Albert Einstein once said that it is a miracle curiosity survives formal education. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t. When my husband Rolf and I decided almost 40 years ago that we wouldn’t send our then-unborn daughters to school, we knew that curiosity was one of the precious traits we didn’t want to risk them losing. In [...]
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The peaceful school
“You must be so patient.” If I have heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. I must be so patient. Patient to homeschool my kids. What is patience anyway? According to Wikipedia patience is “the state of endurance under difficult circumstances, which can mean persevering in the face of delay or provocation without acting on [...]
Education for a green society
There is a strong connection between the business world and the modern institution of schooling. Historians of education have explained how schools as we know them were profoundly shaped by the influence of business leaders and by educators who adopted theories and techniques from the economic realm of society. Many major turning points, new initiatives, [...]
How to listen and how to be heard
Do you really want a dead cat on your desk?” When a teacher took a parent’s phone call at the end of another busy school day, she was taken aback by the question. She couldn’t figure out why a first grader in her class came home telling his mother that their recently deceased family pet [...]
The lifelong journey
It was a cloudy day in April, 2004. It was cloudy in my mind. And storm clouds were brewing over my son as he refused to write his name on his painting. I knew the path we were traveling was getting weedy and we needed to find another way. We are now extremely happy with [...]
Pass the Elmer’s please
“Education is the Glue of Democracy,” reads a billboard towering over I-90 just outside the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It is a sticky business these days, isn’t it?” I mused to myself as I zoomed by. Then a more serious thought: “Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the right of every student [...]
Toward participatory democracy
As I pursued research for my book on the 1960s-era free school movement, I came across numerous references to the notion of “participatory democracy” as an alternative to modern political ideologies and practices. (1) Many of the young activists who formed SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and other radical groups during that period of [...]
Learning is child’s work
Children’s ability to learn experientially through day-to-day living is the foundation of what happens in democratic schools and unschooling homes alike. Part of that experience is kids doing real work in the real world, motivated by their own real interests and goals. It is not pseudo work where kids are “allowed” to “help” adults or [...]
Education without coercion
Our education system was designed to fight and win political and economic wars. We needed people to build bombs, radar and airplanes. We now have different problems, such as climate change, hunger, toxic waste, terrorism and looming shortages of clean water. These issues require new types of solutions. Unfortunately, our public education system is not [...]
Thoughts on freedom in learning
This discussion was published in 2006 in the Hungarian journal Tani-tani. Peter Foti is a parent and educational researcher interested in democratic education. Peter Foti: We are of the same age, both of us born in 1956, what in the history of Hungary was a very remarkable date. There is a family story, that my [...]
