I’m excited that there’s going to be more harpyness more often with more different perspectives and topics.

More harpyness – + infinity.

@rodriguez glad you’re looking forward to the book reviews … I have two quasi-book reviews coming up this week and one next week (you can tell what I spent my Christmas vacation doing when not watching season five of Dr. Who and being traumatized by Children of Earth).

@Ms. M glad to hear you enjoyed my interview with Idzy. Best wishes to your family as you enjoy education outside of school .

Glad to see there are other history and book geeks out there to talk ideas with. Looking forward to getting to know all of you very much.

Good questions both. The “why were you home-schooled” question is a HUGE topic, which I talk about at length in this recent interview with Idzy at the blog I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write. The short answer is that my parents were interested in a type of family life that would have been difficult if our lives had been dictated by the school year and school curriculum … at least given the schooling options available in our area during the 80s.

My thesis is an oral history project exploring the origins of an off-campus study program, the Oregon Extension, that was founded in the 1970s by a group of college professors from the Midwest. They were looking for a way to combine their love of the wilderness and back-to-the-land interests with their desire to be educators. My thesis looks at the cultural context of their project and the way in which the program provided both the faculty and their students a way out of Evangelical fundamentalism and traditional education toward something more educationally holistic and politically and theologically liberal.