Video source can be found here.
More about Schooling the World here.
A book trailer for the new book, ” Whispers Through Time: Communication Through the Ages and Stages of Childhood” by LR Knost.
More information can be found here.
“Ms. Jane Elliott’s “brown eyes, blue eyes” experiment in 1970 (the third one after her first in 1968). This “Eye of Storm” documentary was made by William Peters in 1970 for ABC News and later included in the documentary “A Class Divided” (1985), which included a class reunion (of 1984.)
The most telling moment is when Russell used “brown eyes” as a derogatory term to call John name, only a couple of hours through. Though, the experiment was too short to allow it to get to the point when a “brown-eyes” person does so to another fellow “brown-eyes” person.”
Picked up here from UpWorthy.com.
“Several years ago, we had a Pre-K class comprised of eight girls and one boy, the kind of demographic quirk that happens in a small school like ours. I like to really go with the flow with this small class of oldest kids, following their energy and interests, letting thing ramble from and rumble from one thing to the next. It was getting near the end of our day, when I noticed Sam sitting on the corner of the rug on which we tend to convene for discussions. His body was twisted into a sort of awkward pretzel, muscles tense with the effort, his face clenched in concentration, although he wasn’t focused on what we were doing, but rather, it dawned on me, on the effort of staying seated on the rug.“Holy crap! I realized, we’d been more or less sitting on the damn rug all day. As the girls intensely engaged whatever process in which we where involved, Sam was engaged in willing his body to sit quietly. I forced a wrap-up of the discussion and we spent the final 30 minutes basically running in circles, an activity that Sam engaged with the joy of a freed prisoner.“Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of US children — 6.4 million in all — have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that’s a lot of boys bouncing around US classrooms.”
Read the full, amazing blog post by Teacher Tom here that highlights an disturbing trend in schooling affecting boys when we fail to realize what they really need.
“Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. Its 49 pages long. Mark Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-Socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind – this is never pointed out). We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, Africans have no history.”
Read the full article here.
“The time for revolution is here. It will be a peaceful one, conducted by people brave enough to walk away from our coercive schools, smart enough to resist the propaganda saying that such schooling is essential to success in our culture, and independent enough to thumb their noses at the education-industrial complex that pushes coercive schooling and makes it ever more burdensome.
“Our schools fail because they are based on the false premise that education is something that is done to young people by professionals, not something that young people do for themselves. Over the past few decades, the education-industrial complex has attempted to remedy the obvious failures of coercive schooling by adding ever more coercion, to the point where many children are literally being driven crazy (for more on that, see here and here). It is time to stop this madness. It is time to stop accepting diagnoses of mental disorders for those of our children who can’t or won’t sit still through tedious, irrelevant, time-wasting, anxiety-producing, depression-inducing assignments and tests. It is time to stop praising children who are willing to sit through all this, because all we foster with such praise is conformity, passivity, mindless obedience, and false pride for meaningless accomplishments. It’s time to just say no.
“More and more people are saying no. More and more students, with their parents’ support, are walking away from coercive schools and choosing self-directed education at home and in the community, or at democratic schools where students are in charge of their own lives. The revolution has begun and is accelerating. It will continue to accelerate, not by confronting the education-industrial complex and trying to change it, but by empowering people to walk away from it so it will become increasingly irrelevant.
“Every year in recent times the percentage who opt out of coercive schools has increased. At some point, before long, we will reach a tipping point. We will reach the point at which everyone knows several families who have left coercive schooling and chosen a path of educational self-determination, so it will no longer seem like an odd thing to do. When that happens, the floodgates will open. Schools as we know them today will eventually empty out. When people see that freedom works, that coercion isn’t necessary, most people choose freedom. The families who opt for freedom will become a voting block that will stop approving funds for coercive schools and start diverting those funds toward public educational opportunities and resources–such as learning centers and democratic schools–that people can use or not use in their own chosen ways (more on this here). All people, regardless of socioeconomic status, deserve the right to control their own education. The right to self-determination in education should be one of our fundamental human, democratic rights, and it will be.”
An excellent piece by Dr Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn. Read the full article here at Freedom to Learn.
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