Posts in Community
Moondoggle

Amidst the remarkable singing, dancing, and music in the movie are the critical responses of people at the concert to the US putting a man on the moon, which occurred during the concert. One commenter at the concert made a point that rang particularly true to me: “You could have spent that money on earth and made a whole lot of people much better.”

That’s often how I feel about our never-ending school reform efforts: more technology, bigger schools, more testing, more theories and schemes about making children learn what schools determine they need to know so they can become the workers that science, business, and government want. Instead of focusing on the perceived future needs of science, business, and government, why not focus that money on improving the actual needs of local neighborhoods, family healthcare, salaries, and wages?

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Self-Directed Learning Flourishes Online—Unless We Lose Net Neutrality

This is about more than just saving money: when the internet is a place where anyone, anywhere, can set up a website to talk about their passion and interact with like-minded people, and where anyone with an internet connection can find them, self-directed learning can take us anywhere … If we can't save net neutrality, young people who want to take charge of their own education will find that the internet has been turned into just another place where someone else decides what they can read, watch, and listen to …

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Slowness is Not Slothfulness—Learning by Doing Requires Patience

Slow down, you move too fast! Here are some concrete actions and inspiring ideas for stepping way from conventional, multitasked, overscheduled family life and on to the path of home and community built on shared responsibilities and self-directed learning.

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Technology That Gives Students Agency, Not Instruction

Sitting in a classroom or at home in front of a teaching machine is hardly a major advancement for a child’s social, physical, and mental growth. Our 19th century school assumptions about how learning happens bind us to an industrial model of the school as a knowledge factory, rather than a model of people as active learners. The photo on this post is from an article about the history of B.F. Skinner and his teaching machine by Audrey Watters.

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John Holt on What Are a Deschooled Society and Alternatives to Schooling?

From Freedom and Beyond: "In sum, a deschooled society would be a society in which everyone shall have the widest and freest possible choice to learn whatever he wants to learn, whether in school or in some altogether different way . . . . It would be a society in which there were many paths to learning and advancement, instead of one school path as we have now . . . a path far too narrow for everyone, and one too easily and too often blocked off from the poor."

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Education Disruptors on Two Continents: Shilpa and Manish Jain

Shilpa and Manish Jain are grassroots education activists located in the United States and India, respectively. This spring each is putting on a unique event that approaches vast educational change at a personal, empowering level . . .

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Treating Children As Less than Human

Trying to break the cycle of child abuse seems like a gargantuan task, not just because all sorts of experts, institutions, laws, and religious beliefs encourage and support corporal punishment but also because the majority of adults don’t think children are capable of having deep thoughts and feelings . . .

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