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Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - May, 2005 Creating Social Epidemics - May 28, 2005 I’m beginning to think we have reached or are approaching the tipping point for many of the ideas I have written about since 1976. Yesterday on my morning walk, I encountered a group of self-described “unschoolers” taking in a children’s festival. On a visit this morning to my local farmers’ market, I noted that almost all the vendors were advertising something “organic”. On the twelve-block walk home, a Starbucks I passed had a display promoting shade-grown, organic, Fair Trade coffee. On the newsstand next door, a glossy city magazine boasted a hefty environmental feature, which was printed on post-consumer recycled paper. And I counted eight hybrid cars, a biodiesel bus and two gas-saving three-cylinder Smart cars. Dan Becker, Washington Director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming Program recently said he believes that the auto industry is nearing the tipping point on clean cars. Canada and the state of Washington both recently adopted stringent clean car rules (sometimes called “The California Standard”), and the state of Oregon announced it would follow that lead. That will result in over 35 percent of new cars sold in the U.S. and Canada having to meet tailpipe pollution standards that are stronger that U.S. Clean Air Act. And that, says Becker, will tip the auto industry to make all of cars clean vehicles. “The automakers will find it financially impossible to make one clean set of cars for ten states and Canada, and a dirty set for the rest,” he noted. North American auto makers are losing market share to companies like Toyota and Honda, which have a huge lead in alternative fuel technologies, so the new laws could force the Big Three to abandon their gas guzzling ways. That’s how the tipping point works. Gladwell
describes such changes as “social epidemics”. Epidemics begin with
just a little input, but spread very quickly once they take hold. By
embracing new ideas in our everyday lives, each one of us is
contributing to reaching the tipping point for a thousand “positive”
epidemics. The Problem With Worry – May 23, 2005 Here’s the long answer. First of all, I learned years ago that worry is a bad habit. It comes from negative assumptions about all the bad things that might happen – and from the magical thinking that worrying will actually prevent the bad things from happening. Worriers often believe that their worry proves their love for the object of their worry. Just ask my mother! But I believe that the opposite is true; worry results from a lack of trust (in ourselves, others and the universe). In fact, you can demonstrate love and respect for a person by not worrying about them. In this case, since I trusted the decisions my husband and I had made about how we would parent and educate our daughters, and since I trusted their ability to learn without attending school, I didn’t worry. While worry is a waste of time, and harmful to both the worrier and the person who’s being smothered by the worrying, concern for our children is an appropriate parental attitude. Our concern for our children motivated us to create an environment conducive to learning. And it reminded us to listen to their needs and wants. So instead of wasting time and effort worrying, we acted in ways that optimized our daughters’ chances of success in life and that decreased their chances of experiencing failure or harm. Worry can actually be paralyzing. I hear from many parents who say they are worried about the quality of the education their children are receiving in schools these days, or about the bullying or other issues. Unfortunately, worry is often accepted as a substitute for taking action and the majority of parents don’t act on their fear that public school is not a good place for their children. Why? Perhaps because as human beings we seldom challenge the
conventional ways of doing things. To learn something, we take a course;
to get an education, we go to school. And since public education has the
weight of government and educational “experts” behind it, it must be
the right way to go. Or so the conventional thinking goes. I believe that
when a critical mass of people move
beyond their programming and make more conscious decisions about
children’s place in society, schools will join workhouses as a faintly
remembered relic of a less-enlightened past. And every one of us who is
unworryingly able to offer our children the freedom to learn from life
is helping move society a bit closer to that ideal. Learn the Craft, Then Set it Aside – May 17, 2005 Why Can’t People Read? – May 13, 2005 Call me radical (see May 2, below), but why aren’t we looking at the
way we help little kids learn to read? Why aren’t we looking at why
all the sophisticated reading research and increasingly earlier
institutional interventions only work for 60 percent of the population?
Seems to me that everyone – teachers, school administrators, parents,
politicians, so-called literacy experts – should take a deep breath,
take two steps back and look at the root of the problem in a new way.
The “old” way – no matter how new – obviously isn’t working. A Peaceful Mother’s Day – May 8, 2005 “Arise then...women of this day! Julia failed in her attempts to get a formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace, but after her death, her daughter took up the crusade. As a result, the first Mother’s Day was celebrated in West Virginia in 1907. In 1912, President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day. The celebration eventually spread to other countries. Once we learned that, my friends and I took out an
ad in our local newspaper, financed and signed by women in the
community, to tell Julia Ward Howe’s story. So to my old (and now geographically scattered) friends Julie, Jill and Jacquie – and to our
daughters, now grown – Happy Mother’s Day! Becoming Voiceless – May 5, 2005 As I read that quote, I flashbacked to circa 1960
and heard and saw my own mother using those same words. And I
experienced all over again the hurt and frustration of being punished
for innocently sharing my summer vacation dilemma. I’m not sure if my
mother wanted to solve my boredom problem or punish me, but she most
surely shut down future communication with her. Perhaps she truly
believed that children – and perhaps women – should be, or actually
were, voiceless. But Sandra’s words made me understand why today, at a
sprightly and relatively independent 96 years of age, my mother seems
apathetic. Her reaction to most of my suggestions is that she can’t be
bothered. And why would anyone bother doing or saying anything if they
had felt for most of their lifetime that their actions or words
weren’t important? On Being Radical – May 2, 2005 I thanked her for using the word “radical”, and pointed out that it has a few meanings. My dictionary tells me that it originates with the Latin words radix meaning roots and radicalis, which means having roots. And thus comes the botanical term “radical leaves”, which refers to leaves that arise from the root or crown of the plant. So, for me, a person who is radical is one who examines the roots of issues. And a radical solution to a problem is one that arises from that examination, addressing what we sometimes call the root cause, rather than the more superficial symptoms. I suppose that focus on fundamental change is why radical views, opinions, practices or proposed changes sometimes seem extreme. It is also why I prefer to examine how people learn by living, rather than to isolate self-directed learning as just another homeschooling method or style. When I started thinking about these things 35 or so
years ago, I began with the presumption that what was wrong with our
education system wouldn’t be fixed by tinkering – by adding more
subjects, more equipment, more teachers or more funding, or, in fact, by
changing the location of where the teaching took place or the content of
the curriculum that was used. I realized then, and believe it ever more
passionately now, that what’s needed is an examination of how people
learn and whether or not schools provide the best opportunity for that
learning to unfold. (They don’t.) That sort of radical examination of
the problem – and the radical solutions that life learning families
are living every day – is what Life
Learning magazine is about. In that sense, we “don’t keep to the homeschooling topic all the time”. Return
to current weblog copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 200 7 |
Topics & Passions: natural learning ~ What I'm Reading: The Body Never Lies -
The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting by Alice Miller (2005,
W.W. Norton) ~ What I'm Listening To:
Careless Love
by Madeleine Peyroux (Rounder Records)
~ Fav Bookmarks: Deep Fun ~ Fav Quotes
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