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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
When I tell people that kids are curious and they educate themselves if you just give them space, people can’t imagine it. They can imagine it for themselves, as a adults, because they can think of tons of things they’d want to do and learn if they had unlimited time. But still, they don’t trust […]
One great thing about this homeschool blog is that I get emails full of links that people think I should write about. Many of those links are examples of schools overstepping their bounds.
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.
Every parent will be more successful if they understand their chid’s Myers Briggs score. It’s unbelievable to me that this information is not more widely distributed to parents because it’s so incredibly helpful in terms of becoming a good guide for your child.
The “ed market” is a term people pass around in business mostly to talk about a career death sentence. The education market is slow, the budgets are ridiculously small, and the salespeople have to be in it for the love of learning because they are giving up a lot of money they could earn in […]
I was reading through a collection of articles defending conventional school, and I was stunned by this one, in Consider Magazine. Because it says that education is not about accumulating facts but accumulating habits. I was so happy to read this because it gave me a new reason to homeschool.