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Editor of Editor
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Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - August, 2006 Forgetting Labels – August 30, 2006 “As the new year turns, I’m on a mission. My mission is to remove the “ist” words...words like “activist”, “environmentalist”, “feminist”, “conservationist”... from this publication. It won’t be easy, because those words provide writers like me with an easy way of referring to a group of people with a shared set of values. But I am trying to purge them from my vocabulary because their use divides people into categories – the “ists” and everybody else (ie. the mainstream). I recently read an article that referred to, ‘...students, the general public, public officials, business and labor leaders, activists and environmentalists.’ I felt like crying, ‘Activists are people too!’.” Moreover, I wrote, using these words perpetuates stereotypes and breeds inaction because it allows everybody who doesn’t identify as an “ist” to escape their responsibility to make changes. So as American public broadcaster, college
instructor, environmentalist
Nancy Pearlman recently wrote, “Let’s forget labels and just get down
to the business of making this planet a healthier and safer place for
all life.” Dear
Elizabeth May – August 26, 2006 Today, the party is bigger (a reported 9,000 members as opposed to around 600 in 1996) and much better financed, even though it has still to elect anyone to office at the federal level. (You just defeated the person who had earned the most votes in an election to date; here’s hoping he will take the high road and run in the next election.) I guess you’ll get a salary rather than having to finance the job yourself, as I did. And you have many more high powered friends than I ever had, having led the Sierra Club of Canada for so many years, and been an adviser to the environment minister during Conservative leader Brian Mulroney’s government. However, some things haven’t changed,
unfortunately. The blogosphere and comment boards have been burning up
over the past few months with endless discussions of back room
wrangling, mudslinging and other ugly stuff at the highest levels of the
party. I hope that ends up being put aside and that you can help the
party move past the bitterness, forget the infighting, shine some light
on its inner workings, become better organized at both the executive and
grassroots levels, and finally learn to walk its talk. I wish you well. Let Me Know When They Get the Facts Right –
August 25, 2006 Poor old Pluto. Does that change things for
astrologers as well as school teachers and students? Pluto has been
relegated to a new category of “dwarf planets” and could, according
to scientists, be joined by many others over the next few years. Now
there’s a challenge for those who believe that education is the
accumulation of facts! What’s the Rush? – August 21, 2006 This sort of adult intervention is common, if not as extreme as in the case of child beauty queens. It’s what makes parents push their young children into playing team sports at an ever-increasingly early age. It’s what leads them to program their children’s summers with school work or “enrichment” activities, and to justify enrolling their three-year-olds in preschool. It’s what robs children of the learning that takes place when they arrange their own games and choose their own activities on their own timetables. In short, when they are respected enough to be allowed to behave like the boisterous, curious children they are. There are a number of possible psychological reasons for parents at the extreme end of this syndrome, but at the bare minimum they are motivated by an urgency to give their kids a leg-up, a running start at achieving success. Author David Elkind notes that these “hurried children” often suffer illness, confusion, pain and stress as a result of being pushed, and that they represent a good chunk of the suicide statistics. Although Elkind coined the term and sounded the
alarm in 1981 in his book The Hurried Child (Addison-Wesley), we’re
hurrying children even faster these days. I find that ironic, given the
fact that life expectancies are increasing in the western world. This
desperate rush to front-end load our children’s lives makes little
sense when they can reasonably expect to survive for another 70 or 80
years. In most people’s lives, there is plenty of time to allow life
to unfold at its own pace, without this desperate need to get ahead. The
cosmetic and education industries would make less money, but I think
we’d all be better off. Are “Facts” Worth Memorizing? – August 17,
2006 But now, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is holding a meeting at which the issue will be debated. A proposal is being presented that will define the term and set the current number of known planets at 12. The scientists say that their “refinement of the body of knowledge” is as a result of the advent of powerful new telescopes on the ground and in space, which have caused planetary astronomy to evolve over the past decade. The chair of the IAU’s Planet Definition Committee admits that the discussion of both the scientific and the cultural/historical issues surrounding this issue had its members losing sleep last month. But they have ended up in agreement and, with all probability, there will soon be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon and 2003 UB313. I wonder how long the old text books will hang around in classrooms. If nothing
else, this is an affirmation of John Holt’s statement that: “Since
we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is
senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn
out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be
able to learn whatever needs to be learned.” Or to know how to
research current facts when they need them, rather than memorizing
information when they’re young that will turn out to be wrong later in
life! Not Minding Our Own Business – August 16, 2006 Saul’s endorsement of individualism is not libertarian in nature, but rather the opposite. He writes that our society is increasingly passive, conformist and corporatist, and argues in favor of thinking for one’s self, of identifying ideologies in order to control them and eschewing narrow self-interest. A successful society, he believes, is based on action by disinterested individuals, which he says is the real meaning of “individualism.” That sort of action by citizens is contrary to how the self-created elites who think they know what is good for us want us to behave, according to Saul. They want us to mind our own business, “to not act as disinterested participants in the give and take of debate that occurs in a civilization.” By encouraging us to mind our own business, corporations and interest groups alike can dominate the decision making process, enact legislation, set standards and define policy in ways that serve them best. But that’s not democracy, in spite of some western governments forcing something by that name on other countries. I
think his argument holds true for any institution, including schooling.
When we refuse to mind our own business, when we don’t conform, when
we think for ourselves – and therefore reject schooling as the means
to an education – we are a threat to the corporatists and interest
groups that thrive on the schooling industry…and we create a whole
other generation that thinks for itself! That gives me great hope
for the future of real democracy. RSS Feed –
August 16. 2006 A Pox on Ists and Isms – August 14, 2006 This article has been bothering me since I read it
earlier this week, and not just because of its overstatement. I really
have trouble with exercises in sorting and dividing, such as this one.
Who says I can’t be a feminist and reject the idea of school? Who says
families can’t be as – if not more – democratic as schools? Who
says all homeschooling families involve mom teaching? Who says
homeschooling is isolationist and regressive...or, for that matter, politically incorrect? For me, feminism is about choice, and that includes
being able to choose whatever sort of lifestyle and source of income I
want…and perhaps many different ones over the course of a lifetime,
unrestricted by other people’s notions of gender,
politics or anything else.
Besides, for my family, homeschooling in the 70s and 80s (which, as I’ve
written here before, looked like “unschooling” does today) was a
family pursuit, with both parents working from home as the children
learned (well, as we all learned!). That is, home wasn’t a
“concentration camp” for anyone – neither adults nor, perhaps more
importantly, children. And yes, I had/have a career. And no, we were/are not alone! Perhaps what’s wrong here is the attempt to
generalize. Homeschoolers have many different motivations, philosophies
and lifestyles; feminism takes many forms and includes a wide variety of
opinions on many topics. Or maybe the problem lies in the examining, sorting
and naming of theories, principles and philosophies. Those intellectual
activities can be interesting for some people. And they can create important
organizing tools necessary for those advocating for change. But for most
of us, it’s enough to have the confidence in our own beliefs and to
let them guide how we live our lives, not worrying about the
“correctness” of our attitudes or what “ist” or “ism”
we’re fitting into…whether we’re feminists or not, unschoolers or
homeschoolers, or some hyphenated version. Clearly, we need not only
some new vocabulary, but a lot more publicity about how women, men,
children and families are living and learning in non-coercive,
progressive, non-institutionalized ways. The End of Free-Range Play? – August 12, 2006 At least one reader
felt the case to be over-stated and paranoid. However, a recent incident
in England has underscored the problem. As reported in the
Daily Mail newspaper, three 12-year-olds were arrested for climbing and
playing in a tree! They were locked in a cell for two hours and made to
give DNA samples…all because they wanted to build a tree house. Children Can't Wait –
August 11, 2006 Being Playful –
August 3, 2006 I had just read the article when I received an
email from one of the “experts” quoted in the article - game-maker
and guru Bernie DeKoven, age 64. Bernie knows a thing or two about play,
having been a co-director of the
New Games Foundation (created about three decades ago by Stewart
Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame). He has some great games and links on
his website
and his blog (at the same location) is great reading. And we published an article about his “junkyard sports” in
Natural Life’s May/June
2005 issue. He told the Newsday reporter, “I think a lot of older
people are reclaiming their need to play, and they’re looking for
opportunity and finding places that foster a certain amount of
playfulness.” He said he could almost hear the horror in the
reporter’s voice at the idea of playful seniors! But here’s something interesting: apparently
Scrabble is one of the most popular classic games, but 55 percent of the
National Scrabble Association’s members are at least 50. So they’re
trying to get younger people interested in the game. Most life learning
families probably have discovered its many delights and advantages, but I wonder how many other families spend that sort of quality time together. Meanwhile, many of the “seniors” I know play
things like volleyball, cycling, tennis, Frisbee, Tai Chi. I
think that’s the type of fun I’ll concentrate on having when I grow
up. Now, I have to figure out if my 30-something daughter was humoring
me or herself when she suggested playing Scrabble on my recent visit! Return
to current weblog copyright ©
Wendy Priesnitz 200 |
Topics & Passions: natural learning ~ What I'm Reading: Original Zinn -
Conversations on History and Politics by Howard Zinn with David
Barsamian (2006, Harper) ~ What
I'm Listening To:
Twenty-five by Sweet Honey in the Rock
(Rykodisc Ltd, 1998) ~
Fav
Bookmarks:
Malcolm Gladwell's Blog
~ Fav Quotes:
Art, Writing, Creativity
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