The more articles I read about the future of schools, the more it seems to me that what everyone thinks would be good for children is what unschoolers are already doing and in fact have been doing for several decades.
A year and a half ago we made the decision to move to another country; we relocated for all sorts of reasons but chief among them was the intention of providing our children with a new context: a different culture, language, place to learn.
I asked a question on Twitter earlier today about historical novels for my eldest daughter (she’s thirteen).
Yesterday my youngest daughter showed me the latest blog post she was working on (it’s about poisonous animals). She’s been writing it on the iPad and my initial suggestion was that she should try writing it on a laptop so that the keyboard was easier to use. Her response was that she preferred the…
From birth onwards, at every point in our lives, we’re fully-formed human beings; neither too young or too old. There’s nothing else we need to be and no more we need to learn.
In this respect, the notion that people have “potential” is a false one. The idea of potential…
Weight training works by pushing muscles to breaking point and then allowing them to recover, and grow. Formal education doesn’t work this way. It supports and guides, providing children with a safe environment to acquire knowledge.
The recent launch of Pokemon Go has spawned the inevitable rash of articles about how how we can harness the game’s popularity for all sorts of alternative outcomes, but most irritating of all perhaps is the way the formal education community has sought to use it as a way of (and there’s no nicer way I…
A couple of days ago my girls suddenly decided to learn coding.
There’s a lot of theory about failure and how good/useful/essential it is, but like many educational concepts it’s one of those things that hangs around at the back of my head: I might agree with its importance even if I haven’t given it a lot of thought on a personal level.
