Being inspired is like having friends. If you use it as a prerequisite for doing the stuff you want to do, you’ll constantly miss out on awesome opportunities.
Tag: education
The Quiet Exodus from Mass Schooling
Parents are fed up. As mass schooling becomes more restrictive, more standardized and more far-reaching into a child’s young life, many parents are choosing alternatives. Increasingly, these parents are reclaiming their child’s education and are refocusing learning around children, family, and community in several different ways.
Some Refreshing Honesty about the Purpose of Mass Schooling
These school posters explicitly reveal the troubling reality that mass schooling retains its 19th-century roots as a system of social control. Originally designed to bring order to an increasingly diverse population, the industrial model of mass schooling continues to impose order by encouraging compliance, rewarding conformity and eliminating individuality.
Human Smuggling: What If Philanthropists Were in Charge?
Suppose smugglers were pure philanthropists who only wanted to help people reach Europe alive. There’s a clear trade-off between the two goals – the safest routes will also be the most patrolled. So you have to wonder: If philanthropists ran the human smuggling industry, how much lower could fatality rates even fall?
Homeschoolers: The Enemy of Forced Schooling
Holt observed through his years of teaching, and recorded in his many books, that the deepest, most meaningful, most enduring learning is the kind of learning that is self-determined. As “the enemy,” we homeschoolers reject the increasing grip of mass schooling.
There Are Consequences for Eliminating Free Play
Mammals are innately playful. Our large brains and complex social structures require that we learn vast amounts of information in childhood to help us thrive in adulthood. How do mammal children learn all of this? They play.
Bully-Proofing Won’t Work Until We Give Kids More Freedom
Children who are bullied in school have very few choices and very little recourse. Required by law to attend an assigned public school, many children and their parents have minimal agency to withdraw from a bullying scenario. Some parents will look for alternative schooling options for their bullied children, like private schools, charter schools, online schools, or homeschooling. But for many families, these choices are not available or accessible.
What’s Wrong with the Thrive/Survive Theory of Left and Right
Many people in my circles now seem to take Thrive/Survive Theory as the default position; if it’s not true, it’s still the story to beat. But to be blunt, I find essentially no value in it. It’s not always wrong, but it’s about as right as you’d expect from chance.
5 Ways Mothers Give Away their Power
This isn’t about convincing anyone to do things my way (how boring a world that would be!). But if you don’t know that you have choices beyond the mainstream world, then you aren’t actually making decisions from a place of truth and desire. You are living on autopilot and not considering the impact of living a life in accordance to the status quo, whose only agenda is to keep you relying on it. So what do I mean by giving away power?
“Stay with The Herd”
As we were preparing to board the train together this first time only, we were going over everything to watch for: keep his bag in his hands or on his back; listen for the announcements to know when your stop is coming up, immediately connect to the train’s WiFi and stay in touch with us. And then out of my mouth came words I’d never thought I’d say.