Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy? Nan Palmero/Flickr, CC BY-SA This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! You might also […]
By Idzie Desmarais of I’m unschooled. Yes, I can write There’s a complaint frequently voiced by a segment of life learners and self-directed education advocates, and it is that the term “unschooling” focuses too much on what isn’t happening instead of what is. That’s certainly the way that many mainstream news […]
Encouraging children to make and use a range of maps helps develop their spatial skills, great if they want to read an x-ray, design a building or put up flat-pack furniture later in life. jeshoots.com/Unsplash When we read maps, pack the car for holidays, assemble flat-pack furniture or cut cake […]
If we could stop the high levels of bullying that adolescents with a disability experience, we could make a big difference to their lives. from shutterstock Almost half of the poorer mental health we see in teenagers with a disability is due to bullying, our new research shows. If we could […]
By Idzie Desmarais, I’m Unchooled. Yes, I can Wtite. I follow multiple grown homeschoolers on Twitter. Most of them are unschoolers who, like myself, had positive experiences growing up without school. But a couple of the people I follow had a very different background, coming from the world of Evangelical Christian […]
Failure is a gift disguised as a bad experience. from www.shutterstock.com In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Monitoring, structuring, and protecting reduce children’s activity and health. Most of my writing about children’s free play has been about the mental health benefits (e.g. here), but in this essay I’m concerned with the physical health benefits. Children are designed, by nature, to play often in physically vigorous ways. That […]
TIM SMITS FOR SPECTRUM Originally published on Spectrum The Research on Autism and Development (RAD) Laboratory is located in a Tetris-like maze of brown wooden buildings, not far from the main campus of the University of California, San Diego. The lab itself is a nondescript warren of small beige rooms. But everything […]
How could your local library best serve your family’s and community’s needs? By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn We have in our society two types of publicly supported institutions whose explicit purpose is education—schools and libraries. How different they are from one another! The primary difference is this: Schools are places of forced […]
Students’ sense of belonging at school is linked to how well they do at school. Shutterstock A report released today by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), the managers of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Australia, explores Australian students’ sense of belonging. This has been shown to play a big part in […]