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The message our children need to hear but almost never do

January 17, 2016

The rich middle- and high-school kids [Arizona State professor Suniya] Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.* They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft. More »

Teach Your Children Well: Unhook Them From Technology

January 11, 2016

In the far corner of the desolate looking yard outside Mountain Oak Charter School, a boy of 9 or 10 is digging a hole. A few other children are standing nearby, periodically checking his progress and taking a turn with the shovel. Mountain Oak is a charter school that offers an education inspired by Waldorf, a progressive model that encourages exploration of the natural world and rejects the use of technology in the classroom and even in the home. When I ask later in the afternoon about the ditch digging, eighth-grade teacher Jeffrey Holmes smiles. “Oh, they’re playing Minecraft,” he says, referring to the popular online game. Last year “they had a whole system of ditches and they were bartering with rocks too.” More »

Working toward a better world: Camphill California

January 5, 2016

When my youngest son was a freshman in college, he told me he’d figured out that it took three connections to make a friend. Being in the the same dorm was one connection, having a class together made two, but it took another, third connection, to build friendship. Although he was an early adopter of social media, he wasn’t counting that. This comment was intriguing in terms of what it takes to build community. It also spoke of the needs and vulnerability of young people. Clearly his major concern was not connecting with the great thinkers, movers and shakers through the centuries, which is presumably what a college education is about, but rather connecting with a few good folk to hang out with. More »

A teacher gave her 8-year-old students iPads and discovered one huge drawback

December 16, 2015

But there was a cost. Kids stopped conversing with each other as much. Sure, maybe they didn’t argue, or hurt each other’s feelings as much—something that happens a lot on third grade—but that’s because they weren’t engaging with each other as often. She recalls one rainy day when her students came into the classroom after lunch and she pulled out a box of LEGOs, which only a weeks earlier had been cause for celebration. No one wanted to play with them. They wanted their iPads. The classroom went silent. More »

Growing a Waldorf-Inspired Approach in a Public School District: New research study from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) praises the Alice Birney School in Sacramento

December 9, 2015

Alice Birney Waldorf-Inspired School, a public K-8 school of choice within the Sacramento City Unified School District, provides a powerful example of an alternative educational approach within a public system. Rather than focusing on preparation for standardized tests, Waldorf students are deeply involved in a full range of expressive arts – ranging from watercolors and music to knitting and physical activity; they learn science by gardening and investigating natural phenomena, mathematics by designing and building things of practical value, history from studying biography and the human meaning of historical events, English language arts by writing their own books and extended accounts of what they are learning. The school’s attention to comprehensive student development, including their social-emotional, physical and artistic development has profoundly shaped its graduates into young adults. More »

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