In a household that was open to just about everything else, Sally and I had one rule expressing our most deeply held values and limiting what could come into the house… no toy (or real) guns and no Barbie dolls, two icons of the patriarchal paradigm. I used to laugh that it would be a great name for a punk band… “Guns & Barbies”. Though we never insisted or even encouraged Eric & Emma to follow this rule in their own lives outside our house, we wanted to model for our kids having an ethical bottom-line that you stick to.

There continues to be a great deal of discussion, research and writing related to whether violent play and a fascination with guns is inherent or learned behavior for boys. I believe the later to be true, despite the abundance of cultural mythology and evidence presented to the contrary. Though a higher level of testosterone is a biological reality of male bodies, I strongly believe that playing with weapons and violent play is socially constructed. (more…)

Here is a provocative quote on democracy and schools, which I believe to be on the mark, from a person named Leonard Turton who I exchanged emails with on the AERO (Alternative Education Revolution Organization) listserv back several years ago. If you consider yourself a progressive person and you believe that our country should embody democratic principles, I think you need think long and hard about what he is saying, and if you can rationalize our current education system with those democratic principles… (more…)

A Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door and tells me that there is only one way to find peace and salvation… through Jesus Christ the Lord. Arne Duncan comes on my TV telling me that every youth in America needs to follow one set of national standards for education, to achieve economic salvation of sorts. A noted journalism professor is interviewed by NPR saying that the decline of newspapers is robbing us of the ability to all read the same editorial at the same time so we as a country can all talk about it together.

In a world of now seven billion people, with any number of religions, languages, cultures, rich veins of varied wisdom, and exploding amounts of knowledge that can not even begin to be encompassed by any learning content standard, many of us still seem to long for the unity of the one path and the power of millions marching to the same command. When the all-powerful deity, enlightened leader or best-practice expert sounds the call, everyone should have the common grounding to understand and appreciate that it is time to march and answer that call. (more…)

My dad died of pancreatic cancer in March of 1984 at the age of 69. His great calling and passion was teaching, and he taught his university classes right up to the very end, dying on spring break after the finals were graded and the grades were turned in and posted. Part of my motivation for writing “Lefty Parent” is to reclaim and honor the best of my memory of my dad. He gave me so much love and support and I find in so many (sometimes too many) ways I am like him.

After he and my mom remarried each other and moved from Ann Arbor down to Dayton Ohio in 1977, and then I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, I became increasingly distant from my dad. I think he had been at his best with me when I was a young kid, relating to me through sports, his sense of adventure, and the realm of imagination. But as I moved into adolescence and young adulthood, with issues of self-esteem and emotional development taking the fore, I think he felt increasingly inadequate as a parent to play a mentoring role in those areas and in my life. When I would call home from Los Angeles I would invariably speak to my mom for a long time about her issues and mine and then just a few final moments saying hello to my dad, him saying he would hear all my news from my mom after the call. (more…)

Life, at its best, is an adventure – not always successful, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. Though he never said it in so many words, that was one of the most compelling lessons I learned from my dad, exemplified in how he lived his life, and how he inspired others to do the same. I try to frame my own life as an adventure (or maybe better, a series of them), exemplify that in how I live day to day, and inspire my kids to do the same.

Maybe the greatest adventure my dad ever inspired was in the late 1940s when he convinced my mom (at the time just a friend, they were not engaged or even a couple) to accompany him to Ann Arbor (some 600 miles west of where they both lived in Binghamton, New York), promising her that after a year of establishing residency, he could get her into the University of Michigan. They lived separately for several years and continued their relationship as friends while he got his bachelor’s degree in English and my mom hers in Sociology. Eventually they did become a couple, married and my brother and I were born. It was certainly a very unorthodox adventure, particularly for a single young woman during that period. (more…)

This is a piece I wrote for Alternative Education Resource Organization magazine last fall that I realized I had never shared on my blog. From my experience with Unitarian-Universalist principles and world-view, there is an argument made that it is important to acknowledge that there are many valid spiritual paths in the world that should be honored inclusively. In this piece, I have applied that idea of “Many Paths” to youth development and education….

From our son Eric’s experience, the experience of many other families and youth we know or have read about, and the sobering statistic that up to 50% of our youth in our big city public school districts (including our son Eric) are not graduating from high school, I have come to the conclusion that the ubiquitous, “one size fits all” conventional instructional school does not, and cannot work for every youth, no matter how fully it is funded or how much it is “reformed”. Yet I have talked to plenty of youth who go to conventional schools, do very well, and enjoy going to school each day. I have attended John Lofton’s excellent workshops at AERO conferences where he makes a compelling case that many people in the African-American community believe strongly in the conventional instructional school, if fairly resourced, to be the best shot for their youth to have a chance to succeed. (more…)

I just read a Wall Street Journal article titled “Playing Nice: Teachers Learn to Help Kids Behave in School” which I find very disturbing. I feel it is one of those cases where the adults developing and implementing the programs highlighted in the article probably mean well, but in my mind as a parent, who believes strongly that a kid best understands and can best manage the direction and pace of their own development, and should be able to “play” without being carefully supervised and instructed by an adult. (more…)

In 1973, at age 18, I journeyed to Europe with a female friend who got cold feet after our first few days in England, and after struggling with the decision to continue on my own (including a tearful international call to my mom from a pay phone), I pushed forward for nine weeks by myself. These events turned the trip from a fun adventure with a good friend into a much more intense existential odyssey, a stranger in a strange land of languages I could not speak or understand and other heavily developmental experiences. (more…)

In advocating for more democratic schools in a recent post as a way of identifying problems as they are emerging rather than after the fact, I realize that the concept of democratically run schools, whether run solely by adults or in conjunction with student youths, is a radical concept. As I understand the typical conventional school model today, the governance is much more hierarchical, starting at the state level where basic school structure and policy is set. (more…)

I got my ethical foundations from my family but also from the secular humanist university milieu I grew up in without a hint of religion or god in that context. During the Cuban Missile Crisis I wrestled with the possibility of nuclear war, my own mortality, and was I destined to go to hell if there was a god which I was not believing in. For me, that concern did not change the “facts on the ground”, in the sky, in the heart, or in the laughs of children, where other people might feel the presence of a deity. (more…)