Editor’s Pick. Written by Paul Rosenberg. Commerce, by its very nature, is born free. And more than this, it forever fights to remain free. At almost every time and place, commerce evades regulations and controls; it serves its own will, not the wills of rulers. Markets spontaneously emerge at every opportunity, even when they are…
Category: Editor’s Picks
Mindfulness and Unschooling
Editor’s Pick. Written by Pam Laricchia. I love the variety of words that express the concept of being mindful: observant, aware, attentive, conscientious, careful, cognizant, considerate, present, respectful, thoughtful, sensible. Living mindfully is another skill that I picked up as I played with creating a solid unschooling environment in our home. Being mindful walks hand-in-hand…
Gun Control is Violence
Editor’s Pick. Written by Anthony Gregory. Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.” Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with…
Intellectual Property Cannot Be Property
Editor’s Pick. Written by Joseph Diedrich. What is property? More specifically, at its essential theoretical core, beyond the artifice of legal fiat, what is property? Somewhat broadly, property is anything that satisfies each of the following requirements: property is scarce; property possesses objective (intersubjectively ascertainable) borders; and property has a determinable temporal genesis. The theory…
The Crime of a Commercial Exchange
Editor’s Pick. Written by Connor Boyack. When Jestina Clayton was threatened with legal action for braiding hair, bureaucrats made clear that her supposed crime was that she had been braiding hair for pay. Think about that for a moment: it was legal for her to braid hair for free, but as soon as money became…
Guiding My Children Responsibly Without Imposing Rules
Editor’s Pick. Written by Sue Elvis. We don’t make rules in our family, so how do my children know what is right and what is wrong, if they aren’t guided by clearly stated limits? Do I believe my own quiet example of appropriate behaviour is all that is needed in order to influence my children?…
How Interest Led Learning Works
Editor’s Pick. Written by Amy Milstein. The more I learn about learning, the less I understand why many educators believe all kids need to learn the same subjects at the same age and in more or less the same fashion. That’s not how true learning works. But, the critics say, if you let kids just…
Making Children Learn What They Don’t Want to Learn
Editor’s Pick. Written by Sue Elvis. My children follow their own interests when it comes to learning. This sounds rather indulgent, doesn’t it? Why should I let them direct their own learning? Hey, they’re only kids. How do they know what they need to know? I stop and think about these questions for a moment,…
Help Your Child Develop Self Control
Editor’s Pick. Written by Laura Markham. We can think of self-discipline as the ability to manage ourselves to reach our goals. In Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow experiments, he tests how long a child can resist eating a treat, if it means she will then get two treats that she really wants. In other words, does the…
The Incredible Power of the Whisper
Editor’s Pick. Written by L. R. Knost. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a whisper is worth two thousand when it comes to parenting. In the same way that the instinctive human reaction to someone raising their voice is to raise our voice one octave higher, to out-shout the shouter, to over-power…