giving ourselves

Photo by Jodi of Che and Fidel. Jodi lives in Australia and is "..enjoying the rhythm of the season. The slow days and the early nights. Also the wider eyes and faster feet of Ché. We explore together now. Wandering, digging, making peppermint and mud pies on the verandah. It's special. I think I'm finally adjusting to motherhood - looking after a family and a home. It's peaceful here right now. The little one quietly plays, the Dada hums to the music and I potter and bake. There's blooms on the table and beautiful scents filling the air. Despite the tiredness I feel nourished and nurtured. Life is just as it should be."  

"Most of what they need, you have been giving them since they were born. As I have said, they need access. They need a chance, sometimes, for honest, serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes for joking, play and foolishness; or sometimes, for tenderness, sympathy, and comfort. They need, much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not to feel shut out of it, in short to go some of the places you go, see and do some of the things that interest you, get to know some of your friends, find out what you did when you were little and before they were born. They need to have their questions answered, or at least heard and attended to -- if you don't know, say 'I don't know'. They need to get to know more and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care of kids. They need some friends their own age, but not dozens of them; two or three, at most half a dozen, is as many real friends any child can have at one time. Perhaps above all, they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm, times when there's nothing to do."

- Quote by John Holt from Growing Without Schooling Issue #1

back soon

Hello Friends! I am getting an early start on the weekend and am off to savor the last bits of summer + get things organized for the new school year. Did the summer fly by or what? I'll be back in this space sometime next week.

curriculum for life

A couple of quotes from John Taylor Gatto today..

Gatto was a teacher in New York City's public schools for over 30 years and is a recipient of the New York City Teacher of the Year award and New York State Teacher of the Year. Gatto's teaching experiences led him to the sad conclusion that compulsory government schooling has little to do with education. New to his books? You might start with Dumbing Us Down -- a short read with lots of food for thought.

(Photo by Helen)

"We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found -- in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built -- then we would be so self-sufficient we would not even need the material 'sufficiency' which our global 'experts' are so insistent we be concerned about."

"This great crisis that we witness in our schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the term 'community' hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major actor in this tragedy, as it is a major actor in the widening gulf among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who sleep on the streets."

-Excerpts from Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

free schools

Free Schools, or Democratic Schools as they are sometimes called, are similar to some homeschools in that they share a commitment to recognize children’s natural curiosity and adaptive drives. These schools, which are growing in numbers throughout the United States, encourage children to have a full voice in decisions about their school by allowing “self-directed” learning -- there are no compulsory classes, no tests, no grades, and no external pressure to follow a predetermined educational path. Check out The Brooklyn Free School as one example of how these children are learning.

(Photo by Helen)

"We have to be careful with words. It's a miracle they ever mean the same thing to any two people. Often, they don't. Words like "love," "peace," "trust," "democracy" -- everyone brings to these words a lifetime of experiences, a world view, and we know how rarely we have these in common with anyone else.

Take the word "class." I don't know what it means in cultures that don't have schools. Maybe they don't even have the word. To most people reading this, the word conveys a wealth of images: a room with a "teacher" and "students" in it, the students sitting at desks and receiving "instruction" from the teacher, who sits or stands before them. It also conveys much more: a "class period," the fixed time when the class takes place; homework; a textbook, which is the subject matter of the class clearly laid out for all the students.

And it conveys more: boredom, frustration, humiliation, achievement, failure, competition.

[At Sudbury Valley] a class is an arrangement between two parties. It starts with someone, or several persons, who decide they want to learn something specific -- say, algebra, or French, or physics, or spelling, or pottery. A lot of times, they figure out how to do it on their own. They find a book, or a computer program, or they watch someone else. When that happens, it isn't a class. It's just plain learning.

Then there are the times they can't do it alone. They look for someone to help them, someone who will agree to give them exactly what they want to make the learning happen. When they find that someone, they strike a deal: "We'll do this and that, and you'll do this and that -- OK?" If it's OK with all the parties, they have just formed a class."

- Excerpt from Free At Last by Daniel Greenberg (via Sudbury Valley School)

and the winner is...

Today's winner of one annual subscription to the foodie magazine of choice is:

#5 -- Nicole

Sign me up! Ya gotta love a cooking magazine.

Yay! Congrats to Nicole and thank you so much to all for playing along. Hope you are all having a lovely weekend!