As much as I’m a student of history, I’d like to see us turn our gaze forward, and not obsess on that history and not accept its conventional wisdom. That said, I think it is still important to understand the historic currents that are the basis of those conventions before one sets out to consider challenging elements of that wisdom.

I’ve just finished slogging my way through a dense 800+ page book, From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun. It is a cultural history of the Western World during the past 500 years. Between working, writing, and family, it has taken me some eight or nine months to get through it. (more…)

I have a lot of thoughts as a former kid (who lived for summer vacation each year and felt that that last day of school each June was a day of liberation) and more recently as a parent who used to dutifully send my kids to school as well.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe. “Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas… But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”

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Like “Ever After” did for his sister Emma, the movie “Short Circuit II” resonated with and inspired our son Eric, and is another one of those diamonds in the rough stories that speak to the values both generations in our household hold so dear. Also like “Ever After” it is a compelling tale full of classic scenes that we all can watch over and over again, smile, even laugh, and be reenergized to keep on keeping on.

The movie is humble enough commercial fare, aimed at a younger audience. It is actually the sequel to the movie “Short Circuit” which tells the story of the creation by a U.S. military contractor of a series of artificially intelligent soldier-robots, designed by two young “uber-geek” engineers, Newton and Benjamin. Through the field testing process the series of prototypes prove out their capability as highly adaptable and effective killing machines, except for one (number 5) which has a glitch and somehow becomes sentient and refuses to continue following orders to seek and destroy. Rather than terminate the malfunctioning machine, the two young engineers quit the program and smuggle this wannabe consciousness into hiding. In the process of its own emerging self-awareness, the robot decides it needs a name, not just a number, and adopts the moniker “Johnny 5”. (more…)

So what the heck does it mean to be an “internally motivated learner”? Is such an animal the exception or the rule? And can internal motivation drive even formal academic learning? In a culture where conventional wisdom seems to think that most of formal education needs to be mandated and externally motivated to be successfully undertaken, I think these are very important questions.

Certainly infants and toddlers learn most or all of what they learn for internal reasons. Infants don’t need to be motivated or instructed in how to walk, they are driven to do so and through practice, trial, and error they figure out how to do so. Toddlers learn to speak with a minimum of instruction, by listening to people speaking around them and learning to vocalize words and put them together into phrases and sentences. They learn a myriad of other skills involving coordination of their bodies with their brains on their own as well. (more…)

I thought it was appropriate to follow up yesterday’s discussion launched by my thoughts about trying to sort out a few of the societal issues around homeschooling, and whether it is an appropriate educational path for some kids.

Confessing again my position up front, I gravitate to the educational path of “unschooling”, where the learner sets their own curriculum and works at their own pace, generally outside of a formal educational setting. But I have come to the conclusion that “unschooling” is not for everyone. The truth as I see it, and this seems to be something that a lot of people have trouble grasping, is that no one educational path, even the conventional instructional academic school, is for everyone. (more…)

There is an extensive article in today’s online edition of Education Week, Critics Question Alaska Home-Schooling Success, from the Associated Press on issues with home-schooling, particularly state regulation of this educational path in Alaska.

The article starts out stating the issue clearly and succinctly… (more…)

I think many of us have that particular movie that we can watch over and over and seem to never tire of its familiar scenes. A piece of work that calls out themes and values that we hold dear perhaps, and inspires us once again, every time to go out and live those things we hold dear. For our daughter Emma, her mom and I, that movie is “Ever After”, writer/director Andy Tennant’s feminist re-visioning of the Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore.

The film invents a historical context for Cinderella as the character Danielle De Barbarac, the daughter of a woman from the landed gentry and a commoner father, which by patrilineal protocol made Danielle a commoner as well. Danielle never knew her mom, who died when she was an infant, and was raised by her father, who she adored, but came to die an untimely death as well, soon after remarrying Danielle’s step mother. The story is set in the environs of the French royal court during the early 1500s as it is just beginning to be influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance. (more…)

In the 23 years since our kids were born, I have made a conscious choice to lead a more balanced life, including a primary focus on wearing my parent hat. This choice led to a strategy of trying to carefully choose my jobs and career path to minimize work hours and job stress, while attempting to also maximize the flexibility of my schedule. Based on the common nickname for this sort of work strategy, I was a male parent on the “Mommy track”. (more…)

When I was a young teen I spent six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year in age segregated classrooms where I was often uncomfortable, stressed out, and felt disrespected by many of my peers and even some of the adults that controlled the classrooms and the encompassing school environment. And I certainly was not there by choice, finding every excuse I could (usually illness… real or imagined) to stay away. Looking back I think I was suffering from institutional age segregation and having my rights as a human being given short shrift. Certainly, as a youth and not an adult, I had no guarantee of full civil rights under the U.S. Constitution.

First of all, I will admit to being a bit of a provocateur in that initial paragraph to build my “hook” for this piece. But I am hoping that it is a prescient, though provocative, statement of a step forward in human rights that is still percolating in our future, and the debates to come surrounding the evolutionary trajectory of the human race. (more…)

There is an article in September 3 online edition of Education Week magazine, “Why Not Count Them All”, addressing the issue of whether kids who are a year or more “late” graduating from high school should be counted in school graduation statistics. For me, the whole idea that the process of formal education encompassing generally over a decade of one’s youth leading hopefully to high school graduation has a high-stakes “schedule” makes no sense. It is an unfortunate remnant of the industrial era in which public schooling flowered and unfortunately a residual but inappropriate conventional wisdom of that era. (more…)