The Empowered World: Fixing What's Broken In Our Own Ways

Steven Zuckerman contacted me months ago about participating in a large, online event to promote social change at the grassroots level and it is now happening. Homeschooling is one way that Steve sees grassroots social change occuring in the field of education, and I was pleased to be asked to be interviewed as part of this program. As you can see from viewing the speakers and interviews for this four-day event, there is a lot of cool stuff happening outside the walls of university, school, and government institutions that isn't getting much international attention, but which is affecting lots of people nonetheless. This event is FREE and will put you in direct touch with such people and their ideas. Here are the details:

As millions of people around the world are looking for progressive improvements in systems that have broken down, Shaping the Future Global is committed to showcasing ideas and how-to-enable actionable events through a global platform. Thousands of people will be experiencing this event. We hope you will be one of them!

We have an incredible event that will start live with presentations in Melbourne, Australia on Saturday, December 1 at 9 a.m.  Holding an event with multiple time zones is never easy, and therefore the events have been aligned with our home base in Melbourne, Australia in mind. 

With all due respect to all listeners and participants, please be advised that all sessions are archiveable and can be listened at your leisure after the events are over.   Some of the events are live, some are pre-recorded.

All events will be made available at the time of broadcast/webcast found at the schedule of events page:

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

 Please note that the start times in other time zones are as follows:

USA Eastern Time (New York, Miami)    Friday, November 30, 5 p.m.

USA Central Time (Chicago) Friday, November 30, 4 p.m.

USA Mountain Time (Denver)  Friday, November 30, 3 p.m.

USA Pacific Time (Los Angeles) Friday, November 30, 2 p.m.

London: Friday, November 30, 10 pm

Geneva/Paris/Munich  Friday, November 30, 11 p.m.

Jerusalem: Saturday, December 1, 12 a.m. Midnight

For all other time zones, please adjust your clock accordingly.

All events are immediately archived for playback after each event is over.

Home page: www.shapingthefutureglobal.com  and www.theempoweredworld.com

Presenters Bios: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/presenter-biographies

The Global Peace Centre: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/the-global-peace-centre

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

We anticipate an amazing, empowering and wonderful event dedicated to enabling progressive change at a time of globalization.

How Unschoolers Learn Math

The latest issue of the free HoltGWS newsletter tells about the updates I'm making to this site, new books coming in 2013—John Holt: A Celebration of Learning and a new edition of Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children—and some articles by John Holt about learning math by discovery, his favorite math textbook for beginners, and some good Internet resources I've found for math.

Read it here.

Crazy Mom is Awesome!

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, is a one-woman agit-prop advocate for children’s independence. When she allowed her nine-year-old son to use the NY subway system by himself she was dubbed “Crazy Mom” by the press and she embraced it. By the way, I grew up in the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s and my parents let me ride the subways when I was about ten; they were much more dangerous then, but my parents didn’t get called names by the press or other people for letting me do so. Times have certainly changed—and for the worse for children’s play and explorations of the world.

Now Skenazy is back with a new twist to make parents think about why it is a good thing to let children play, learn, and explore on their own. The New York Daily News writes about it, too: Crazy Mom Strikes Again!

Skenazy describes about her rationale for doing this on her blog: “Hi Folks: Welcome to the first after-school class that lets kids play outside, together, unsupervised — the greatest developmental boon a parent can give a child!”

Do you think Skenazy is a crazy mom or is she giving children a gift of time and space to self-actualize?

John Holt, Secretary of Education? In Memory of George McGovern

There are some moments in history when hindsight allows to see that if other things had occurred history would be different. For instance, learning that George McGovern died this week, I was thinking about his legacy and how different America would be if McGovern had defeated Richard Nixon, who characterized McGovern as a radical and whose use of dirty tricks during the election eventually cost him the presidency. The New York Times obituary noted:

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought. Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his presidential campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment. It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

But another issue dear to McGovern is overlooked in all the discussion of his liberal politics: before he entered politics he was a college history teacher with a strong interest in education. I knew from speaking with John Holt that McGovern was very interested in Holt’s work and ideas, so I asked him to write an introduction to the 1988 edition of How Children Fail. Here’s what he wrote, in part:

As a member of Congress especially interested in the issues of education, I exchanged correspondence with John Holt when the first edition of How Children Fail was shaking the educational world in the mid-1960s. He exerted a strong influence on my thinking about educational matters. Indeed, as a presidential nominee in 1972, I carried John Holt’s book in my briefcase on the campaign trail. I knew the book well, and my familiarity with its insights gave me the capacity and confidence to speak forcefully and meaningfully on educational concerns. I remember drawing on John Holt’s wisdom in a major campaign speech in New Jersey before a huge convention of the National Education Association.

It is sad to note that children continue to fail in America’s schools—perhaps on an even larger scale than when John Holt first wrote of these matters. But a visit to schools in any part of the national will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote a quarter century ago . . . (PF: McGovern is writing this in 1988.)

. . . Obviously failure on such a large scale is not to be laid solely at the feet of our teachers. Rather, such a failure embraces the home, the neighborhood, and the whole community. The finest of all teachers are not able to compensate entirely for the failings of home and community.

. . . The author believes that one of the basic needs of children is to be in the company of adults who are willing and able to listen to the individual child revealing and discussing his or her own concerns, hopes, anxieties, and fears. Too many teachers dislike and distrust children and are themselves fearful of an honest and free-ranging dialogue with their students. Too many teachers are comfortable only with dull and routine ways of conducting their classrooms and ignore the interests and questions of children.

“It is not the subject matter that makes some learning more valuable than others, but the spirit in which the work is done. If a child is doing the kind of learning that most children do in school, when they learn at all—swallowing words, to spit back at the teacher on demand—he is wasting his time, or, rather, we are wasting it for him. This learning will not be permanent or relevant or useful. But a child who is learning naturally, following his curiosity where it leads him, adding to his mental model of reality whatever he needs and can find a place for, and rejecting without fear or guilt what he does not need, is growing in knowledge, in the love of learning, and in the ability to learn.”

These convictions of John Holt form the centerpiece of this book and they are worthy of our careful reading and consideration today.

George McGovern understood what John was attempting to do in his work as a teacher and with his writing; I wonder what would have happened to the course of American education with a leader who grasped these concepts and acted upon them? However, after McGovern lost the election John Holt began to stop hoping political leaders and big institutions would help make his ideas about education happen. Instead, he appealed to citizens and parents to support and enact the changes he sought and the ever-growing homeschooling movement proves that this was a path worth blazing.

Is Kahn Academy Really a Breakthrough Moment for Education?

Marion Brady has written a very good critique about the flipped-classroom, Kahn-Academy model for broadcasting instruction to students in a recent Washington Post blog. He doesn’t dismiss this development but Brady is a clear-eyed and experienced teacher who understands that learning is more than just having a well-prepared teacher talk to you on a predetermined schedule. Brady writes:

Intractable educational problems will begin to disappear when learners’ rear ends are gotten off school furniture and allowed out where life is being lived, when learners’ eyes are lifted from reference works passed off as textbooks and directed to the real world, when learners’ minds are respected too much to treat them as mere storage units for secondhand, bureaucratically selected information.

Intractable problems in education will begin to disappear when kids are not just allowed to chart their own course, but are encouraged to do so, and given means to that end. Too bad there are no policymakers willing to promote that idea, and no rich philanthropists willing to put up encouragement money.

Marion Brady has worked for decades in curriculum development and school reform and he wants to share his work and see his ideas and programs put to use in many places, not just conventional schools. For high-school-age homeschoolers and unschoolers seeking some educational language and rationales to use for their reports about their children’s different learning scopes and sequences, reviewing this free download of his curriculum can be useful.

Connections: Investigating Reality

A comprehensive general education course of study based on general systems theory

For adolescents and older learners