Central to our vision of what makes Self-Directed Education work for young people (and one of the reasons conventional schooling does not) is age mixing. We do not segregate Learners by age, and can have Learners as young as four-years-old and as…
read moreMany organizations use the word community as a buzzword, and particularly so in education. We believe this is in large part because educational institutions so often utilize practices and structures that are isolating at best and dehumanizing at worst, and buzzwords can often distract people…
read more“Passions aren’t ‘found,’ they’re developed.” That’s what Carol Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford argue in a recent Atlantic article by Olga Khazan. We’ve been slow to repost this article because we wanted to make sure we responded to it appropriately. And…
read moreAntonio Buehler, founder of Abrome was invited to the Laura Bush Community Library to speak about how to tackle bullying in schools. This presentation leaned heavily on the bullying series we provided earlier this ‘academic’ year. Those posts are listed below. This…
read moreNow that the school year is winding down, many parents and their children are shifting their focus to a wide variety of camps to fill up the summer calendar. Some parents simply need daycare for their children when school is out. Others…
read moreBullying is not the only problem with schooling, but it is one that literally brings violence into children’s lives, and in worst case scenarios it ends lives. In this essay series we laid out five actionable steps that schools need to take…
read moreWe previously pointed out that the first step to ending school bullying was to end age segregation.[1] The second step is to eliminate competition and grades. The most overt (and odious) function of schooling is a sorting function. Edward Thorndike, the father…
read moreA 2013 CDC Study found that 19.6% of youths had been bullied on school property in the previous 12 months, and 14.8% had been electronically bullied.[1] In a 2011 National Crime Victimization Survey, close to 1.2 million students reported that someone was…
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