My husband sent an email to me this morning with a link to Noa Kagayama’s post Do We Have a Hidden Bias Against Creative People. My husband wrote: “This one was really good. I don’t know if my son will be a happy productive adult, but I do think you are helping him have a chance. I think public school would slowly kill him.” Read more
I get one or two interview requests every day. I say no to written interviews because if I’m going to write anything I want it to be for my site, not someone else’s. So I tell people I’ll do phone interviews. Then I try to schedule the phone interviews for crazy times like midnight on Tuesday nights when we are driving home from cello lessons. Read more
The purpose of school is to get kids out of the house so parents don’t need to take care of them. But we can’t talk about school that way because if we did, any school would be good enough. So if you want to market your school, you have to differentiate it by focusing on superficial stuff. Read more
Humans do an incredible amount of growing outside the womb. Many animals are born able to walk, feed themselves, find a place to sleep. Human babies are helpless.
Which explains why kids have an amazing way of normalizing any situation their parents put them in. This behavior makes sense because kids are dependent on an adult to take care of them, and they want to believe they are being taken care of. The highest risk factor for borderline personality disorder is when a child is not actually being taken care of, because they still make their brain believe that really, they are being taken care of, so they start losing touch with reality. Read more
This is a guest post from Gary Houchens, professor at the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences at Western Kentucky University.
One of America’s foremost scholars of school leadership and improvement is Joe Murphy, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. His 2012 book, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, offers the most comprehensive look to date at one of the nation’s fastest-growing school choice options. Murphy’s book makes it clear that what we know – and don’t know – about homeschooling offers deep lessons for professional educators. Read more
There are a lot of kids who are doomed to perform poorly in school. You know some of the types: creative artists types who will never understand algebra. Insanely self-directed types who become obsessed with one topic and forget to do all their other homework. All the time. But here’s another type you might not know: kids who are behind in reading by third grade. Read more
So many posts on this blog deconstruct the idea of school. For example:
School is a babysitting service
Boys need to be medicated to cope with school
Forced curriculum assumes that kids are not naturally curious
I’m constantly shocked at what I discover about schools. I can’t believe how much de-schooling I have to do for myself to see clearly when I look at the idea of school. Read more
There’s a new TV show called Dream School. It’s so offensive that I normally wouldn’t even think twice about it. But it’s on the Sundance Channel, and the people involved with it are remarkable: Suze Orman, Steven Spielberg, 50 Cent. Read more
The New York Times has a parenting advice columnist who answers a letter from a parent whose kid thinks school is boring.
The advice to the parent is amazing. First of all, the kid should talk to the teacher directly. Really? What will the kid be able to accomplish that The Gates Foundation has not been able to accomplish after $9 million in funding? Is there some secret to making school interesting that the world does not know about? Read more
At this point, I’m sure you know that I’m going to tell you I don’t like Waldorf. Because I don’t like public school and I don’t like Montessori and I don’t like Sudbury. So of course I don’t like Waldorf. Read more