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…
Tag: natural
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.
Trump Sends Property Rights Up in Flames
Alongside of Catholicism and Protestantism, the primary religion in the United States is not Islam or Judaism but the American civic religion. The Pledge of Allegiance is the creed of this religion and the American flag is its chief symbol. In the American civic religion, the worst sin that an American can commit is to refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag or to desecrate it. Federal law contains numerous provisions regarding the use, handling, display, and disposal of the flag. After some college students recently burned American flags on their campuses, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”
The Trouble With Socialist Anarchism
Written by Per Bylund. The new movie “V for Vendetta” has provoked public discussion of the meaning of anarchism. Murray Rothbard was an advocate of the stateless society, but he was never accepted by the anarchist movement and is still considered more a “capitalist lackey” than anarchist thinker. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism has always been considered an…
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.
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.
David Hume on Self-Coordinating and Correcting Market Processes
David Hume emphasized that commerce and trade were among the most important avenues to offer opportunities to raise people’s standards of living, and to bring refinement and cultural betterment to a growing portion of a nation’s population.
Monetary System: Currency vs. Money, & Hyperinflation
Natural currency is that which is chosen by free and peaceful people to interact in. It is chosen because it has been demonstrated to be of superior value as compared with currencies of the past. The value of currency is its ability to lubricate transactions and facilitate trade. When it no longer effectively serves this function it must and will be summarily abandoned and replaced with a better alternative.
How Government Regulation Makes Us Poorer
Oftentimes people, including so-called experts, compare apples and oranges by looking at data “before” and “after” an event, for instance, when discussing the effects of raising the minimum wage. So they might say that employment before was similar to after the hike, and then conclude that the change had no effect. But this is wrong, because there are plenty of changes in the economy that took place between the before and after — not only the minimum wage. So in order to figure out the effect of the minimum wage specifically, we must compare the “after” situation with what would have been had there been no minimum wage hike — the unseen.
“Buying Local” Is as Senseless as “Buying Tall”
Many advocates of “buying local” insist that buying local is good for the local economy and, hence, economically good for each person in the local economy. For a number of reasons, the economics on which the “buy local” movement rests is remarkably weak.