Avoiding
Educational Headaches – August 31, 2009
This morning, I received a press release with tips from
doctors at a children’s hospital for parents wanting to help prevent kids’
headaches as they head back to school. Apparently, the change in schedule, new
teachers, new friends and schoolwork can increase stress and its related
headaches. A study was quoted, which found that more than a third of children
suffer from recurrent headaches – headaches that occur more than once a month.
Most are tension headaches, but 25 percent of them are the more severe migraine
type. The headache prevention tactics include getting kids into a routine
schedule at least two weeks before school starts and enforcing earlier bedtimes.
More sinister remedies involve investigating “emotional disorders” and the
application of various medications. There is no mention of avoiding the cause of
the stress. But, then, I imagine that would give many parents their own
headaches. And, after all, school is supposed to be good for kids, isn’t it?!
Posted: 2009/08/31 9:25 AM
What Does Age Have To Do With It? – August 30, 2009
Occasionally, a child who is learning and living in a non-traditional manner is
removed from his or her parents’ custody. But here’s
an instance of government arrogance, ageism and abuse of rights that tops them
all.
Laura Dekker is a 13-year-old Dutch girl who is an experienced and highly
skilled sailor, having been born on a boat and sailing solo since she was six. She now wants
to sail alone on her 26-foot boat for the next two years until she has
circumnavigated the globe. Her parents are supportive – although her father was
skeptical at first – and she has some corporate sponsors backing her too. She
was all set to leave on Tuesday but, last Friday, a court ordered her into
temporary state guardianship while child psychologists decide if she can cope
with the adventure. The Dutch Council for Child Protection is fretting about
her “development” and her motivation, as well as her education. According to
this interview from CBC Radio, they plan to “decide what’s best for Laura now
and for the rest of her life.” Whew. Psychologists are apparently concerned
that her desire to be the youngest person to sail solo around the world might
be fueled by ambitious parents or some deep-seated need to please or be praised,
especially since her parents are divorced…and, in a bizarre and circular
argument, precisely because her parents are accomplished sailors. All of this
raises some interesting questions about children’s and parents’ rights and the
role of state protection in our lives.
The government’s intervention came about because
Laura plans to continue her education via correspondence, for which her father
asked permission. (There’s a mistake if I’ve ever seen one!) Dutch law
specifies that if kids aren’t in school, they must be homeschooled under the
supervision of an adult. It’s more than a little condescending to suggest that
someone determined to sail around the world would goof off from a few hours a
week of studies, but such is the mentality of those who think they know best. Even
if she did get tired of her formal lessons, her adventure would provide an
arguably better education anyway.
Meanwhile, Laura’s lawyer reportedly told a Dutch television
station yesterday that he’s not sure she would accept a ban on her trip. In
fact, she has
said that, if necessary, she will renounce her Dutch citizenship in order to
escape the control of that government. Passion, determination and a dream can
take one anywhere…even around the world. I wonder when we will
stop using age as a measure of ability and maturity. I wonder when we will
start trusting parents and children to live their own lives.
Posted: 2009/08/30 3:45 PM
Frank Zappa on Schooling – August 26, 2009
“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our
mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library
and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” ~ Frank Zappa
Posted: 2009/08/26 11:51 AM
Who’s Bamboozling Whom? – August 25, 2009
Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
charged four smallish companies with deceptively labeling and advertising clothing and
household items as made of bamboo fiber when, it says, they are really made of
rayon. The FTC also charged the companies with making false and unsubstantiated
“green” claims that their clothing and textile products are manufactured
using an environmentally friendly process, and that they are antimicrobial and
biodegradable. The FTC, unfortunately, doesn’t substantiate its counter claims
and issued a notice with a rhetorical headline accusing the companies of
“bamboo-zling” consumers. That led to some grossly over-simplified coverage
by both mainstream media and bloggers that smeared the whole industry.
That’s too bad, because things are not black and white.
The bamboo industry as a whole – including
the process of turning the plant into fiber and then into fabric, as well as
the labeling regulations – is young and evolving, as writer and organic expert
Ed Mass wrote in a
definitive article that we published in Natural Life
magazine earlier this year. The government has only recently created labeling
guidelines; previously, U.S. Customs accepted the term bamboo fiber when
companies imported it from China but now the FTC has decreed that the term doesn’t exist. The manufacturing
processes vary and, with them, the environmental friendliness of the product, so
all fabric made with bamboo cannot be described as environmentally unfriendly.
One of the ways bamboo is turned into fiber is the same one used to make rayon
and that can be very environmentally unfriendly, although some processors
apparently recycle the chemicals they use. That’s the process the FTC is
focusing on. As for bamboo being antimicrobial, that claim can be supported, and research has been provided to the FTC by
the companies charged. Biodegradability is a moot point; no fiber biodegrades in
a plastic bag smothered landfill.
Greenwashing is
rampant these days. But I wonder whose interests this sort of anti-greenwash
fervor is actually serving. I prefer my tax dollars to be spent in support of
companies that are trying to turn an extremely environmentally friendly plant
into products that are truly green…rather than to protect their
environmentally unfriendly counterparts. Oh, and where is the FTC when you need them to
react to that magazine ad I recently spotted proclaiming the greenness of
pesticide- and energy-intensive conventional cotton?
Posted: 2009/08/25 8:38 PM
Getting an Education, Living a Life – August 24, 2009
Recently, someone tried to talk me out of using the term “life learning” and
encouraged me to “support” use of the term “radical unschooling.” And that,
he said, is because most people only understand education in terms of schooling,
so “unschooling” is a good first step to get them to think more broadly
about ways to get an education. He quoted author James Marcus Bach who says he doesn’t oppose schooling, he opposes “schoolism:”
the belief that schooling is the only way, or the best way, to obtain
education.
While I certainly agree that school is not the only or best
way to obtain an education, that is not what I – nor, I suspect, many who call themselves “radical unschoolers” – mean
when we discuss the lifestyle we are living with our families. Using a term like
unschooling seems to support the notion that one needs to get an
education, but just not at a school. And that once the education has been acquired,
life and that odd phrase “making a living” can proceed. The dictionary
meaning of the word education involves a process of drawing out an
individual’s latent potential, inferring that an education is done to a
learner by an educator.
When I use the term life learning, I’m referring to all
the types of needs-based learning that happen continuously throughout one’s
life – from birth (or even pre-birth) to death. Some of that learning will be
what we call “academic” in nature, some not. Some of that learning
will involve life skills such as walking and talking, building a house, growing
a garden and caring for a loved one. Some of it will involve those moments of
insight that help us continue to fine tune ourselves as compassionate,
emotionally well balanced human beings. Compartmentalizing and differentiating
among various types of knowledge and when and how they are learned is encouraged
by those who commodify education. Some bits of knowledge are deemed important
enough to be taught in schools (or obtained by other educative means) and
measured and tested; others aren’t. When we talk about getting an
education or becoming educated – in school or otherwise – we are
talking about academics – reading, writing, chemistry and history, as opposed
to gardening, plumbing, bicycle repair or playing the harp. In fact, the latter
bits are scorned in academic circles, considered frills at best and, at worst, a
place to relegate kids who can’t or won’t do academics.
Unschooling – even the radical sort – is about
obtaining an education; life learning is about living a life and learning what
one needs along the way.
Posted: 2009/08/24 12:31PM
Holistic Moms Network Conference – August 23, 2009
Natural Life magazine columnist Naomi Aldort will be a keynote speaker at the Holistic
Moms Network Natural Living
Conference in October in New Jersey. I am on the
Advisory Board of this energetic organization and Natural Life magazine is a media sponsor of the organization and the conference.
Posted: 2009/08/23 12:27PM
We Shouldn’t Export Our Broken Schooling System –
August 22, 2009
Just heard an Oxfam ad on the radio. I’m usually a fan of
that organization and occasionally donate to it. But they have it wrong this
time. I’m supposed to send money to fund “health and education for all.” I, too, believe that education is a right
for everyone – girls and boys alike. (Two-thirds of the hundreds of millions
of illiterate adults worldwide are women.) However, they’ve
confused school and education…and that is a serious, albeit common, blunder. The radio ad told
me that one of the things the kids will miss if they don’t go to school is the
excitement of the school bell ringing to let them out for recess – getting
sprung from the building being one of the iconic experiences of school. That is
condescending and trivializing of the nature of the school experience for many
Western children. As
David Albert writes in the fall issue of Natural Life and Kirsten Olson writes
in her book Wounded
by School, many Western kids suffer life-changing trauma
in school. We should not be arrogantly exporting this broken system of education
to developing countries like so many well-meaning but misguided missionaries; we
should be encouraging and enabling those countries to develop something better
and more specific to their needs, something that does not harm
children, something that encourages personal and societal independence rather than dependence on a
coercive institution, something that is inherently democratic, non-hierarchical
and non-patriarchal. I’ll donate to that.
Posted: 2009/08/22 1:53PM
The
Ramifications of Cheap and Free – August 21, 2009
I often have two or more books on the go simultaneously (I’m a short attention
span Gemini). And right now, I’m reading
Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell and Free by Chris Anderson.
I picked up a copy of the latter at a local bookstore and paid $34.95 (even
though it’s available for free online) because I would rather support the book
publishing industry as opposed to free info online. (Ironically,
Anderson apparently picked up some of the sentences in the book for free from the
Internet.) Both books deal with the psychology of pricing but argue from
different ends of the topic. Cheap’s thesis, with which I agree, is that
rather than encouraging good old fashioned frugality, our appetite for cheap
products has led to an explosion of “shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics,
wobbly furniture and questionable food” and that the wastefulness contributes to our current
environmental problems. Free, on the other hand, demonstrates how some companies
are giving away stuff (or information), sometimes in order to sell other stuff,
which is hardly a new idea, but in other cases simply because technology allows
it. The trouble is, somebody always ends up paying – my purchase of Free
contributes to Anderson’s presumably hefty royalty fees. And if nobody pays, then the quality
suffers (perhaps because people take shortcuts!). And I’m
not the only one to think that is a problem. Fortunately, Free and
its assertion that, as Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand famously
said, information wants to be free, is already out of date; Anderson’s
trumpeting about how newspapers tried to charge for online content but stopped
has been negated by the same newspapers recently reinstating fees for content.
Aside from the quality issue, the bottom line for me is that just because
something is cheap or, yes, even free, does not mean it has to be consumed.
Mindless acquisition is always problematic.
Posted: 2009/08/21 6:26PM
Keeping
The Kids Under Their Thumbs – August 20, 2009
Awhile back, the government here in
Ontario introduced the idea of “full-day learning” (ie. attendance) for
kindergarten students, accompanied by an extended day of supervision for the
convenience of working parents. The proposed model (which has already been
tested and is in place in some other jurisdictions) would have supervision
shared by regular school teachers and early childhood educators (who typically
work in daycare settings). Not surprisingly, the teachers’ union doesn’t
like the idea of its members sharing their classrooms. At their annual
conference this week, they voted to begin a campaign to “protect the integrity
of the teaching profession.” In a press release, the union also said, “The
resolution also reflects the concern that kindergartens will suffer the same
fate as many elementary school libraries, where teacher-librarians have been
replaced by library technicians. Because there is no instruction by
teacher-librarians, very little learning takes place,” [my italics]. I
guess these folks missed the memo about the mounting body of research that says
learning is not primarily the result of instruction by anyone, no matter how
much education or arrogance they have. Learning
is not something that teachers do to children. It happens when children are
allowed to retain their motivation, interest, curiosity and integrity…and to
be active. Although the curriculum the union recommends is play-based, you can
be sure it’s also adult-directed (or why would it matter who supervised it?).
And that’s too bad because there is another growing body of research
indicating that what children need the most is time for unstructured play. Nor
does this learning and play have to take place, as the union recommends, in a
“publically-funded elementary school.” (In my opinion, that’s one of the
places where it’s least likely to happen.) If you’re going to protect your
job, say so, and don’t pretend it’s for somebody else’s benefit. Any
institution will be used if it’s useful and therefore doesn’t have to be
compulsory. Likewise, if the teaching profession does, indeed, have integrity
(not to mention usefulness), it will find its place in an evolving world.
Posted: 2009/08/20 12:45PM
You Have To Live It To Learn It –
August 19, 2009
In my spare time (ha!) I’m plugging
away at a book of memoirs It Hasn’t Shut Me Up. And I’m currently writing
about my stint as leader of the Green Party of Canada in the mid ‘90s…and
why I resigned. So I found it interesting that today I
heard from the Media Awareness Network that they, along with
Equal Voice, have developed some lessons plans for elementary and secondary
schools to encourage girls to get involved in politics. The lesson plans and
handouts are designed to examine and overcome the stereotypes of male
politicians – promoted most explicitly in the media – that keep women from
seeing themselves as political actors and portrayals of female politicians that
make them seem like unattractive models to young women (or the lack of
portrayals and role models at all).
I’m enthusiastic about getting more
girls and women into politics (in Canada, only 20 percent of the seats in the House of Commons are held by women and
it’s less than that in the U.S. Congress). And I applaud these groups for
their intentions. But these lesson plans are depressing to me, let alone to the
kids who will have to sit through them. Oh, they meet government standards, they
are written in the time-honored lesson plan format and accompanied by lovely
handouts and overheads. The teacher is told what to write on the blackboard,
what “correct” responses to elicit from the students in order to create the
pre-determined outcome. Some bios are provided of women activists, as opposed to
actual politicians, in order to “redefine” politics. At the end, students are
told to choose from a list of women politicians and write a bio of that woman.
Unfortunately,
this is all in vain until young people are allowed to experience democracy (and
its accompanying politics) during their daily lives at school. The hierarchical and
patriarchal institutions these kids attend (and the curriculum to which they are
subjected) are part of the problem! They do not
encourage young people of either gender to be active and engaged in governing
themselves or to work for change. Courses such as these are too little, too
boring, too engineered and too late.
Posted: 2009/08/19 3:19PM
Spending Our Money to Make Us Sick – August 18, 2009
Hog farmers in Canada are
being offered government money if they get out of the business – in
a move reminiscent of support offered to failing tobacco farmers. Unfortunately,
the same government is also providing the industry with money for marketing and
supporting the more successful farmers with loan guarantees. And that’s
unfortunate because it encourages even larger, more
“efficient,” intensive farms. What we really need to support – if we need to eat pork
at all – are smaller, more diversified farms where animals are treated well,
housed cleanly and humanely, allowed into the great outdoors and not pumped full
of “just-in-case” doses of antibiotics that will eventually lead to virulent
diseases in humans. Oh, wait a minute, maybe those government-supported hog
farms
have already done that. Have you ever wondered why there seem to be as many
highly-placed people
protecting the swine industry from the taint of swine flu as there are those
protecting people from the flu?
Posted: 2009/08/18 10:06AM
Teaching Kids About
(Not) Purchasing Beauty – August 16, 2009
I’m getting old(er) – okay, the word is highly subjective. Although I try to
embrace my inner crone, on some days I have mixed emotions about the state of my
knees, my thighs, my eyelids and…well, I’ll spare you. The unhappy side got
a boost earlier today when I looked at a wonderful photo of my beautiful
35-year-old daughter in the bloom of womanhood – i.e. she’s no longer a kid.
However, I have bounced back to my normal state of fretting about something more
important. So I was interested to spot
this article on a site I love but don’t visit enough.
Cahoots Magazine is a (now) online magazine based in
Saskatoon, Canada and their website is full of great articles by women writers from across
North America. This particular article focuses on a new children’s book designed to help
women explain to their children why mommy is going under the knife to change her
body. What it really does, says author Christine Orchanian Adler is help
“parents teach their children that a body you’re not happy with is not a
healthy one.” My body is a “relatively” healthy one, and I’m happy to
help it get even healthier, rather than change it to mask the wonderful wrinkles
and droops that tell my history. And I am sure that if I was even tempted to try and “fix”
those wrinkles and droops, my beautiful daughter would teach me to be happy with them.
Posted: 2009/08/16 5:55PM
Finding Meaning
and Purpose in Education – August 15, 2009
Infusing more meaning and purpose into class lessons can help improve
children’s outlook on life, curb depression and boost grades, University
of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman told a conference of the American
Psychological Association held in Toronto last weekend. Seligman is the author of books like
Learned Optimism (Knopf,
1990) and Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002) and is known for his theory of
learned helplessness. Apparently he studied a bunch of ninth-grade students
and discovered that those who took a “positive psychology” course got better
marks than those who didn’t. “Under conditions of high well-being, more
classroom learning occurs,” Seligman said. Well, that’s if you think there
is any correlation between marks and learning, which I don’t. (Maybe
“classroom learning” is something different – like retention of facts
until the exam.) But I can’t argue with the idea that meaning and purpose will
curb depression! (I guess it’s not his specialty to ask why kids in
school are depressed in the first place.) At the same time, I think it will take a lot more than adding
positive psychology courses to the curriculum to infuse our education system
with meaning and purpose…like tearing schools down and starting over with a
self-directed model of community-based education.
Posted: 2009/08/15 1:10PM
The Perils of Wooing the Media – August 12, 2009
This is the time of year when PR firms and corporate marketers rev up their
promotional activities. In the last month, we’ve received – unsolicited – a
sample of granola, three brands of flavored water, a selection of household
cleaning supplies, enough sun block to last the rest of my life, four pieces of
organic cotton clothing, a solar toy, three CDs, an organic hemp backpack, a
travel mug, a stainless steel water bottle, a solar key chain, a year’s supply
of yarn and eight books. These have been variously packaged in reusable bags, a
tin gift box, too much paper, bubblewrap and wicker baskets. In addition, I’ve
been offered a sample of “enviro-friendly” fiberboard, an all-expenses-paid
trip to an eco-resort in Costa Rica and one to Arizona to test drive a new
hybrid car, a one-day family pass to a local conservation area, three
invitations to champagne-fueled company launches, a dinner for two at a locavore
restaurant, tickets to a film and a whole bunch of homeschooling curriculum
products. It might seem like we’ve tapped a goldmine here, but we actively
discourage samples and gifts, and don’t write about these companies and their products. The mainstream
media outlets typically have a similar policy because it’s just too difficult to write
objectively about a gift.
But some giveaway publications and many bloggers don’t
adhere to this sort of policy, happily (or innocently) blurring the lines
between advertising/sponsorship and editorial. In addition to writing positive
reviews about products after having been showered with large quantities of the
product, some publish “articles” written by
advertisers (some advertisers refuse to buy an ad without being given
“advertorial” opportunities). Others charge a fee to “review” a product
or won’t cover a product or book unless it’s available for them to get a
commission on Amazon.com. I understand that, unlike Natural Life, some magazines
depend upon advertising to pay their bills and that bloggers might appreciate the
gift of products as a way to pay for their time and bandwidth, but it really
threatens your integrity. The self-regulating advertising industry and even governments are worried and trying to figure
out if they can
regulate things, or at least encourage people to disclose whether they’ve been
given the products they’re saying nice things about or if a company is
sponsoring their site or greasing the wheels.
Aside from the journalistic ethics, which are being smashed
minute by minute on the net in many other ways, I am concerned about how this
unbridled commercialization of the so-called “mommy blogs” is affecting
relationships between women. And I am pleased to see that is one of the topics
tackled in a new book called
Mothering and Blogging.
Posted: 2009/08/13 1:33PM
Limited Time Free Online Sample of Natural Life –
August 13, 2009
For a limited time, we
are offering a free online sample of
Natural Life Magazine.
We hope you will enjoy reading this online sample and
then subscribe to Natural Life's print or online
edition. If you already subscribe,
this is a great opportunity to share Natural Life with your friends, so feel
free to pass along this offer. (But you will have
to cut and paste this posting or forward the URL, since the offer is not linked
from the Natural Life home page.
Posted: 2009/08/13 1:02PM
Send Us Your
Favorite Vegetarian Recipes – August 12, 2009
Natural Life Magazine’s
readers have been telling us that they would like us to publish more recipes. (There are a couple of excellent ones in the September/October issue, which is just about ready to be mailed.)
So we are asking readers to share their favorite organic, local vegetarian or vegan recipes with us for publication. All recipes will be considered, checked for originality (i.e. copyright) and
tested. If we publish your recipe in Natural Life, we’ll give you a one-year
subscription to Natural Life’s online edition (worth $18 and includes
access to Natural Life and Life Learning back issues). Submit as
many entries as you like, but only one subscription will be given per person.
So email us your favorite way to prepare all
that wonderful produce we are seeing the markets these days. Meanwhile, here is
the beginning of an online archive of recipes we have published in the past, as
well as contest details.
Posted: 2009/08/12 5:17PM
Parents Are Spanking Less…Well,
At Least Dads Are – August 11, 2009
I’ve been reading a
press release about a study just presented to the American
Sociological Association about how parenting practices are changing and how
that relates to the way people were themselves parented. There is much there to
think about. According to these researchers at Ohio State University, when it comes to how people raise their children, mothers today tend to follow
the same practices their own mothers did. Fathers, on the other hand, don’t
seem to use their moms as parenting role models as much. The researchers studied
thousands of parents over a couple of generations, considering how often parents
spanked, read to and showed affection to their children, and compared that to
how these parents were treated by their own mothers.
The second generation of mothers closely followed what their mothers did. For
example, mothers who were spanked at least once a week are nearly half as more
likely to spank their own children than mothers who weren’t spanked at all. In
most cases, there was no relationship between mothers’ parenting practices and
the parenting practices of their sons – the one exception being spanking. And
in that instance, fathers who were spanked as children were less likely
to spank their own children. Only 28 percent of the second generation of fathers
reported spanking their children, compared to 43 percent of mothers.
Posted: 2009/08/11 2:05PM
Learning by Tinkering – August 10, 2009
The wonderful TED website
has offered up another inspirational tidbit. It’s by Gever Tulley, a software
engineer who is also the founder of something called
Tinkering School, a camp where kids get to, well, tinker…using power tools and other great
stuff they aren’t always allowed near because people think they’re
dangerous. He, on the other hand,
trusts kids to play, tinker and learn. He says they learn life skills and the
“realization that you can figure things out by fooling around.” The bad
news? Tinkering School’s hands-on learning experience lasts only six days. The
good news? Unschoolers learn like this every day.
Posted: 2009/08/10 5:33PM
Slow Sunday – August 9, 2009
The other day when twitter and facebook were both down and many folks were
feeling lost without them, I was feeling relieved at the lack of pressure to
post and the seemingly slower pace of my working day. Checking through my favorite
blogs (a much slower form of writing and reading that is, by the way,
apparently
on its deadbed), I saw that Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow and Under
Pressure, is also a twitter newbie and has also been musing about
twitter-speed. And he’s come to the same conclusion I have: Online “social
networking” is neither good nor bad, but one needs to be prudent (i.e.
balanced) in its use. If Honoré is correct that there is a “right speed” for
everything, blogging – not to mention paper magazines and books – isn’t dead
but is just another tool in our communications kit. Long-form writing is hard
work and it’s slow; sending off a five-word tweet is easy and quick. (Actually,
it can be hard and slow too, if done well – requiring all the conciseness and
care of a haiku, which is partly what attracted me to twitter in the first
place. But most of us don’t take the time to update our twitter or facebook
status that way.)
Anyway, this is Sunday. And from Honoré, I learned about the
Slow Sundays initiative in the UK. People are
encouraged to spend their Sundays slowing down and taking part in simple
actions that symbolize a rejection of commercialism, a passion for the planet
and a desire for change – things like baking bread, planting a garden, taking a
walk. Not surprisingly, neither tweeting nor blogging have been suggested! So I
think I’ll shut off the computer now and remember what a slow Sunday feels like.
As someone living with the chronic autoimmune disease lupus, I need to learn
this lesson well.
Posted: 2009/08/09 12:07PM
Taking LEGO™ to the Next Level of Fun – August 8, 2009
I’ve often said that LEGO should be made the official
unschooling toy, since so many life learning families seem to play with it
non-stop. I have fond memories of the countless hours of fun we had with our
daughters making castles, trucks, villages and especially marble chutes. We even
published an article once in Life Learning
magazine about what you can learn through LEGO play. So I’m very excited to
learn that funsmith
Bernie DeKoven, who has written for us in Natural Life magazine in the
past and knows how to have more fun than anyone I know, has been
working with LEGO to develop a new, fun project.
Posted: 2009/08/08 1:11PM
Paying For Quality – August 6, 2009
One of our regular contributors to Natural Life Magazine just asked me if I think the
concept of simple living is compatible with paying more for things that lessen
one’s negative impact on the environment – especially since one’s choice
to live more simply often results in less income. I responded that paying for
quality is usually a good thing, both for simplicity and for the environment –
whether it’s investing in more durable and worthwhile items (less shopping and
less garbage) or paying a bit more to buy organic food that’s better for the
environment and healthier for our bodies. It’s about integrity, I said.
And, I might have added, that includes our consumption of
media. On my walk this morning, I picked up a free copy of a health magazine
from a rack in front of a vitamin store that I passed by, barely missing a step.
I intend to replace that magazine on the rack on tomorrow morning’s walk
because it wasn’t worth reading, let alone the second it took me to pick it up
or the burden on our municipal recycling program as I dispose of it. The entire
content of that “magazine” was either supplied directly by advertisers or
written to attract and please them. They are clearly making money with this
approach, but I prefer information that’s not commercially biased, like we
present, for instance, in Natural Life. (
Here’s where you can read about our approach.) Unfortunately, I’ll never get
rich doing it this way because, especially in this economic climate, advertisers
and their PR representatives are increasingly pulling the strings. However,
I’m happy with our business and sleep well at night, knowing that there are
sufficient numbers of readers out there who understand that integrity and
quality are worth paying for. Thanks for every one of you who subscribe to
either the print or online editions of Natural Life Magazine and who buy our
books! If you care about integrity, quality and simplicity, please pass the word
along.
Posted: 2009/08/06 5:51PM
Learning What We’re Bad At – August 5, 2009
I’ve just been glancing back at the bits I highlighted
when I first read Kirsten Olson’s book
Wounded by School. School left me with many wounds, some of which are poignantly
described in Kirsten’s book. Perhaps the major one is perfectionism. I have a
need to do things correctly the first time, which leads to a disabled sense of
adventure. Even though I was a good student as a child, there were, inevitably,
things that I wasn’t so good at. The humiliation I was made to feel at my lack
of pitch, my inability to memorize multiplication tables and my physical
clumsiness negated any pride I took in my physical attractiveness (I thought I
was ugly until well into adulthood), my ability to read and write well, to
articulate my insights, to lead groups or my other considerable strengths. For
much of my youth, that humiliation hobbled my self-esteem, blinded me from
learning new things, and prevented me from taking on challenges. In fact, it has
been my life’s work to fully heal. So was fascinated by a posting that I read
a month or two ago on the
Ecology of Education blog about a guy who finished last in a golf tournament but
turned it into a learning experience. His list of ways in which he turned his
failure around is entertaining and illuminating, but I wish he’d analyzed how
he overcame his school-inflicted wounds in order to accomplish that – smiling
all the while. In his article in the upcoming fall issue of Natural Life
Healing Trauma and School Disease, David Albert says that one way to alleviate
the pressure and heal the school disease problem is to homeschool. Intuitively,
both Rolf and I knew that before we had children, and vowed to keep our
daughters safer than we’d been. That’s why I get so infuriated when social
workers, school administrators and other pro-schoolers suggest that not sending
a child to school is abusive. And that’s why it is so important that we get
brave works like David’s and Kirsten’s as much coverage as possible.
Posted: 2009/08/05 12:48 PM
Speed
Reading – August 4, 2009
I’ve been playing around with Twitter as a tool for
making more connections and telling more people about our work (http://twitter.com/WendyPriesnitz,
http://twitter.com/NaturalLifeMag, and
http://twitter.com/AlternatePress). True to my
original concern about signing on to it, it’s fast. It requires me to write
quickly, to post quickly, to keep checking other people’s tweets and to
respond quickly. Otherwise, there seems to be no point. Unfortunately, I’m a
relatively slow thinker and writer, so I’m feeling the pressure, even though
I’m intrigued by the platform and think it could be a good thing for us. And
what if it isn’t even about the content? It might be mostly about the
connections – the networking. It makes me think about a book published a few
years ago by Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the
University of Paris. In English, it was entitled
How To Talk About Books You
Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury USA, 2007). Bayard’s thesis seems to be that the associations that tie books together –
book as a system – are more important than the actual content of the books.
And that, in one sense, is what Twitter is doing – giving participants a speed
reading version of what’s out there and how it all relates in the overall
scheme of things. James Harkin expands on this idea in his book Lost in
Cyburbia (Knopf Canada, 2009), connecting social media to systems theory and Marshall McLuhan’s idea
about the medium being the message. This is all very depressing for a writer and
editor, but I’m willing to go along for the ride awhile longer and see if
Twitter helps me connect with more readers. The kind who read books and magazines.
Posted: 2009/08/04 11:11 AM
Learning by Heart – August 3, 2009
When I was a child, the term “learning by heart” was used in school and
church to refer to rote memorization. At some point as a teenager, I wondered
what “heart” had to do with it, especially since my heart definitely
wasn’t in memorizing stifling old bits of poetry or biblical passages that I
neither understood nor enjoyed. Years later, I stumbled upon Roland Barth’s
book Learning by Heart (Jossey-Bass, 2004) and delighted in a new meaning for the phrase –
one that contradicted the very concept of rote memorization, which, by then, I
knew isn’t learning at all. And today, I discovered this
lovely piece of the same name in the Irish Times, adding
yet another element to the meaning of the phrase. It helped me remember that
although one’s children may grow up and temporarily vanish from one’s life, they’re
still there in heart and memory.
Posted: 2009/08/03 2:34 PM
Slow Money – August 3, 2009
When I came of age in the late 1960s, many of us had an
uneasy relationship with money – the money that funded wars, the money that
supported the patriarchal and corporate status quo. We talked about the evils of
money, thinking it would taint the purity of our countercultural revolution.
Although subsequent generations waste no opportunity to scorn how the Baby
Boomers “sold out” and became as fat and sassy as preceding generations,
some of us have retained many of those earlier values even as we realized the
importance of money to pay the rent and raise our families. Over the years, I
learned to see money in a different light – as a tool to accomplish the
social, environmental and educational change that I want to see happen – but
knew the underlying structural problems hadn’t gone away. The recent
international economic meltdown and environmental and social crises underscore
that. So I’m glad to see what feels like a surge of interest in fixing the
problems. I have
written a number of articles about the need for new economic indicators to
replace GDP, and how the GPI or Genuine Progress Indicator is attracting
interest. And over the past 33 years, we’ve published umpteen articles in
Natural Life magazine about
local food systems, local economies, micro lending, social entrepreneurship and
alternative currencies. Now, there is a new and growing movement designed to
take that concept to another level. It’s called “Slow Money.”
It’s a spin-off
from the Slow Food movement and based on a book called Inquiries into the Nature
of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green, 2008) by
alternative investment guru
Woody Tasch. Tasch heads up an emerging multi-generational
network of investors, donors, entrepreneurs, farmers and activists committed to
building local food systems and local economies. These people have left behind
that countercultural unease with money and are putting their money where their
words were.
Posted: 2009/08/03 12:17 PM
Checking Out Chickens – August 2, 2009
The giant British supermarket chain Tesco is jumping on the grow-your-own-food
movement by renting out garden space and selling live chickens and backyard
chicken coops. Details of the initiative appeared last week in
an article in Advertising Age. Presumably, they are counting on
customers still purchasing some groceries in their stores. Municipalities in the
UK are legally required to offer allotment garden plots, but there are often long
waiting lists, a problem that Tesco’s allotment initiative is trying to
address. Allotment gardens are often called “community gardens” in
North America. The American Community Gardening Association
website maintains a list of community gardens in the
U.S. and Canada, as well as lots of info about how to start one in your neighborhood. You do
need a small piece of your own property to keep chickens and they’re outlawed
in many places in North America. That, too, is changing with the times, although I think it will be awhile
before supermarkets begin selling chicken coops. Still, the
Chickens in Your Backyard article that we published in Natural Life magazine in
March received the largest number of favorable responses that we’ve had in the
last year...maybe because it combined food and unschooling
– a true life learning experience!
Posted: 2009/08/02 12:28 PM
Homeschool According to Charlie Brown – August 1, 2009
Nice little
article in The New Yorker about the young members of a
cast of a production of the musical “Snoopy!!!” – none of whom attend school. One of them
says he thinks he can solve problems more creatively than kids who go to school.
His sister says she thinks Snoopy represents the best of the homeschooled
individual. And another actor says that when you don’t go to school everyone
you meet is your teacher.
Posted: 2009/08/01 1:22 PM
Change For the Sake of Our Children – July 27, 2009
Léandre Bergeron is a parent, social activist and writer whose article in the
upcoming September/October issue of Natural Life magazine illuminates the respectful,
trusting way of parenting and educating children that I’ve practiced
and championed for the past 35 years. Léandre suggests that we treat our
children as “distinguished guests” – people we respect and admire for who
they are and who grace us with their presence. He has much more wisdom and
experience to share in his new book For the Sake of Our Children, which we’ve
just published and is now back from the printer and ready to be ordered.
Collectively, we have much work to do to own up to the
damage our society does to our children through the ways we parent and educate.
I sometimes wonder if we are willing to make the sweeping changes in our
institutions, public policies and personal lives that are necessary to reverse
that harm to our children and to our society. But, recently, as I was listening
to an album of old tunes by singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, I felt grateful for
the increasing community of people who are pushing for those changes. We are, to
paraphrase a line from Cohen’s song Anthem, taking advantage of the cracks
that appear in everything, which is where the light gets in.
Posted: 2009/07/27 12:14 PM
Natural
Life Online Subscription Available – July 18, 2009
Over the past while, we
have had a number of requests for an online subscription to
Natural Life
magazine. And now, it is available, at half the price of a print subscription.
For now – at least until we are able to gauge the level of interest and
therefore how much time and money to spend on programming and other
infrastructure – the format is password-protected PDF.
That password also provides access to our ever-growing archive of back issues of
Natural Life and all issues of Life Learning magazines.
Natural
Life has been reader-supported since Rolf and I launched it back in 1976.
(It is difficult to promote a conserve/simple lifestyle and attract companies
selling the latest knick knack, green or not.) Aside from amassing a huge amount
of credibility, which we value highly, that lack of dependency on advertising
has allowed us to weather the current recession-induced advertiser downturn. But
the recession has meant that we have had to re-think everything we do at Life
Media, to be sure we are on solid footing going forward. I hope we are managing
to maintain a fair balance between paid content (we think our articles are worth
paying for!) and free.
Posted: 2009/07/18 4:50 PM
