My son outgrew his violin.  It's always a bittersweet time when we move up a size in violins.  I saved his first violin.  The whole thing is the size of an adult hand.  At the time, it looked just right for him and it didn't strike me as particularly small, but the teacher told me,…

All forced education is bad for kids because it tells them that they're too stupid to pick out what they're interested in, and too dull to depend on their curiosity. But there's a unique problem with forcing kids to go to gym class.  It ruins kids' self‑esteem in different ways than other types of forced…

The mental and emotional developmental rates of teens in high school is the equivalent of the developmental rate of somebody who is put in jail, according to Joseph Allen, professor of psychology, in his book Escaping the Endless Adolescence.  Teen brains are developing at a very fast rate at that point in life, but they…

This is a guest post from Anna Keller. Who just took her son out of school.  We've just pulled our son out of a private, academically rigorous preparatory school. He'll finish 8th grade in a minimally supervised online program and spend most of his day in a baseball training program for high school-aged athletes.

We talk about the health of children all the time. But we rarely talk about anything that would lead parents to take their kids out of school. School is so sacred that people who are supposed to be protecting kids are scared to come out and say what kids really need.

The New York Post went nuts over the fact that my friend Lisa, who is the director of digital literacy and citizenship in the NYC Department of Education and makes $170K a year, is advocating that parents opt out of standardized testing.  Here's the article.

The U. S. Department of Education is trying out extended school years. The three-year pilot project will affect about 20,000 students in 40 schools in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee.

We can legislate all we want about making bullying against the law. But the truth is that we would have no bullying if we did not ship kids off to be isolated from the majority of adults for the majority of their days. Kids are much less likely to bully when they are intermingled with…

We need to talk about the school bus. In other cultures, people admit that school starts when you get on the bus. In The Netherlands, for example, the kids pedal themselves to school on the bus. Absurd, yes, but the fundamental acknowledgement that the schoolday begins on the bus seems positive to me.

This is a photo of my son taking a lesson from the cellist Hans Jensen. It was not like any teacher-student relationship I've ever seen. My son was not playing the right notes, and after the tenth time of playing the wrong note, Hans said, "This is just ridiculous. You are being stupid. Just play the…

The media is constantly reporting that it's harder for girls to get into college than boys. Because girls do better in high school, and more girls apply to college. So, even though 60% of the bachelor's degrees are awarded to women, it's still harder for girls to get into college.

The difference between extroverts and introverts is how they think. An introvert thinks silently, and when he has come up with an answer, he talks. An extrovert thinks out loud. The process of talking helps an extrovert think.

Amazingly, a lot of people who read this blog are sending their kids to public school. At first I thought those parents were crazy, since I'm constantly telling them their school sucks. But then I realized that these parents are incredibly open-minded and genuinely trying to get information to help make good decisions. This post…

Here's a photo of my family on a trip to Florida. Something that is totally unremarkable for a family photo is that everyone is different ages. Of course people who are different ages play together. The kids who want to swim go in the ocean. The kids who want to build sand castles go find…

This is a picture of a teacher in Providence public schools reading his resignation letter. He teaches second grade, and he's fed up with the changes schools have made in order to ensure that kids are good test takers. At the end of his letter, what's clear is that a huge result of test-focused schooling…

Picasso was very opinionated, and he even had opinions on teaching, (which I found via Daring Greatly). Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children?

I have a box of all the stuff my kids brought home from their time in traditional school that made me want to homeschool them. I wish I had known that I was going to have a blog about homeschooling, because when the box was nearly full, I started throwing stuff out. I worried that…

Doctors have finally started talking about the long-standing practice to medicate low-income kids with Adderall so they can compete in the school environment. To those of you who follow the Adderall debates, this confession should come as no surprise. People in both the medical community and the academic community have been predicting school would come…

I just finished reading the book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. It's the story of a Hmong girl with epilepsy. In Hmong culture, epilepsy is a gift to the soul. So the parents wouldn't give her medicine. The book is about the cultural struggle between the parents and the American medical community….

The first news I saw of the Chicago teacher's strike was a headline on the Chicago Tribune that said, "I'm going to lose my job."  It was not a quote from a teacher. It was a quote from a parent, who was worried about the time she was taking off from work because she had…