My son outgrew his violin. It’s always a bittersweet time when we move up a size in violins. I saved his first violin. The whole thing is the size of an adult hand. At the time, it looked just right for him and it didn’t strike me as particularly small, but the teacher told me, “Save this one. It will be really precious to you later.” Read more
All forced education is bad for kids because it tells them that they’re too stupid to pick out what they’re interested in, and too dull to depend on their curiosity.
But there’s a unique problem with forcing kids to go to gym class. It ruins kids’ self‑esteem in different ways than other types of forced education. Here are four ways: Read more
The mental and emotional developmental rates of teens in high school is the equivalent of the developmental rate of somebody who is put in jail, according to Joseph Allen, professor of psychology, in his book Escaping the Endless Adolescence. Teen brains are developing at a very fast rate at that point in life, but they develop at a slower rate when the limitations of their exploration is so severe as in school. Read more
This is a guest post from Anna Keller. She just took her son out of school.
We’ve just pulled our son out of a private, academically rigorous preparatory school. He’ll finish 8th grade in a minimally supervised online program and spend most of his day in a baseball training program for high school-aged athletes. 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
The New York Post went nuts over the fact that my friend Lisa, who is the director of digital literacy and citizenship in the NYC Department of Education and makes $170K a year, is advocating that parents opt out of standardized testing. Here’s the article. Read more
The U. S. Department of Education is trying out extended school years. The three-year pilot project will affect about 20,000 students in 40 schools in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee. Read more
We can legislate all we want about making bullying against the law. But the truth is that we would have no bullying if we did not ship kids off to be isolated from the majority of adults for the majority of their days. Kids are much less likely to bully when they are intermingled with adults, in the real world. Read more
We need to talk about the school bus. In other cultures, people admit that school starts when you get on the bus. In The Netherlands, for example, the kids pedal themselves to school on the bus. Absurd, yes, but the fundamental acknowledgement that the schoolday begins on the bus seems positive to me. Read more
The media is constantly reporting that it’s harder for girls to get into college than boys. Because girls do better in high school, and more girls apply to college. So, even though 60% of the bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women, it’s still harder for girls to get into college. Read more