The people who argue against homeschooling focus on an argument that requires them to ignore obvious education trends. What we end up having is a discussion about homeschooling on a national level that assumes the readers are idiots. Read more
If your kids have been in school for years, they start to seem naturally dense and unproductive. The more kids conform to what school demands, the more dense and unproductive – stupid – the kids look. So when you consider taking them out of school, you worry that your kids are dense and unproductive and that you need special teaching skills to overcome that. Read more
It’s amazing to me that parents who are willing to be academic iconoclasts for homeschooling are suddenly the most conservative people in the world when it comes to college: everyone’s going. Like, the way to prove homeschooling works is your kid goes to college. Read more
At first when you take kids out of school you get scared that you won’t be able to teach them what they need. After a while, you realize they were learning nothing that they needed in school anyway, so how can you go wrong? Read more
Logan LaPlante is a homeschooler and he gave a speech at TedX University of Nevada where he talks about the purpose of homeschooling. The first thing I notice about Logan is that he does not have the regular fear that kids have in a roomful of adults. And he has a surprising self-assuredness. These are the hard-t0-define, nonverbal cues that homeschoolers give off to announce they are not part of the school system. Read more
There’s plenty of information about how stupid worksheets are. They are myopic and linear and they promote competition (what page are you on?) and rigid thinking (did I get the right answer?).
That said, some kids love worksheets. My youngest son, for example. Here’s what else he likes: Read more
A few weeks ago Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that all telecommuting is banned at Yahoo. All the major US newspapers covered the story on the front page – New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times – those are just examples of the hoopla surrounding this topic. Read more
Once a person turns 25, the most predictive factor in how successful they’ll be at work is how well they’re able to surround themselves with mentors. Which means that people need to develop the skill of getting mentors during their school years. Unfortunately, the best ways to learn these skills for getting a mentor are completely impossible to learn in regular school. Read more
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