Ask yourself this: even if you make less than your parents, would you go back in time to the world they lived in when they were your current age even with their higher real money income? My guess is no, and that’s the most powerful evidence that whatever your income, you perceive yourself as better off today than they were then.
Tag: children
Why Self-Directed Education?
Written by James Davis. Six years after deciding that our family was going the route of self-directed education, it’s almost hard to remember what we used to think. When I think about my wife and I earnestly discussing whether we’d choose a conventional public school (the diversity!) or a conventional private school (the opportunities!), it’s…
Unschooling: Personalized, Self-Determined Education
Unschooling has been around for at least 95 years, ever since Summerhill, the first “unschooling school,” was established in the UK in 1921. Unschooling really came into fashion in the 1970’s when the term was coined by John Holt, a prominent leader of the secular home education movement.
Mainstream Media is Not the Solution
While the recent preoccupation with “fake news” is largely intended to silence the alternative media, there is a real (and growing) trend of reporting unproven theories and unsubstantiated claims as facts—often with little or no evidence.
Someone, not Santa, is Always Watching
A paper recently published by a professor in Canada suggests that the popular “Elf on the Shelf” game is conditioning children to accept the surveillance state. The notion of the Elf on the Shelf is that a small elf doll is actually a scout elf who reports nightly to Santa Claus on the activities that occur in his house. Parents are supposed to reinforce this story by relocating the elf each night so that his journey and return seem more plausible.
How Work Became Drudgery Once Again
Young people, college graduates especially, are not feeling hopeful about their careers. Mired in student loan debt, facing a labor market that has been stagnant for as long as they can remember, and deciding between a job where they’ll be miserable and moving back in with their parents, millennials have grown skeptical toward market capitalism. Yet, if they looked at the history of the matter, they would be amazed how far we’ve strayed from a free market in labor in the past century. Their plight is not due to economic freedom, but to a century of centralized efforts to regiment and regulate the labor market and the very mind and soul of the worker.
Compulsory Education
Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it – the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of precisely those who have the most potential in society; children.
Teaching vs. Indoctrinating Your Children
What is the difference between teaching and indoctrinating? It’s a question that we don’t often think too deeply about, because the answer feels pretty obvious. It’s something bad that other people do to teach children falsehood before they know any better. Teaching is concerned with truth, and indoctrination is concerned with ridiculous dogma. But from an objective perspective, it’s hard to tell who is doing the indoctrinating and who isn’t.
Children Don’t Give a Shit About Praise
I wanted to look at the relationship between the practice of praising children and human action (praxeology), which will lead us to an interesting conclusion.
My Kids Are Better Teachers Than I Could Ever Hope To Be
I am in absolute awe of my children. For as long as I have known them, they have been teaching me, and helping me grow as a person. I owe them a debt that I can never repay, and I am deeply grateful to them.