Enough

Enough already.  When will we stop the senseless measuring of young children’s intellect by whether or not they can perform (quickly) mundane tasks that require minimal intellectual effort and capacity?  I sit with children every day who can make elaborate and airtight arguments, design architecturally sound and aesthetically interesting structures, negotiate solutions to complicated social [...]

Fashion

The other day I followed an online link to a list of “surprisingly lucrative” careers.  Fashion design was on the list.  I wasn’t actually all that surprised that a career in fashion could be lucrative, but its presence on the list called to mind a chronic problem which, I believe, really holds us back as [...]

Big college questions

Three provocative pieces about the value of college have come to my attention in the past 24 hours, so I thought I’d pass them along en masse. First, a very short one from Seth Godin. Second, a longer one from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch. Third, an older one on NPR. All three are asking the question that [...]

Raising participants

One of the arguments I hear for keeping kids in traditional school programs, even when those programs are not working, is that if you “let” kids focus on what they’re interested in and already good at, they’ll become too self-centered and involved in their own thing.  They won’t learn to be of service.  They won’t [...]

Top billing

Parents of kids who struggle with or resist traditional academic subjects (math, reading, writing, etc.) are usually encouraged to concentrate all their energy and resources on helping kids with those areas.  It makes sense, but it also doesn’t usually work.  It often has the opposite effect of what we intend.  With a few exceptions, kids [...]

On great new ideas for schools

I don’t get as excited as I used to about great ideas for new schools.  I may seem  like a bit of a Grinch about the whole thing so I thought I’d clarify.  It’s not that I don’t think the ideas are great. Great people have great ideas for schools and how to make them [...]

Teen 2.0

One of my particularly alert readers here in Maine has been after me to read Robert Epstein’s Teen 2.0.  I have yet to entirely cast off memory of my high school experience with the Norton anthologies and thus was a little put off by this book’s length. Now that I’ve finally got my hands on a [...]

Paths

This article from the Associated Press found its way to our local paper Wednesday afternoon.  It’s about a study published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Pathways to Prosperity Project.  The project is part of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative and was launched (according to a document I scrounged up on the Harvard website) to [...]

Worked for me

My uncle sent me a link to this commentary in his local paper.  The author developed an approach to educational reform called Educating for Human Greatness, which he describes in the piece. What got my attention about this article was the mention of something I think is an often-overlooked pitfall of many reform efforts.  The [...]

What then?

Last week I wrote about expanding what we imagine is possible, so that kids might realize potential that transcends what history and habit have told us we can hope for.  If we were to find it in ourselves to make that shift, what might it lead us to?  What would we do differently? Here’s one place [...]