It happens to all of us: you are going strong with a project, with learning something new, with a new habit or two … and things go sideways. You get derailed. This is a critical junction. If you let yourself quit, all your time and effort up until now has been for naught. If you can get back on track, things can be great again.
Tag: reading
Public Education Vs. Public Schooling
The primary difference between public education and public schooling is that the former is openly accessible and self-directed, while the latter is compulsory and coercive. Both are community-based and taxpayer-funded; both can lead to an educated citizenry. But public education–like public libraries, public museums, public parks, community centers, and so on—can support the education efforts of individuals, families, and local organizations with potentially better outcomes than the static system of mass schooling.
Challenging Societal Defaults
The problem with mass schooling is that it is not serving children well. It kills creativity, punishes individuality, and pathologizes difference. As mass schooling expands and becomes more restrictive, there is mounting evidence that it is causing serious psychological harm to many children. In addition to these troubling outcomes, mass schooling simply isn’t working. Children aren’t learning.
Why You Should Pull Your Kid Out of School
Kudos to these parents for listening to their parental instincts, despite pressure from the school to do otherwise. They saw that forcing their son to read at age 6, before he was ready, was causing him to hate reading and despise books. They recognized that the rigidity and uniformity characteristic of the mass schooling model was smothering their son’s curiosity and innate, self-educative ability.
How an Airborne Ranger Became a Voluntaryist
Government directives to do evil (whether by commission or omission) do not override our conscience and our understanding of right and wrong. I favor agoristic obviation of government institutions. I support voluntary alternatives to government services as much as I can and continue to encourage government institutions to reduce and eliminate their restrictions on our freedoms.
The Data Don’t Matter
My kids have some clear challenges and opportunities because of their digital immersion. None of those changed because someone did some research. My kids’ unique screen time pros/cons existed before I read stats from a study, and they exist after.
I Do Not Want a “Well Behaved” Child
“Whoever wrote this and did the research is confused and did not define terms accurately. I spanked, not hit, all nine of my children and they do not hit. Never have. My grown children are well adjusted, well behaved, loving kids. I receive positive compliments about them often. Spanking is quite misunderstood.”
Influences III
If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists — Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences who made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.
Episode 075 – Russ’s Journey, Part Two: Learning to Read by Sight (1h2m)
Episode 075 welcomes Russ Fugal to the podcast in a two part conversation with Skyler and Morgan. The topics covered in this second part include his background as a reader, cryptography and peer 2 peer technology, mathematics and his desire to make it simple for his children, cognitive development on how we count, why people are born with the ability to count to 4, the language he developed early on to count in base 4, a conversation on base 10, base 12, and base 60, origin of Roman numerals, his daughter’s stronger interest in reading than in mathematics, switching tracks from mathematics to reading development, how children teach themselves to read, speed reading, Chinese characters and reading, his new program called EAR (Engaged Aided Reading), why phonics is a crutch to fluency, reading well is reading by sight, not by phonics, why are brains are good at pattern recognition, the development of his mobile app based on EAR and sight reading, and his hopeful presentation in the SXSW 2018 conference.
Known By Those Who Consider You the Enemy
It is said that if you are libertarian, and being consistent, those on the Right will call you a “Leftist” and those on the Left will claim you’re part of the “Right.” It seems to me, in some cases at least, I must be doing things right.