Josh Pickel grew up in Canton, Illinois and returned home to teach at the public schools he had once attended. As time went on, he felt increasingly unsettled about the coercive classroom dynamics characteristic of conventional schooling. 

Josh began researching alternative education models and came across Liberated Learners, a network of self-directed learning centers for teenagers modeled after North Star, a learning center in western Massachusetts that was started in 1996 by Ken Danford, who was also a disillusioned public school teacher. 

Last summer, Josh quit his teaching job to open Canton Learning Collaborative, a self-directed microschool for homeschoolers. It grew from 5 learners last fall to 15 young people over the course of its first year.

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