background we should be able to do the exciting and productive ideas without the entrapment if we are consistently applying our creativity and scale-keeping skills. Life-leading curriculum and research vs the extremely narrow-focused academic model of research, such as the members of the Coalition of Independent Scholars do, rather successfully by academic standards. So we know that it's doable to make research progress at that level, but it's somewhat unsatisfactory because you end up living in the sick cultural blueprint instead of making the changes so that the blueprint fits life and logic. brush off accredidation gathering beautiful gems for our own blueprint This is what we have created with our own family collaboration, which collaboration we acknowledge is crucial for success. We planned and executed a multigenerational strategy and have seen great progress, more than we would have dreamed, though not at all the direct route we had started out on, in the beginning, when we were part of a larger group of graduates and their mothers and a few of their fathers. And yet this success has shown the crucial importance of narrowing down a group to focus on a possibly more accessible route to the goals that we had set. Come see for yourselves what we have achieved in the past 10 years and judge for yourself what you think is doable with your resources and with the obstacles you will encounter and you will encounter resistance of significant forcefulness. Just be careful and don't be unnecessarily afraid of finding your way through the messy opposition, though we will point out that we have decided that the minimal presence of governance entities is a good thing for pioneering the designs you will select for your own Life-Directed Learning. So you will find us out on the edges of Appalachian rural Ohio, where still the forces of the corrupted cultural blueprint must yet be kept at bay. Life is decidedly very different than in the big cities where we grew up and got our own start. Before you think that we are not in society's designated pyramid of possibly token women to make history in the corporate or government world, we will point out that we abandoned that route. That Token Woman story is now been published and we also suggest that you can further see our bios in the navigation options. As for the obstacles that you may encounter, my own dear son who was also one of our founding members and an enthusiastic support for our work will suggest you consider your own cautions and tolerance and local circumstances as they may be significantly other than ours which you can judge from these accounts. NaturalLandscaping in city government Criminals demanding sewage creation even in rural government The Government Attack Continues less than successfully. Instead of 911 because of the criminals in medicine, which could happen whether you're adventuring in learning or just trying to stay in the mainstream. In fact in the mainstream, you wouldn't even know what hit you. Once you have gotten over these possibilities for where your life and logic will take you in defying the corrupted cultural blueprint, then consider how wonderfully you can design your own life-directed curriculum to implement the blueprint that life and logic would lead you to. Ours, for our little family, has matched for excitement and for benefit many of the wonders of the academic variety. Judge for yourself. Founding Rationale 1998 As homeschoolers, and especially as unschoolers, we concur with the statements, that we've created our own curriculum for educating our children, and there's no theoretical difference between learning at later ages and learning when you're young. With our understanding of learning styles, learner directed programming, resource acquisition, and creative, life-centered, knowledge generation, why wouldn't a homeschooling adult simply extend their work in curriculum creation and program generation to their own interests? Why would you pay an institution (an outrageous amount at that), then struggle to get them to see your vision, and after all that defining effort to show them what you need, turn around and let them decide what hoops you should jump through -- unless you have the intention of pursuing some "typical job" and of acquiescing to putting your efforts into powering someone else's blueprint for as long as they choose to keep you and only that long. Why do that, after all your work to become self-directed. That's the concept behind the group here. We're all self-directed, some have unschooled their own families and now they're looking at the next phase of their, and their own newly graduated children's, choices -- cherry-picked college, temporarily targeted work experience, internship, apprenticeship, travel, peace corp, home-building, family starting. But the attitudes around in this society -- now that we're talking about post secondary -- again breakdown and return to the school-crippled matrix, even though logic would expect society's previous recognition of k-12 performance to continue and to acknowledge that we do thrive on customized learning systems and have succeeded in making those customized systems to be honored by the established edu-systems as well as by our extended family and our peers, via having validly demonstrated, credibility-portfolios and project-records to define our path to progress -- a much more advanced method of credibility demonstration than any k-12 edu system. Somehow, in those 'adult' circles of this society, we're now expected to agree that, at our graduated levels, these formerly considered 'adult' portfolio options -- when we were talking k-12 -- must now be expected to fail to achieve both customized learning and clear development. This denigration of our ability to adequately control our learning illogically misses the obvious favorable comparison of our methodolgy to the established practice of presenting a resumé to demonstrate precisely that 'adult' graduate progress. When our older generation began homeschooling their children, people shook their heads in disbelief. When that effort proved successful, those same people said "sure, anyone could, but wait til they get to high school, shudder". Well, the unschoolers managed the dreaded high school process as well. So now as graduates, we see the shortcomings at the more factory-like colleges and we're asking, why stop with highschool. The lights really go on when you realize that there's no difference between what graduate school programs do and what unschoolers do, and have done since the beginning. See ("Graduation and the Great Shellgame",LifeLearning Magazine, Sep/Oct 2002) Unschoolers have been running graduate programs for their children all along, why should unschoolers now diminish their work and progress by abdicating their role to the edu-establishment -- unless they need a piece of paper? And why would anyone need a piece of paper? Not unless they needed to "prove" something to an outsider about their abilities that wouldn't be accepted from a portfolio, i.e. to get a job with rigid definitions and no hiring staff capable of recognizing performance and ability. But that's not what grown unschoolers want. When we started our homeschooling originally, we formed our own groups and structures to help us support our educational goals so now we're exploring what we should form for this stage of our work. I doubt we're the only such group. The early generations of homeschoolers are reaching a sort of critical mass. I don't think this movement is done. As for the value of getting a job... I don't mean to be unduly negative but I have some doubts about the job market, with or without a degree, actually. Have you looked at the labor market projections? So-called 'knowledge work' is the premium job category, with large doses of technical training and presumably a degree. But all the 'growth' areas of the job market are less desirable by their apparent monetary standards. If you were interested in tech-stuff which is a highly touted career path, you may feel that your choice is well positioned, but the last time I looked, a few years ago, there were some pretty nefarious trends going on. Nor was this the only indication of unsavory working climate. The academic women were pushing young women to pursue science degrees even though the market would not support the number of graduates in science already, not in academia nor in industry. And they knew it. Their explanation really floored me. They wanted to confront their admins with the size of the pool of available women techs and ask why there were so few in the quality academic positions. Now this may seem admirable strategy to some but the bottom line was that they were using young women as cannon fodder in their internecine warfare over equity in the univs. Frankly, I wouldn't care to volunteer for that scene. But maybe you're locale is somehow different? Those young women were going to invest years of their lives and hard work, not to mention the financial debts they would incur (some graduate with debts the size of mortgages on palatial homes), so that they could be the unused pool of talent???? And their chances outside the univs were not particularly promising so they couldn't simply get quality jobs in industry. In industry, there were signs of real instability, partly from the incessant hype of new systems to keep the software businesses generating income, but also from economic trends to minimize salary *expense* by constantly bringing in new blood, so called, from the lower paid pools. This resulted in anomalies such as hysteria before congressional hearings to demand the lifting of quotas on tech-skilled temporary workers from lower paid sources abroad while at the same time being one of the industries with the highest layoff rates in the economy. Self education is more likely to get you the skills and treatment and probably the opportunities you want... Together, let's make people's lives more satisfying by pioneering this vision in our own lives. If you have doubts about how enjoyable this graduate home education lifestyle is, visit our departments and savor their excitement and absorb the reality of what can be really done. Outside the matrix of our western culture. . We do know the ropes, been there, gathered better ideas and routes with every intention to make them available to more people. Who we are is spelled out on our Resumé pages, though if you're looking for something from our online electronic resources, you'll find our web-art gurus at Bergerac-tv.net are also among our CyberHobbits creating their own CyberHobbiton. Come enjoy your visit to our web-campus office.... Signed, the CIGHE staff. Talk to us about moving closer toward the Life of your dreams...