The O-B-S-C-E-N-I-T-Y of Spelling Bees
The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee made headlines today with the announcement of a new champion. Stories like this one at CNNÂ gush over and theorize about how students from certain backgrounds perform better than others. Other stories focus on how much practice goes into each performance. Or how the events are sources of great pride […]
Politics Makes People Mean
One of my Facebook friends recently posted a status that went something like this: I know I am going to lose some friends over this, but I have to say it. If you are our age and a member of/vote for the [INSERT POLITICAL PARTY HERE], then you are an idiot. That’s just how it […]
The Schooled Mind
The schooled mind is a consequence of imposed visions and definitions for the future. It crowds out the vision of the deschooled mind — the vision of the student left alone from imposed systems. The schooled mind is simultaneously indefinite, while being the consequence of a limitedly definite systems. The schooled mind is constricted in […]
My Podcast with Isaac Morehouse on Education, Aviation, and Innovation
I joined Isaac Morehouse for a discussion on education, aviation, and innovation in the podcast below. We discussed some topics like college, schooling, deschooling, unschooling, and some thoughts on aviation and barriers to major innovation in that sector. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/197801049″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
Some Ways to Think About Schooling, Part II: Authoritarian/Libertarian
Yesterday, I offered a few different ways to think about and categorize different models of schooling and mapped some of these models onto 2×2 matrices. Schools can be categorized in terms of their curriculum (open/closed), their centralization (centralized/decentralized), their setting of instruction (individualist/collectivist), and their setting of attendance (personal/communal). These allow us to categorize schools […]
Some Ways to Think About Schooling, Part I
Traditional schooling is unnatural, harmful, and stymies the social, intellectual, and cognitive development of young people. This is essentially the thesis of MIT Psychologist Peter Gray’s excellent 2013 work Free to Learn. Gray recounts his son telling him to “go to hell” after he and his wife try to keep him in a traditional school, […]