A large percentage of the emails I get from this blog are from teachers. Some teach in a classroom but keep their kids out of school. Some don’t have kids but they read this blog because they are sure they won’t put their kids through what they see their students going through. Many teachers who read this blog feel stuck. So this post is for them. Read more
This is a guest post by Lehla Eldridge. Her blog is Unschooling the Kids. She lives with her husband and three kids in Italy.
What does “to be powerful” mean anyway? To have power? Power can be a bit of a scary word. Wars have been fought over power. Maybe for me it means that our girls will be able to stand in their power when they are not being treated fairly. Read more
If there’s a reason I’m crazy, it’s not because of sharing too much on my blog, or taking my kids out of school. It’s not even for jeopardizing my finances way too often with way too many startups. The reason I’m crazy, if I’m crazy, is that I spend the majority of my waking hours dealing with music lessons. Read more
You know all those ads that say “Make $2000 a month from home!” They are not lying, but it’s a minimum wage job doing work on the phone that requires almost no skill except to sound like you live in the US.
Which is to say those jobs are terrible. Read more
Research is turning up more and more data to support the idea that people become addicted to drugs because of the environment they are in. And it’s compiled nicely in Johann Hari’s book, Chasing the Scream: The first and last days of the War on Drugs. Read more
One of the big reasons that super smart kids do not do well in the work world is their limited executive function—the skill that tells you to stop eating berries and run away from a lion. Natural selection has made us into executive function geniuses (though we still cannot multitask with any competence, at least we know what to do first.) Read more
This is a guest post from Karelys. She is one of my favorite commenters. And it’s amazing to me that she writes guest posts when she has a brand new baby.
Plenty has been said about the merits of homeschooling (even if it’s just done as simply as transferring traditional classroom material to the home), but even more about unschooling or self-directed learning. It’s just clearly the best way for children to learn. Read more
Coke sponsored a contest to see who could come up with a new bottle top to make an empty Coke bottle useful again. Read more
It’s common for parents to say they have chosen to give up income when they began homeschooling.
I disagree—there is really no lost income, and here’s why: Read more
There is big debate among academics about whether patriotism and nationalism should be a goal of public education. On the surface, the debate is whether nationalism leads to nefarious practices (war, for example), or whether nationalism is a prerequisite for making a sacrifice to the community, which is a prerequisite for distributive justice. Read more