Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously

What happens when children are allowed to spend their growing years doing what they want to do rather than what others think they ought to do? What happens when they have the time and the opportunity to explore the world in their own ways? Nancy Wallace's first book, Better Than School, was the story of how the Wallaces fought for and won the right to teach their children, Vita and Ishmael. Now, in Child's Work, Nancy looks at what happened in the years that followed; how Vita and Ishmael explored and became skilled at music, mathematics, art, and writing, and how Nancy learned to trust their idiosyncratic ways of learning and to respond seriously and helpfully to the choices they made. Child's Work is about how children make knowledge and understadning out of what is available around them, and as such it is an important book for parents, teachers, and anyone interested in learning from and about children.