Awards and Press Notices

Copyright © 2013 Karl M. Bunday, all rights reserved.

Ratings of This Site

[Yahoo! logo {link}] Yahoo's home schooling directory, the most visited source of links about homeschooling on the Web, has listed the Learn in Freedom! site ever since learninfreedom.org was founded. Yahoo has recently trimmed thousands of sites from its directory, perhaps preferring to refer users to other sites now through its partnership with Google, but this site is still listed in the Yahoo homeschooling directory, which is a pretty good guide to which sites have been listed in Yahoo since the early days and have survived.

AltaVista's enhanced Open Directory Home Schooling Directory with LookSmart ratings is a useful guide to a considerably greater variety of homeschooling sites than Yahoo, and it has site ratings. The AltaVista directory lists this site as a top homeschooling site.

[Open Directory Cool Site Award] The Open Directory Project says it is the largest human-edited directory of Web resources in the world, and it has so many editors that its categories are very detailed. This site first was given a Cool Site award by the editors of the Home Schooling: Politics directory of the Open Directory Project, and as of June 1999 now has also won a Cool Site award from the editors of the Project's Home Schooling: Unschooling directory.

[Top 20 HomeSchool Web Sites Award] This site was rated as one of the top twenty homeschooling Web sites in the whole wide world under five different sets of rules at a site that formerly sponsored voting about homeschooling Web sites. I was quite glad to see that my site is so well-regarded in such a competitive rating process. Alas, there was always some vote fraud at that site (individuals voting multiple times for the same site, and driving down the ratings of highly rated sites by ridiculously low scores for well-regarded sites), so this honor can't be taken too seriously. The voting program has been discontinued, so I no longer provide a link to the site that sponsored the voting, but I appreciate the support that this site received from voters unknown to me.

[Open Directory Cool Site Award] One thing that has changed on the Web since the earliest award programs were active is founding of NewHoo, which later became the Open Directory Project. The Open Directory Project says it is the largest human-edited directory of Web resources in the world, and it seems to sort out better Web resources on many subjects than certain Brand X directories of the Web. This site has been given a Cool Site award by the editors of the Home Schooling: Politics directory of the Open Directory Project.

Jon's Homeschool Resource Page, itself a very popular homeschooling site that is one of the oldest and most visited homeschooling sites on the Web, includes a page of homeschooling Web site ratings on which this site is listed as one of the best sites. I especially appreciate this, as Jon's early example of posting homeschooling information on the Web inspired me to find a niche for my own Web site about a year later.

[Homeschool Top 5 Percent Website Award] This site won the Top 5 Percent Homeschool Site award in 1997, while the award was supervised by the first Mining Co. guide to homeschooling. That award program was founded didn't consider the content or usefulness of Web sites much at all. When the first Mining Co. homeschooling guide began administering this award, the content of sites began to be considered in passing out the award. But then the Mining Co. chose a new guide to homeschooling, and the award program seems no longer to be in operation. Thus I don't provide a link here to any page where you can see other winners. A lot has changed on the Web since that award program was last active.

[Top 5 Percent Award] There are a variety of finding and rating services for Web sites. Without any intervention on my part, not even my submitting my own URL to the service, my bibliography pages on the Bookport server were rated one of the top 5 percent of Web sites by Point Survey back in 1995. Until I set up this awards page, I usually kept the Point Survey award logo on my site's home page, as one of the more early and more credible awards this site has ever received. Now I'm moving all the news about site awards to this page, to save downloading time for the home page. I no longer provide a link to the Point Survey review for my old site, as my site has changed considerably since then and the Point Survey award program is no longer very active, although the review of my old site and its obsolete URI may still be posted on the Web.

Press Notices, Books, and Magazines (Most Recent to Least Recent)

U.S. News and World Report magazine published an article on June 12, 2000 about parents who advocate an "exodus" from the public schools of the United States. The on-line version of the article recommends this site as a source of general information on homeschooling, and particularly as a source of information on how to get started and on college admission.

CBS News broadcast a story about a homeschooled girl who placed third in the year 2000 National Spelling Bee after previous years of outstanding performance in mathematics competitions. A sidebar to the on-line version of that story urges readers to "scan the Learn in Freedom site" and I certainly welcome you to take that advice.

Education Week magazine mentioned this site's Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ in an article that has an on-line version posted on the Web.

This site was recommended in the May/June 1998 issue of Mothering magazine and in the October 5, 1998 issue of Newsweek magazine in a sidebar to Newsweek's cover story about homeschooling, "Learning at Home: Does It Pass the Test?" by Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert. The Newsweek sidebar especially drew attention to this site's information about college admission (found in the Colleges That Admit Homeschoolers FAQ page) and resulted in a noticeable increase in visits to this site.

By the time my former Web site was obsolete (that is, by the time I had founded this Learn in Freedom™ site), my former pages on the Bookport server were reviewed in the November 1997 issue of Yahoo Internet Life magazine's roundup of homeschooling sites [link to a different Web site]. The review was favorable, although not as good as the review of some of the few other sites that were mentioned at all, which I agree were better at that time than my old Bookport site. I have updated all of those pages and include them with this new Learn in Freedom™ site. See if you think the current condition of this site responds to the suggestions for improvement found in that review.

It's great fun to get a Web page listed in a published book. For no more effort than that involved in the initial site set-up of my earliest Web site (with which my Web master, Daniel Kehoe, gave me great assistance) and a submission to Yahoo!, I found my first Web site (which included earlier forms of some of the bibliographies included in this site) listed in two books that for a while one could find in almost any bookstore.

[Yahoo Unplugged by David Filo & Jerry Yang] My former Web site on the Bookport server was listed in the education resource section of Yahoo Unplugged: Your Discovery Guide to the Web by David Filo and Jerry Yang, et al. (Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, 1995) (ISBN 1-56884-715-7), where it was one of the few homeschooling resource pages selected for the book.
[InternetWorld World Wide Web Yellow Pages by Marshall Breeding] The Bookport site was also listed in Mecklermedia's InternetWorld World Wide Web Yellow Pages edited by Marshall Breeding (Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, 1995) (ISBN 1-56884-344-5). I felt especially honored by this notice from a professional information services specialist for a library.

Your Visits Are the Best Award

Nowadays there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Web sites about homeschooling and other aspects of learning in freedom. But this site continues to be one of the more popular sites on that subject. Visits to my early pages and to this site have come from people connecting to the Web from more than sixty countries or territories all over the world. Please let me know if you are visiting from a country other than those listed on the Homeschooling is Growing Worldwide page.

People all over the world are finding out how important it is to learn in freedom, which is why there are links to my Web pages from Web sites based in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, France, Israel, the Republic of Korea, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and other countries. When you see another Web site that links to interesting information about education, please tell the Web master about the Learn in Freedom™ site and its current address (http://learninfreedom.org) if there isn't already a link to here from that page. I now have provided reciprocal links to most sites that send visitors to this site, on the Pages That Link to the Learn in Freedom! Site page.

Please let me know what I should still improve about this site.

[Last revision 9 March 2013]

Feel free to come back to the Learn in Freedom™ page (http://learninfreedom.org) and to this "Awards and Press for the Learn in Freedom! Site" page (http://learninfreedom.org/sidlifawards.html) again soon!

This School Is Dead: Awards and Press Notices page is copyright © 2013 Karl M. Bunday, all rights reserved.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)
Feel free to contact the Learn in Freedom™ site owner, Karl M. Bunday, at any time. Fill out this site's Google Docs comment form or email or send postal mail to the Learn in Freedom webmaster as you like.
webmaster@learninfreedom.org [mailto link]
Karl M. Bunday
P. O. Box 1858
Minnetonka, MN 55345