Rethinking Tattling

Editor’s Pick. Written by L. R. Knost. Few things irritate adults as quickly as a tattle-tale. The kneejerk response is often “Stop tattling!” or “Handle it yourself!” or even to shame (heard of the ‘Get Along Shirt’ where parents force their squabbling children into close bodily contact with one another instead of helping them to…

With Cautious Optimism

Bitcoin, 3D printing, independent online learning, charter cities, increasing cultural interconnection, optimistic prospects for seasteading, growing black market entrepreneurship, boom in homeschooling, growing distrust of state-sactioned media, unsustainable state debt. A confluence of positive factors is setting the stage for the development of a voluntary society and for the gradual withering away of the burdensome,…

Learning by the Seat of Your Soul

Editor’s Pick. Written by Allen and Laura Ellis. After dark on a summer evening, an 8-year-old boy named Allen and his mother sat on the blacktop driveway, which was still warm from the day’s sun, drawing with chalk. But they weren’t drawing daisies and rainbows and other normal-type pictures–they were doing geometry. Why? Because Allen…

What If, Vicarious Connectivity, More About Information

Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Verbal Vol. Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. This past…

Unschooling and Free Schools

Editor’s Pick. Written by Marike Reid-Gaudet. I’m interested in unschooling because it’s an applied philosophy rather than a teaching method. This philosophy, which I strive to use daily with my son, who is now 16 years old, is also the one used in free schools. For me, this approach to life and to children’s’ development…