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Archives - March,
2008
Earth Hour Candles –
March 29, 2008
I’m taking a minute away from doing the final proofreading for
Natural Life and Life Learning
magazines, before the files are shipped off to the printer tomorrow night. I can
only take a minute, because I plan to give up an hour later this evening to hop on
the Earth Hour bandwagon, which is being described as a “wave.” But I have two
concerns. I know...I always have concerns! One is that not enough people will carry the lessons learned past
tomorrow morning. (Yes, I know it's supposed to be symbolic, but a symbol is
nothing if it doesn't translate into action.) The other concern is that
Earth Hour will create – probably already has – a run on cheap candles
from the dollar store. Please, if you live in a place where eight o’clock hasn't
yet arrived, don’t burn petroleum candles because they are a health
hazard. And, ironically, they also, by some accounts, have a greater environmental impact than electricity! Happy Earth Hour. Burn beeswax.
Or better still, go outside and enjoy the stars. But please consider not driving
somewhere to watch the lights go out.
Posted: 200 8/03/29 4:38 PM
Webcast Discussion on Homeschooling – March 25, 2008
On Tuesday April 1 at 12:55 PM Eastern Time, I’m going to be part of an
interactive webcast about homeschooling. It’s entitled “Is School Essential
to your Child's Learning?” and I was favorably impressed by the depth of the
producer’s research when we chatted earlier today. Details about how to
participate are on the website.
Posted: 200 8/03/25 5:12 PM
The New Radicals – March 14, 2008
I recently picked up a book entitled We
Are the New Radicals by Julia Moulden (McGraw-Hill, 2007). The book
documents a phenomenon whereby people go off the career and money track
to contribute to the social good. Some of the people profiled include a
London librarian who left his job to retire to Scotland to record
birdlife for the environmental movement; London Mayor Kehn Livingstone,
who at first was criticized for charging extra for those who congested
London traffic but now is imitated worldwide; Melissa Dyrdahl, who left
her job as senior vice president of marketing at Adobe Systems to create
Bring Light, Inc., a nonprofit website that connects donors with charities; and Chef Jamie Kennedy, who
knew that there was something unsustainable about the way restaurants source ingredients and is now
leading the movement toward local, sustainable cuisine.
Moulden says the new radicals are often boomers who
as a generation already had been part of big social movements such as
women’s rights and who want to continue principled work. The idea
makes for a good read, but there’s nothing new about it. This is also
known as social entrepreneurship and the term was first used in the literature on
social change in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was certainly in use in the
mid ‘70s when my husband and business partner Rolf and I went off the
money track to start our “new radical/social entrepreneurship”
publishing business. The term came into more widespread use in the 1980s and
‘90s, promoted by people like Harvard Business School
professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka..
I believe that all entrepreneurship should be for the good of society,
which is a very radical thought. I fail to see the point of any human
enterprise that is otherwise, meaning that it destroys society, health
or the environment. Likewise for any economic structure or policy that
encourage destructiveness. Further, I think the notion that
business=bad and non-profit=good is very out-dated. But all of this makes me wonder: I’m already a
radical, which means I can’t be a new one. So does that make me an old
radical????
Posted: 2008/03/14 11:28 AM
Is Education About Winning or Learning? – March
12, 2008
Education is not a contest. Unfortunately, the academics at Ryerson University in Toronto don’t know that. They’ve threatened a first-year student with
expulsion because he administers a Facebook study group that helped 146
engineering students to collaborate on homework assignments. The
academics call
it cheating. The student and his supporters – who have rallied about
him on Facebook and in person (there’s even a website and t-shirts) – say the group is simply the online version
of a study group that had existed for years in the basement of the
university.
Academic dishonesty, as in plagiarism is, of course,
to be condemned, as is journalistic or any other sort of dishonesty. But
let’s be clear that the purpose of attendance at an educational institution
is to learn. And some of the best learning is done through discussion
and collaboration. When the focus becomes competition for correct answers, marks and that
cherished piece of paper held up tantalizingly by a bunch of so-called
experts, rather than to gain knowledge, the spirit of
education is mocked.
Posted: 2008/03/12 7:55 PM
The
Homeschooling Crisis in California – March 11, 2008
I did an interview yesterday with a local Toronto
talk radio show. The host wanted me to tell him why parents here
aren’t required to have teacher credentials in order to homeschool
their kids…like they now are in California, as a result of a recent court case. It’s beyond me why radio
talk show hosts take it upon themselves to address topics about which
they admit to knowing nothing about. After a pretty adversarial
“interview,” I mailed him a copy of Life Learning with an invitation
to chat about the topic in a calmer context. He probably won’t take me
up on it because calm, enlightening conversations don’t make good
mainstream talk radio.
Nevertheless, the phone call did motivate me to
take the time to dig more deeply into the substance of the headlines and
rumors I’d been hearing about a homeschooling catastrophe in
California. The San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, put it this way: “A
California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without
teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state…leaving an
estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk
of prosecution.” I’ve been around long enough to assume that this
was either an ignorant or sensationalist headline writer, or that there
is more here than meets the eye. Turns out to be both.
My first stop was the website of the
Connecticut-based Home Education Legal Defense (HELD) organization.
(Note that I did not write “Home School Legal Defense Association”
– HSLDA – which is always my last stop, for many reasons, and seems
to be flaming the rhetoric in this case.) HELD Executive Director Attorney Deborah
Stevenson didn’t disappoint me. She has written a succinct and factual
description of the situation and assures that “the sky is not falling
in California.” She also provides a link to the court ruling that has caused all the alarm among homeschoolers. Other good sources of info are the
California Homeschool Network, the
HomeSchool Association of California
and
Tammy Takahashi’s blog. The various organizations are working together
to solve what is a complicated situation that appears to have started
out by having little to do with homeschooling.
There seems to be much missing information, but
it’s clear that family involved has a history with the child welfare
authorities – which perhaps the ruling was a misguided attempt to end.
This particular case apparently began when the oldest of the family’s
many children reported that the children were being physically and
emotionally mistreated by their father, who has homeschooled all of his
eight children. Now, why the panel of
three judges focused on homeschooling rather than alleged abuse
issues is not clear. But it looks to me that the judges have
misinterpreted the law. The state’s legal options for home educators
include establishing a private school in their home by filing a private
school affidavit or enrolling in private school satellite instruction or
independent study programs. Nowhere does it say that private schools
must employ accredited teachers.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack
O’Connell has issued a statement saying he supports “parental choice
when it comes to homeschooling.” And Governor Schwarzenegger has also
issued a statement in support of homeschooling, saying, “Every California child deserves a quality education and parents
should have the right to decide what’s best for their children.
Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of
their children’s education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned
by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then,
as elected officials, we will.” So this court ruling – scary as it
seems at first glance and in the hands of knee-jerk media commentators
– has not changed the law or the situation for California
homeschoolers. And I hope everyone there is taking a deep breath. My guess is that
this crisis won’t change anything…and that when the dust
settles it will be life as usual for the vast majority of homeschoolers
and unschoolers…in spite of the fact that the state’s teachers’
union is happy with the court ruling.
Posted: 2008/03/11 12:20 PM
Respecting the Journey – March 5, 2008
Natalie, who is writing my life history as an unschooling advocate as
her PhD thesis, asked me yesterday to elaborate on a 1985 entry in my
journal. I had written about my uneasiness with the idea that a new
state of mind – in this case relating to the women’s movement –
could somehow negate the prior state. The feminist rhetoric I was
reading hinted that I should scorn the person I’d been before supposedly
having been “liberated.” And what about the ongoing search for
meaning in life…what sort of wretch was/am I prior to becoming
“enlightened?”
I see two problems there: the suggestion that
liberation and enlightenment were the result of exposure to another
(more liberated or enlightened) being’s work rather than my own
experience and thought processes, and the idea that the destination is
more important than the journey. I see them both as relics of
institutionalized education, where learning is thought not to happen
without teaching and where a good grade or diploma is valued rather more than
the learning experience. This sort of thinking is also an integral part
of religion (from which institutionalized education arguably
flowed), where everything we do in this world
will provide us with a reward or punishment in the next world.
Yes, goals are important
in life, whatever your worldview or belief system. But I’ll take my
chances learning from each moment of my life, just like I enjoy my work
rather than viewing it as unpleasant labor leading up the weekend, a
vacation or retirement. If I end up at the destinations some call
liberation and enlightenment, that will be fine too.
Posted: 2008/03/05 12:08 PM
A Lively Life –
March 1, 2008
Here at
Life Media, we have a problem. Since the early 1990s, we have owned the
domain life.ca as a highly popular portal for all things green, and for the archives of our magazine
Natural Life. Recently, Microsoft has created the domain live.ca for
the Canadian version of its Windows Live set of offerings, which includes free email and
text messaging service. And, since we have, for the past decade and a
half, used the life.ca domain for email accounts associated with Natural
Life, this has caused us a huge problem. Interestingly enough,
thousands of people do not seem to be able to tell the letter V from the
letter F. Consequently, we are being inundated by email messages intended
for folks who have signed up for the Microsoft live.ca email service. And, of course, when their incorrectly addressed message fails to arrive at its destination the first time, they simply pound it out again, with no changes. Darn stupid Internet.
This has become such a problem that we are having to phase out our use of
those email accounts. If you have anybody or anything @life.ca
in your records, please change it to anybody or anything @lifemedia.ca...or
check the specific magazine website in the sidebar on this page for a
more specific address. And if you have any idea how we can cash in on
this problem and turn it into an opportunity, please let me know!
Posted: 200 8/03/01 6:29 PM
Foundations of Success – February 29,
2008
Many rich and successful people are high school and college dropouts,
including Microsoft’s Bill Gates (who was expelled, according to some
sources), Oracle Corporation’s Larry Ellison, Apple Computer’s Steve
Jobs, McDonald’s Ray Kroc, Virgin’s Richard Branson, etc. Um, not a
lot of women there, unfortunately, but then there aren’t a lot of
billionaire women who run corporations! That’s a whole other story,
for another posting…and there are some women (usually artists or
writers, not entrepreneurs) on the lists of home-educated famous people,
like Margaret Mead, Agatha Christie, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Love
Hewitt.
However, my point here is to share this quote by Dell Computers
founder Michael Dell: “It’s exciting to see how fast your kids learn
and grow. I’m not too worried about them, particularly the ones who
like to break rules and don’t follow instructions, those are the ones
that will do just fine because they know what’s important to them.”
The quote is from Success Built to Last: Creating a
Life that Matters by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, Mark Thompson (Wharton
School Publishing, 2006). Dell is the consummate entrepreneur who
dropped out of the University of Texas
at age 19 to found Dell Computers. His parents weren’t happy, hoping
that he’d stay in school and become a doctor. And his early teachers
saw little promise in him, with one commenting that he “would probably
never go anywhere in life.” His net worth is now estimated to be over
$17 billion.
Both Nancy Plent and John Taylor Gatto have articles in the March/April
issue of Life Learning (on its way to subscribers now) on variations of this topic.
Nancy notes one commonality among
them – it was a person, not a school, who made a difference in the
lives of successful people who had problems with school. But I think Michael Dell nailed it: Breaking rules, not following
instructions and knowing what’s important to you are hallmarks of
success, especially in business and the arts. And school most definitely
is not the place to learn those things! Keeping to the rules, following
instructions and accepting others’ opinion of what’s important are
the things that matter most at
school.
Posted: 2008/02/29 12:25 PM
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