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 […]
A view of the 1,700 solar panels on the roof of Discovery Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. Over the course of the year, these panels provide more than enough energy to power the school. CHRIS BERDIK FOR THE HECHINGER REPORT DRESSED IN PASTEL pink and green for an early spring day, […]
By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn Psychiatric emergencies and youth suicides rise sharply with the school year. I am not in the mood today – bored teenager boy sitting by the wall We get very upset by school shootings, as well we should. Every such instance is a national tragedy. We […]
By the time children are five, they should show preference for a particular hand and be able to work with others. from www.shutterstock.com Parents often have different expectations for their three- to five-year-old children when they attend an early learning centre. Some parents expect their child to engage in academic […]
SIMON POTTER/GETTY IMAGES FOR SOME PEOPLE, summer means warmer weather and outdoor activities. But what about the kids that are out of school? What will they do all summer? For most parents, they just want their kids to do something other than video games or watching endless videos. So for you, […]