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Archives
- May, 2005
Creating Social Epidemics - May 28, 2005
In his best-selling book
The Tipping Point,
journalist Malcolm Gladwell explains why social change often happens
quickly and unexpectedly, rather than slowly and incrementally as
conventional wisdom would have it. He believes that ideas and behavior
sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease and can be
contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is. In fact, the phrase
“tipping point” comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name
given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass
and starts spreading very quickly through a population.
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.
Posted: 2005/05/28
3:55 PM
The Problem With Worry – May 23, 2005
Yesterday, I was asked a question I have heard a hundred times
before: “Didn’t you ever worry that homeschooling wouldn’t be what
your kids needed?” The short answer is, “No.”
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.
Posted: 2005/05/23 12:31 PM
Learn the Craft, Then Set it Aside – May 17, 2005
I’m re-reading the book
Creativity by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (1996, HarperCollins). And it occurs to me that he has
something useful to say about how we should be going about educational
reform (including how we help young people become literate – see May
13, below). He wrote:
“You cannot transform a domain unless you first thoroughly understand
how it works. Which means that one has to acquire the tools of
mathematics, learn the basic principles of physics and become aware of
the current state of knowledge. But the old Italian saying seems to
apply: Impata l’arte, e mettila
da parte (learn the craft and then set it aside). One cannot be
creative without becoming dissatisfied with that knowledge and rejecting
it (or some of it) for a better way.” We’ve evolved an educational
system, academics have studied it into rigor mortis, we’ve tinkered
with it (which includes throwing money at it) over the years, and now
the level of dissatisfaction has risen to the point that it’s time to
reject “the current state of knowledge” for a better way. If it
would make the administrators and academics feel better, they can
believe there were some aspects of the old system that might have worked
once upon a time. But that was then and this is now. Now, we need to
build a better way – or perhaps many better ways. And the
self-directed learning community can guide us…if the status quo
enforcers will get out of the way.
Posted: 2005/05/17 10:22 AM
Why Can’t People Read? – May 13, 2005
According to a new study authored in part by
Statistics Canada, forty percent of Canadian adults have serious reading
problems, which interfere with their ability to get and retain jobs, and
perform everyday tasks like reading a newspaper. Astoundingly, that
percentage has not significantly changed in a decade. The Canadian score
results trailed behind those of Norway and Bermuda and ahead of the
United States. What, in my opinion, should be a wake-up call about the way we are
helping people learn seems to have been accompanied by little more than a
few tongue cluckings by those who could read the report about the fate
of those unlucky people who couldn’t. Where it was noticed, it became
another call to throw more money at the problem, including the funding
of adult literacy programs to fix problems schools create. Donna Kirby
of the National Literacy Secretariat, a division of the Department of
Human Resources, says that the federal government has recognized the
existence of a serious literacy problem. Her division receives $30
million each year to improve the literacy skills of Canadians, and the
Paul Martin government has promised an additional $30 million over the
next three years as part of the 2005 budget.
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.
Posted: 2005/05/13 10:40 PM
A Peaceful Mother’s Day – May 8, 2005
Today is Mother’s Day. I hope all the mothers
reading this are having a good one. I didn’t always express that
sentiment, once scorning it as just another “Hallmark Card” day,
something my daughters came to tolerate at an early age. However in the
mid 1980s, a group of women friends and I discovered the origin of
Mother’s Day and developed a new enthusiasm for the event. The
original concept was a protest against war and a celebration of peace
– the brainchild of Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), a suffragette and
poet who is, ironically, better known as the writer of the Battle Hymn
of the Republic. In an attempt to unite women in the cause of finding
peaceful resolutions to conflicts, she issued a Declaration in 1870. It
read, in part:
“Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
‘We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’”
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!
Posted: 2005/05/08 8:40 AM
Becoming Voiceless – May 5, 2005
Today, I have been editing articles for the
July/August issue of Life Learning magazine. Canadian broadcaster, writer and
unschooling mom Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko has contributed a wonderful
interview with popular unschooling writer and conference speaker Sandra Dodd, who
lives in New Mexico. One of the things Sandra said to Beatrice during their wide-ranging
conversation was: “If your child is bored, you could offer her three
or four really cool things to do. Whereas, my mom and millions of other
moms would say, ‘If you are bored mop the floor. If you’re bored,
you can go and pull weeds.’ That is punishing a child for
communicating with you!”
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?
Posted: 2005/05/04 8:22 PM
On Being Radical – May 2, 2005
I had a letter over the weekend from a Life
Learning reader. She wanted me to know that while she has been
enjoying reading about other people’s learning experiences, she
won’t be renewing her subscription because she feels it is “too
radical” for her and that we “don’t keep to the homeschooling
topic all the time.”
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, which means
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 even 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.) I also believe that education
cannot be separated from how children are trusted and respected.
(They are, all too often, not.)
That sort of radical examination of the problem
– and the radical solutions that radical unschooling families (I
prefer the term “life learning,” but that is another
discussion) are living every day – is what the Life Learning
website and Natural Life magazine are all about. So,
no, we “don’t keep to the homeschooling topic all the
time.”
Posted: 2005/05/02 12:04 PM
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