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Archives
- September, 2006
Junk Food and Truant Officers Visit Park Place – September 28, 2006
A couple of very non-welcome spins on the already competitive game of
Monopoly have crossed my desk recently, released just in time for
Christmas gift giving.
Homeschoolopoly purports to celebrate the best of
homeschooling. Apparently that includes avoiding “running into the
Truancy Officer lying in wait to send a homeschooler to court!” But
don’t worry, you can use your “HSLDA Member – Get Out of Court
Free” card. HSLDA is one of many businesses that have paid big bucks
to have their name and other promotional material on the game board and
in a flyer inserted in each box. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t
reflect the diversity of the homeschooling community, this game seems to
me to ratchet up the commercialization of the movement.
But the designers of that game have some stiff
competition in the hawking stuff to kids department. Hasbro has released
a new version of Monopoly itself, which has ads for McDonalds,
Starbucks, Motorola and other corporate sponsors on the game tokens.
“Shame on Hasbro for hawking junk food and caffeine to children,”
says Gary Ruskin, executive director of
an organization
called Commercial
Alert.
“Hasbro is toying with the health of our children. Maybe it thinks
that the childhood obesity epidemic is just a game, but parents know
better.”
“Hasbro has undercut one of the prime virtues of
its own product,” adds Jonathan Rowe, issues director of Commercial
Alert. “Whatever else one
thought about Monopoly, at least it conveyed to kids the importance of
savings and investment. Now
the game is touting consumption instead. Maybe Hasbro should rename it
‘Huckster Haven.’”
Commercial Alert’s mission is to keep the
commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from
exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family,
community, environmental integrity and democracy. For more information,
see their website.
Posted: 2006/09/28
3:16 PM
Freedom of the Press? – September 18, 2006
Earlier today, I received an email from a
Life Learning magazine reader.
She wrote: “Approximately two years ago Margaret Boyce of
Saugatuck, Michigan wrote to the Holland Sentinel [Holland, Michigan] slamming homeschoolers. I believe there was a huge refutation from
around the country. Well, she’s back at it again.” Here’s a little
of what Ms. Boyce wrote for publication in this morning’s paper:
There is a whiff of autumn in the air, and football
has begun. One can feel the excitement. Why? Because it is back to
school time! I know many children who just can’t wait to begin, from
kindergarten to high school, looking forward to seeing the friends,
including teachers, that have been missed during the summer. New
clothes, new books and a new start in the year. Truly one of life’s
greatest milestones when everything is filled with promise. However,
there is a group of children being robbed of this incredible experience.
Their parents, probably that they are being especially virtuous, have
decided that they will keep their children and “home school” because
they (the parents) believe that they are able to bring all knowledge and
learning to their children…There are several new studies that deal
with this overzealous parenting. Too
much home pressure, too much togetherness, no chance for the children to
find their own way. I have written in the past of a Harvard study that
followed a flock of homeschooled children that found no significant
difference in their academic achievements that the traditionally
schooled children, with the exception of some gaps where the parents
were just not knowledgeable. However, the mothers do get a huge ego
boost.”
You get the picture. Clearly Ms. Boyce has a serious problem with
home-based learning and perhaps with what she calls “controlling
parents” and perhaps even with logic. I don’t who she is, what her problem
is or why she has it. But I do know that the editor of that newspaper doesn’t need to
provide a platform for her ignorant neurosis. You might want to
tell him that, even if you’re not inclined to point out for the
millionth time the strengths of home-based learning and the painful lack
of promise shown by our public school system.
Posted: 2006/09/18
6:26 PM
Sit Still or Be Drugged – September 10, 2006
Thinking once more about the notion of teaching young children to sit
still so they can function well in pre-school (see my September 7 post,
below), I recall the
article I wrote earlier this year for Natural Life magazine about the
dangers of medicalizing normal behavior, of labeling kids with so-called
behavioral or learning disabilities, and of treating them with drugs. I
listed some of the side effects of Ritalin, the drug of choice,
which include increased blood pressure, heart rate, respiration and
temperature; stomach pains; weight loss; growth retardation; facial
tics; muscle twitching; euphoria; nervousness; irritability; agitation;
insomnia; heart palpitations; and more violent behaviors like psychotic
episodes and paranoid delusions. And I reiterated what I wrote in my
last book, Challenging Assumptions in Education, that the behaviors
being labeled ADD and ADHD are the result of lifestyle issues and
school oppression.
I continue to receive both support and censure for
that stand. So it’s good to see others coming to the same conclusion.
Jane Fendelman, an Arizona-based child and family counselor, says that
psychiatrists who participate in this diagnosis and treatment are on the
wrong track. The author of the book Raising Human Beings calls ADD and
ADHD “an adaptive response to a society that’s stuck in the hamster
wheel…We want them to go fast when we say so and slow down and stop
when we say so.” Plus, she notes, “they may be bored with a below-par curriculum.”
Fendelman was recently interviewed on a radio show
produced by the
Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights, a three-decade old organization
fighting psychiatric abuse. She points out that not only are the
pharmaceutical companies making billions of dollars selling Ritalin and
other addictive (and sometimes fatal) drugs, schools also have a vested
interest in students being diagnosed with ADD or ADHD because they then
receive money for servicing these “special needs” children.
The interview discusses how the psychiatric drugs
children are given do not address the basic problems they may be faced
with, and often lead to many other problems, such as serious physical
and psychiatric side effects, drug addiction and even death. She reasons
that difficulties can well be expected later in life when one has gotten
through school using amphetamines as a crutch, because the students have
not learned new skills or how to deal with their problems. However, the
situation is not hopeless; as the show’s guest explains, knowledge
equals power. The interview can be downloaded
here (patience is required.)
Posted: 2006/09/10
4:40 PM
Sitting Still – September 7, 2006
My breakfast reading material this morning was a complimentary copy of a
new parenting magazine called Wondertime, which I pulled randomly from
the massive pile of back-to-school stuff that has come my way over the
past few weeks. It’s a lovely production and the cover copy says to
“celebrate your child’s love of learning.” It’s published by
Disney and full of ads from VISA, HP, General Motors and cosmetic
companies, so it’s clearly a very mainstream publication. But for a
brief moment or two, I thought perhaps the life learning philosophy had
gone mainstream, at least as far as little kids go. Then I reached the
article entitled “Preschool Confidential – the three things teachers
wish our children arrived at school already knowing.”
These three apparently very important skills are
self-care (putting your own coat and shoes on), sharing…and sitting
still. The author writes: “One of the primary components of preschool
is circle time, when children sit and listen to a story or sing songs or
even do some simple academics as a group.” So parents are told to have
their pre-pre-schoolers practice sitting still by having a circle time
at home. Having a set time at home for snacks is important too,
apparently, so that your preschooler will learn how to sit and eat at
specifically scheduled times.
Of course, this could be important advice for
people who send their ever younger offspring to school and don’t want
them diagnosed with ADHD, which, by the way, I heard mentioned yesterday
in a radio ad as one of the “mental illnesses and addictions” for
which the local association for mental health could provide help. What
is an illness is the idea that such classroom passivity should be
inflicted on active, joyful three- and four-year-olds.
Posted: 2006/09/07
10:34 AM
The Power of Images – September 5, 2006
We recently had an indignant phone call from a homeschooling dad in the
US midwest who had seen a copy of the May/June issue of Life
Learning magazine. He
had some major complaints about the cover photo, which depicts a little
girl working hard at learning how to throw and catch a ball. This reader
feels strongly that the photo does a major disservice to the whole
concept of homeschooling. This young girl will, he noted, inevitably be
hit on the nose by the ball she has thrown because she is holding her
hand at the wrong angle. Since, he said, it portrays homeschooling
parents as not even being able to teach their daughters to catch a ball,
other parents will, he feels, reject the idea of homeschooling as worthless. But more
than that, as a self-declared
passionate proponent of girls’ softball, he feels that this photo
also sets that cause back into the dark ages.
If I’d taken the call, I would have pointed out
that the very essence of life learning is that people learn best through
experimentation – yes, even if that means being hit on the nose by a
softball from the height of a few feet. Perhaps this particular little
girl had a knowledgeable person (of any age) nearby with whom she could
have discussed the problem post-nose bonking. Or perhaps she would have
tried a different hand angle all on her own.
As for “girls’ softball”, maybe this little
girl was just having fun tossing a ball around. Maybe she didn’t have
aspirations to play a competitive sport. Or maybe she was on track to developing a high level of competency, based on an acquired passion for throwing and catching balls.
Posted: 2006/09/05
8:23 PM
Learning from Living …and Video Games –
September 1, 2006
I have been reading “Everything Bad is Good For You”, a rationale
for how popular culture is making us smarter rather than dumbing us
down. It’s an interesting hypothesis, similar to the article we ran
two years ago in Life Learning by Pam Laricchia entitled
“Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Video Games.” Book author
Steven Johnson compares the cognitive stimulation of a ten-year-old 100
years ago to today, which he says includes “following dozens of
professional sports teams; shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to
e-mail in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through
immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media
technologies without flinching.” He continues, “Their classrooms may
be overcrowded and their teachers underpaid, but in the world outside of
school, their brains are being challenged at every turn by new forms of
media and technology that cultivate sophisticated problem-solving
skills.”
Although Johnson doesn’t say so, this is a great
argument for life learning. There is another not-bad one (plus a plug
for Life Learning magazine) in yesterday’s Kansas City Star. Thanks to the local unschooling group there, the members of which
I assume passed along our contact info to the reporter.
Posted: 2006/09/01
3:48 PM
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