‘public education’ Archives
Computers and Self-Directed Learning
In the July 9 online edition of The New York Times, Silicon Valley-based business professor Randall Stross published an article entitled Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. He described some studies in which economists have been measuring a home computer’s impact on the school performance of children in low-income [...]
The Fast Food Model of Education
A curriculum is a diet of other people’s ideas that is fed to children in schools. It is designed by a group of people assumed to be much better qualified than mere parents – let alone children – to decide exactly the type of information that should be fed, and when, and how its digestion should be measured. However, that very process [...]
Quotations About Life Learning / Unschooling
As any unschooler / life learner and many homeschoolers know, there are many benefits to a self-directed education. However, I have always been surprised and pleased by how many writers, thinkers and doers from various times in history have also known and written about the folly of school and the importance of a learner-directed education. [...]
What’s Wrong With the Schooling Mentality
The marketplace of ideas has become monopolized by corporations and institutions, and our coercion-based education system is used to create a society of consumers rather than one of thinkers. For almost twenty years (since he resigned from teaching while he was New York State Teacher of the Year), John Taylor Gatto has been writing and [...]
Wanted: Unschooling Quotes by Women
A few years ago, I was approached by a woman who wanted to write my life history as a woman homeschooling advocate as her PhD thesis. While doing her MA research, she had been struck by the lack of women's voices in the academic literature. She did write that thesis as a contribution to the literature, and there are now a number of other women [...]
It’s Not Progressive to Force Regulation by a Dinosaur
There’s been an earnest new academic journal article published entitled "The Harms of Homeschooling." (Note, January 2010: I have removed the link to this article for now due to difficulties downloading the file.) Author Robin L West attacks the lack of regulation of homeschooling (she doesn't mention or indicate that she understands [...]
Librarians Are Tech Savvy
Librarians have traditionally (and probably unfairly) had a conservative reputation. But they and their libraries are the best example I can think of for a replacement for schools and their teachers. After all, libraries are publicly-funded learning institutions, open to everyone and mostly free to use…but usage is not compulsory nor monitored [...]
School is Not the Solution for Stressed Out Toddlers
The Australian government has recently proposed a program to prevent depression in very young children. Thanks to Barbara Kelly who reported this at Linda Dobson’s Homeschool Crones Café. Apparently, children are presenting themselves at primary schools with mental health problems like anxiety and depression, and those as young as one are [...]
Unschooling Extends John Dewey’s Legacy
October 20 marked the 150th anniversary of John Dewey’s birth. If he were alive today, the educational reformer would no doubt be aghast at the fact that the dominant educational philosophy still mimics that of an assembly line, with memorization and regurgitation of isolated “facts” organized in a pre-determined curriculum continuing to be [...]
Not Using Their Heads
I have been reading a series of feature newspaper articles about brain science and its relationship to education. Believe it or not, the education community – especially the public school system – has never paid much attention to neuroscience. You’d think that understanding how people learn would be at the very basis of how schools [...]