Here’s an episode of 60 Minutes where there’s a kid who got put in special ed at school and survived. In fact, they think the kid is “on track to win a Nobel Prize.” But what 60 Minutes really wants you to realize is how great 60 Minutes is for telling you about how the […]
The bus ride to school would be an hour each way, with kids up to five grades older than my sons. Unsupervised by anyone but the driver. So I decided to drive my kids to school. School drop-off and pickup was so chaotic and time consuming that I hired someone to do it.
After decades of research about what makes a person happy, it turns out that self-regulation is at the top. Sonja Lyubomirsky studies every day actions that can increase our happiness and it turns out they all require self-discipline -from giving two random compliments a week to walking with a book on our head for one […]
I just got an email from my local homeschool group announcing openings in the local homeschool football team. This is notable because as Jews, we were not allowed to be officially part of their group, but I guess football is different. It’s also notable because tackle football is so over-the-top dangerous that I can’t believe […]
These arguments about public vs private school are so meaningless. Of course we can’t have a national public school system without forward mobility if we take out all the rich kids. The problem is that this argument distracts us from the core issue, which is that school doesn’t work for anyone, rich or poor. If […]
This photo is part of a series by photographer Erik Ravelo, who crucifies children onto adults. If you think this picture is disturbing, you should see the ones I didn’t put on this blog. At first I thought the artist was insane and just trying to get people angry, but then I thought, “Why is […]
This is a guest post from Judy Sarden, a homeschooling mother of two, business advisor, writer and attorney. This is a photo of her son. As the homeschool movement gains social acceptance, more black families are pulling our kids from underperforming public schools and even from private schools where our bright kids are losing their way.
This is a guest post from my son. I dictate blog posts in the car, while we drive. And a few days ago, I was talking about how video games help kids succeed at work, and he told me he wanted to dictate a post. I said okay. Here’s what he wrote. So I was […]
There is a seven-page article in Harper’s about why algebra is not necessary, and in fact, the author (Nicholson Baker, for all you literary minimalist afficionados) concludes that in most cases, forcing kids to learn alegebra is torture.
I don’t know why I’m even writing this post because it would never occur to me that democratic schools are even worth talking about. Like, we don’t talk about sending our kids to schools in war zones. We know it’s a dumb idea. And this is how I feel about democratic schools.