The Gentle Wind School Newsletters

As a service to the homeschooling community, I have scanned in six education newsletters that were published by the Gentle Wind School in Surry, Maine, from 1989 - 1991. These newsletters are an extremely radical indictment of the very idea of "school". I'd like to thank Carol in Massachusetts for providing the original newsletters.

PLEASE NOTE THAT I DID NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH WRITING THESE NEWSLETTERS. I just scanned them into my web site.

A total of six newsletters were issued. The first four were entitled "Great Education Moves" and were published during 1989. The last two were entitled "REBOUND" (Redeeming Education By Observing Universal Natural Development), and were not dated. A reasonable guess is that volume 1 was issued in 1990 and volume 2 sometime in 1991.

Because the Gentle Wind School is no longer in operation, I've omitted their address, phone number, requests for comments, etc. from the original newsletters.

And now, I want to give you three important warnings:

• Warning: the Gentle Wind newsletters have a liberal orientation and contain many gratuitous insults to conservative political figures, as well as other slights against the conservative/libertarian view. Of course, if you ARE a liberal then this would be a plus.
• Warning: these newsletters also insult just about everyone and everything, especially school teachers and the public school system, politicians, parents, leaders of the homeschooling movement, and even psychotherapists and physicians! Fortunately, with the exception of politicians, names are usually not mentioned! In one or two cases where names were used, I changed them to fictitious names.
• Warning: It appears that some of the same people that were part of the Gentle Wind School are now involved in The Gentle Wind Project. Sellers of so-called "healing instruments," this organization has been accused of being a cult.

Warnings aside, however, these newsletters demonstrate, in a very powerful way, why school causes irreparable harm to children and why all parents should therefore give the homeschooling alternative serious consideration. Furthermore, they will confont you with the fact that you were severely damaged when you attended school as a child, in ways that you can never fully recover from even decades later. Please don't put your kids through the suffering that you had to endure!

[Notes that I've added to the scanned-in text are formatted in the same way as this paragraph, and will be ended with my initials, like this - DSH.]

The following text appears at the beginning of each issue of the Gentle Wind Newsletters.

The Gentle Wind School is a service project that is dedicated to improving the quality of life in the world today. We function completely on the basis of donations, and do not charge any fees for our work.

!Help Yourself!

The Gentle Wind School has obtained copyrights on all of the material contained in this newsletter. However, this is not an attempt on our part to own this information. These ideas belong to everyone. The destruction being caused by modern education is far too serious for anyone to try to hang on to these ideas.

If you are writing a book or newsletter of your own, feel free to take anything you want from this publication. You need not request our permission and you can claim it as your own if you like. How people come to hear this information makes no difference to us. We only ask that you not attempt to prevent anyone else, including us, from using these ideas in the future. Other than that, help yourself!

[The above gives me permission to put the newsletters on the web - DSH.]

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