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Class Dismissed Movie Features Well Trained Mind

Guest homeschoolfilm

By Guest homeschoolfilm,
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Guest homeschoolfilm

Guest homeschoolfilm

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I just wanted to inform the Well Trained Mind community that the movie Class Dismissed is being released in October and the Well Trained Mind is one of the primary homeschool options explored in the movie. Class Dismissed is the world's first feature-length film about homeschooling. We're starting off with a West Coast tour of private screenings in theaters. If you live near Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland or Seattle, you can get your tickets here: http://classdismissedmovie.com/see-the-film/private-screenings/

 

If you don't live in those areas, we'll be coming to the East Coast, then a few cities in between, then opening it up for smaller screenings hosted by groups or volunteers. More background on the movie can be found on our production site: http://www.homeschoolfilm.com

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Guest homeschoolfilm

Guest homeschoolfilm

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Iron Ethel Flint: Thanks! We've been working on it for 4 years and are quite satisfied with how it turned out. In 2015 we'll have online on-demand and DVDs versions available.

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We'll be grabbing a DVD and perhaps hosting a screening if nobody else with a better venue steps up first, which they probably will. ;)

 

I thought it was about four years, but didn't know until you posted that WTM was mentioned.

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kubiac

kubiac

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Thanks for the reminder to buy my tickets! I already told my husband I need him to watch the kids that night so I can run off to see this. I think I need to invite my dad to join me as he has expressed some serious skepticism about our cockamamie plan to homeschool the DC. :D

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Guest homeschoolfilm

Guest homeschoolfilm

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Chicago is looking like a real possibility. Planning underway for a potential screening there. The movie is appropriate for kids as well & bringing non-homeschoolers to the movie is a good idea as it is a rare opportunity to see why we do it & how "normal" we all are ;)

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Guest homeschoolfilm

Guest homeschoolfilm

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Forgot to follow up with our new screenings until today. We played in Chicago a couple weeks ago and New York yesterday. We'll play in Boston (Arlington) tonight and fly down to do two NC screenings: Charlotte tomorrow, then Raleigh on Wednesday. You can keep an eye on the screenings here: http://classdismissedmovie.com/see-the-film/private-screenings/

We're hoping to add many more in January & February (Southern states like Arizona, Texas, and Alabama for sure). People can also host their own screenings: http://classdismissedmovie.com/see-the-film/guide-to-hosting-a-screening/

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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I just wanted to inform the Well Trained Mind community that the movie Class Dismissed is being released in October and the Well Trained Mind is one of the primary homeschool options explored in the movie. Class Dismissed is the world's first feature-length film about homeschooling. We're starting off with a West Coast tour of private screenings in theaters. If you live near Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland or Seattle, you can get your tickets here: http://classdismissedmovie.com/see-the-film/private-screenings/

 

If you don't live in those areas, we'll be coming to the East Coast, then a few cities in between, then opening it up for smaller screenings hosted by groups or volunteers. More background on the movie can be found on our production site: http://www.homeschoolfilm.com

 

Okay, since no one else has, I just have to make a persnickity comment on the bolded above.  The only time WTM is mentioned or referred to in the movie is a two-second photo of the spine of the book.  They do highlight a family that does Classical Conversations, but as boardies here well know, CC is not WTM in any way, shape, or form, even if they do share a "Classical" component. ;)  There are pictures of kids singing Latin chants at a CC coop. The CC mom throws out the word 'dialectical'.  SWB isn't mentioned at all - most of the 'homeschooling gurus' interviewed are unschoolers (Pat Farenga, Sandra Dodd; there's footage of John Holt and John Taylor Gatto)

 

I did enjoy the movie and thought overall it did a decent job showing different styles of homeschooling (as you can only do so much in a two hour film!)  The main family also tries out a public charter for a while and just through watching what they go through (they quit) it's really clear why that's 'public school at home' rather than homeschooling - even without a single word of commentary on the issue.

 

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ondreeuh

ondreeuh

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Is it really heavy on the unschooling philosophy?

 

When I first started to consider homeschooling, I went to an info night at a local library that was organized by a state homeschool group. There were I think 3 presenters who shared how homeschooling can work, and they were all unschoolers. So their advice was to not worry abut anything and trust that kids are learning even when it looks like they aren't. It wasn't really a message that inspired me or resonated with me then. Unschoolers don't speak for all homeschoolers so I wonder if the 4 prominent unschoolers are balanced out by other views?

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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Yeah, saying that TWTM is "featured" seems to have been a way to publicize the movie to the good folks on this board, and not much more.

 

Ah, well.

 

Well, FWIW, the filmmakers seem like well-meaning folk (they were both at the screening).  They're both homeschool dads, and I think they said they started the film when their oldest kids were 6?  So I think that would make them about 10 now...?  I get the feeling they both fall more toward the unschooling end of things, or at least quite relaxed, and we all know it's much easier to be relaxed before your kids hit middle school! 

 

From conflating CC and WTM and some of the ways they describe things in the CC segment, I get the feeling they meant well but really didn't have a firm handle on what the Classical method is, or the breadth of materials and sometimes competing theories it entails.  I have a feeling that they may honestly have no idea that CC is a kind of semi-pyramidical business model (from what I've read here, anyway...) rather than what everyone thinks of as the be-all end-all of Classical Ed, and that it has really nothing to do with WTM...

 

Pretty much the main family visits the CC family to find out how they do things (as they're kind of floundering trying to figure out what to do after they pull their middle-school aged kids from ps), and then decide that's not for them.

 

As far as other things available to homeschoolers, there's also some footage of drop-in centers where hs kids can take classes, or do their own thing.  Now that I think of it, though, not much of anything about coops other than CC (which isn't really a coop).

 

I guess any movie is going to reflect the biases/experiences of the filmmakers, and who they've met in their own homeschooling journey.  It would have been quite a different film if the guys making it had been Evangelical Christians from the Bible Belt using Abeka or Apologia rather than the secular CA unschool-leaning guys that did. :)  I don't think homeschooling for religious reasons came up at all in the film; if it did, it was a brief mention like "when homeschooling started, most were Christians or hippies, but it's much more diverse now..." or something along those lines.

 

They mentioned that they'd seen Waiting for Superman and Race to Nowhere and wondered why there wasn't a film out there that talked about homeschooling - so they made one. :)

 

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Matryoshka

Matryoshka

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Is it really heavy on the unschooling philosophy?

 

When I first started to consider homeschooling, I went to an info night at a local library that was organized by a state homeschool group. There were I think 3 presenters who shared how homeschooling can work, and they were all unschoolers. So their advice was to not worry abut anything and trust that kids are learning even when it looks like they aren't. It wasn't really a message that inspired me or resonated with me then. Unschoolers don't speak for all homeschoolers so I wonder if the 4 prominent unschoolers are balanced out by other views?

 

The main family followed I don't think considered themselves unschoolers.  The dad worries out loud about accountability and expresses a bit of relief when they join the public charter. (there's actually three parents - mom, stepdad, and dad, all of whom are on board and help with the homeschooling).  Then of course the public charter is all the busywork from school minus the building and they bail.  One dd expresses nothing but relief, but the other does mention that she did like something to keep her on track.  I'd say they end up somewhere eclectic and fairly child-interest-led (volunteering at a marine center, going to work with the dads and seeing what they do there), but not full-on radical homeschooling "don't worry if your kids play video games all day" style.  They learn French, Teaching Textbooks is shown...

 

The focus is more "public education is broken; homeschooling can be a great alternative and it doesn't have to look like school-at-home" rather than "let your kids do whatever they want and they'll be fine". 

 

The filmmaker shared an anecdote in the Q&A that was not in the film (and I'm rather relieved wasn't) - that old chestnut about the unschooled kid who applied to college for astrophysics but hadn't learned any math, so went to the library, got out some math books, and learned everything he needed to know from first grade to calculus in 3 months and aced the entrance exam. :glare:   I'm really curious if that's actually a real person he had met, or he'd heard the apocryphal story and was passing it on...

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73349

73349

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I liked the movie overall. It was a little on the unschooly side--lots of the commentary is "Don't worry: your kids will learn everything and you don't really need to make it happen"--although that's not really what Ana and Lily really wound up doing. In some ways this is very true, and it's reassurance that will be helpful to the Modern Anxious Parent, but it takes a lot for granted that the film doesn't explore. I would've liked them to look a little longer at more of a variety of styles as well as at the resources that parents make available to the kids in order for the child-led learning to be successful, beyond the Village Home and going to work with a parent sometimes. Maybe someone should make a sequel. :)

 

In no way does the film "feature" WTM; instead, it shows the spine of the book when mentioning classical education--not the friendly blue and yellow cover, but a black cloth spine with silvery letters, as though it's a Bible or a Harry Potter book. Not sure what was up with that. Anyway, the main family featured does not seem interested in a classical approach.

 

Lots of parents brought their kids. I wonder how many were school-leavers versus never-enrollees, so to speak. Everyone seemed absorbed in the story. Lots of knowing laughs at certain points.

 

The focus of the film is the way the homeschooling opens up possibilities--so much so that the lack of enforced structure is scary to parents and children alike. The older girl even considers going back for  high school as a path of least resistance. Ultimately, though, homeschooling is paradigm-changing and empowering when the family persists.

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