The New York Times reports today India is finally coming down on coal mine companies that employ kids. The description of the lives of the kids is harrowing, but nothing I haven’t read before from people like Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis, who wrote about the same child labor problems in the United States in the early 1900s. Read more
Despite knowing that college is an outdated rip off, I am still stuck on the idea that my kids will go to college. My kids are young enough that I continue to live in a fantasy land that they will go to one of the small handful of colleges that the majority of powerful people attend. Read more
My kids each have their own laptops. And they have a desktop, because sometimes they need a Mac for what they want to do, and their laptops are PCs. They also have an iPhone.
You may think this is extreme, but this electronics bonanza is a small price to pay so I can work during the day and homeschool my kids. This means there are no fights over whose turn it is on the computer, there are no meltdowns because there’s a game that is only for a PC, and there are no car trips where I am doing a coaching call and the kids are screaming in the background; they are watching something. Anything. Read more
We talk about the health of children all the time. But we rarely talk about anything that would lead parents to take their kids out of school. School is so sacred that people who are supposed to be protecting kids are scared to come out and say what kids really need. Read more
I’m just going to be blunt and tell you that I make an amazingly large sum of money for someone who is homeschooling. Last year, my first year of homeschooling, I cleared $150K. Some of you will admire my spunk. Some of you will say what I’m doing doesn’t even count as homeschooling. Read more
I wrote today about how Obama’s proposal for universal pre-K is stunningly out of touch with the realities of today’s society. It’s clear that most mothers do not want to work full-time when they have kids, and it’s clear that Obama is advocating school as a daycare system rather than an educational system. You can read the whole post here. Read more
Part of what makes public schools widely supported is that everyone buys into the idea that kids need teachers in order to learn.
Yet, if you look closely at the arguments for teachers it becomes clear that kids do not need teachers trained in curriculum-based education. Kids need teachers who can accommodate self-directed learning. And anyway, a 1:30 ratio is fine for a babysitter, but not a teacher. All of which leads me to make a list of reasons why parents don’t need to be teachers to homeschool. Read more
So many people tell me that they send their kids to school so they meet a wide range of people. The problem with that idea is that kids do not learn open-mindedness by going to school because school can’t have a ratio of thirty independent thinkers to one teacher. It would be chaos. Here’s how really to teach open mindedness to kids. Read more
The impact of being part of a family that lives in a fish bowl is that I am a lot more conscious of when I’m lying. To other people, to myself, to anyone, really, because the more you lie the more you have to compensate for the lie. (I know you know that, but you probably don’t risk the wrath of popular sentiment like a blogger does.) So I end up thinking all the time about if I’m being honest with myself. Read more
When we talk about school being a place to socialize kids, let’s be clear that it’s a place to socialize kids who like school. If you’re an outcast, what you learn is that you don’t fit in and that it’s hopeless. Read more