The learner comes first. Their desire to learn a fact or method or subject is – must be – the first mover in order for genuine education to occur. If that desire prompts them to seek formal or informal teachers, the teaching is valuable. If teaching is imposed on unwilling learners, it’s the opposite of valuable. It does violence to education.
Tag: writing
4 Tactics I Use to Push Through Procrastination
There are very few good things about having the weakness of procrastination. OK, there are basically two good things.
Pay It Forward
If everybody reading this just skipped one breakfast — or not — and paid the amount forward to EVC, we would be doing much more than buying a fat guy in a pickup truck a breakfast burrito.
Single-Minded Devotion to a Task
I’m going to share a secret to productivity, happiness and mindfulness that you can practice right now, and every day: Devote yourself single-mindedly to anything you do.
3 Ways To Get More Value From Facebook In a Few Minutes a Day
The key for people like us is using Facebook intentionally. Of all possible ways to use Facebook, there are a few activities that provide the most value. Fortunately for us, it’s easy enough to find them. Here are a few I’ve found through experimentation and recommendations from others.
Starting, Over and Over Again
I know from my own experience, and coaching thousands of others, that habits and projects are a messy affair. We get good at building and maintaining 5-6 habits, or we get off to an amazing start with a new project, and then everything falls apart when our lives get disrupted. And this becomes a huge problem — we get discouraged!
The Destructive Habit of Evaluating Everything We Do
We are in the mental habit of constantly evaluating everything we do, to see if we’re worthy or not. This mental habit of evaluating everything — while completely normal and natural — is actually pretty destructive. Why?
Putting Principle above Party, People, and the Past
When I put principle first, I’m better able to judge the compatibility of parties, people, and the past with what I believe in. And when my understanding of those things change, it’s easier to move on. I’m also less likely to be fooled and subsequently betrayed.
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.
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.