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Archives
- August, 2006
Forgetting Labels – August 30, 2006
I’ve been renovating the
Natural Life magazine
website. And I came across my editorial from January of 1999. Looks like
I’ve been going on about “ists and isms” (see August 14 posting
below) for awhile now. Here’s part of what I wrote then:
“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.”
Posted: 2006/08/30
7:08 PM
Let Me Know When They Get the Facts Right –
August 25, 2006
So the experts at the International Astronomical Union meeting in
Prague have, after much heated debate, finally agreed upon the definition of a
planet. And, contrary to the press release they issued a week or so ago,
they’ve also decided that we have eight planets rather than 12…or
the nine that we used to have. (See my August 17th posting
below.) Interesting to know that the decisions were made by a small
minority of scientists present at the meeting – only approximately 300
of the estimated 2,500 astronomers present actually voted.
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!
Posted: 2006/08/25
12:05 PM
What’s the Rush? – August 21, 2006
These days, avoiding the adult-looking face of six-year-old murder
victim JonBenet Ramsey in the media is difficult…and I imagine we’ll
be seeing that disturbing photo for many more months now that the
ten-year-old case has a new suspect. I, like many others, have begun
wondering all over again why parents would plaster their young
daughters’ innocent faces with make-up, and coif and dress them in a
manner suited to a much older person.
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.
Posted: 2006/08/21
10:50 AM
Are “Facts” Worth Memorizing? – August 17,
2006
The “experts” have decided to agree on the definition of a planet.
Who would have thought there wasn’t one? When I was a kid in school,
45 or so years ago, I assumed those guys already had decided. I was,
after all, taught as
fact that earth was one of nine planets in our solar
system. In fact, I was tested on that bit of “knowledge” and
chastised if my memory failed and I said that there were eight or, say,
12.
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!
Posted: 2006/08/17
11:20 AM
Not Minding Our Own Business – August 16, 2006
I’ve been re-reading John Ralston Saul’s The Unconscious
Civilization (1995, Anansi Press). And I came across the following quote: “Real
individualism …is the obligation to act as a citizen. This has nothing
to do with conformism or obedience to ideas outside of the public good
... The very essence of individualism is the refusal to mind your own
business.”
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.
Posted: 2006/08/16
4:11 PM
RSS Feed –
August 16. 2006
In response to numerous requests from readers, we have created an RSS
feed for this blog so that you can find out when I’ve added a new
entry without visiting the site.
See details in the sidebar to the left. Thanks for reading! Over the
next few days, we’ll be adding a RSS feed to the
Natural Life magazine site,
which is updated with new articles on a regular basis.
Posted: 2006/08/16
10:06 AM
A Pox on Ists and Isms – August 14, 2006
An article in the August-October issue of
Otherways, the magazine of the
Australian
Home Education Network caught my eye. Entitled “Homeschooling – A
Feminist Challenge,” it was written by
Wendy McElroy, a self-described “Individualist Anarchist” and
“Individualist Feminist” who is also a columnist for FoxNews.com. Anyway, in the article she describes “a peaceful revolution…of
[educated] women choosing to stay at home to teach their children.” Yet, she notes,
“the major voices within feminism are either silent or ambivalent
about homeschooling.” She goes on to provide her explanation for that,
which involves homeschooling parents wanting to avoid the politically
correct values championed by both mainstream feminists and public
schools, values which she says include the diminishment of boys. She
characterizes homeschooling moms as being “a backlash against [feminist]
PC policies.” She also points to the fact that homeschooling mothers stay
at home in “much the same family situation that Betty Friedan
described as ‘a concentration camp.’” And then she asks the odd
question: “What if homeschooling is a choice of which self-respecting
women should be proud?” Is this a problem I hadn’t heard of? Are
there legions of ashamed homeschooling women out there to whom McElroy
could introduce me???
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.
Posted: 2006/08/14
2:49 PM
The End of Free-Range Play? – August 12, 2006
Both Natural Life
and Life Learning have excerpted Richard Louv’s
important book Last Child in the Woods
(2005, Algonquin Books of Chapel
Hill). In the Natural Life
excerpt, we included the following quote, which describes Louv’s
thesis: “The cumulative impact of over development, multiplying park
rules, well-meaning (and usually necessary) environmental regulations,
building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends
a chilling message to our children that their free-range play is
unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields is the only
officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation.”
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.
Posted: 2006/08/12
4:24 PM
Children Can't Wait –
August 11, 2006
“Many things can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time. His blood is
being formed, his bones are being made, his mind is being developed. To
him, we cannot say tomorrow. His name is today.” ~ Chilean poet Gabriela
Mistral
Posted: 2006/08/11
11:04 PM
Being Playful –
August 3, 2006
There was an article in
Newsday a few weeks ago entitled Racing
to Play.
It’s about the kinds of games seniors apparently play.
The list includes Bridge, Cribbage, Mah Jong, Dominoes, Chess, Scrabble
and other pursuits like video games (gasp.). Mental stimulation,
socialization and the healthy effects of laughter were some of the
benefits cited.
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!
Posted: 2006/08/03
5:37 PM
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