Fuck Yeah Radical Education

I know I’m barely active here already, but just wanted to let you folks know that you can find me other places! On Facebook at I’m Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write.

On Twitter @idzie 

"I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time.

I don’t think laziness was ever at fault.

Ever.

"If research shows that stress is literally toxic to the human body, and for so many kids school creates stress, why aren’t we talking about that? I’m not equating school with child abuse (although in some school situations that equation unfortunately applies). I am saying that as long as we’re segregating our children into buildings every day, dictating their every move, evaluating their intelligence and abilities based on their performance of tasks we assign, and throwing them into spaces where they too often face name calling, humiliation, sexual harassment and sometimes sexual or physical assault, we ought to also think about the consequences."

“I feel like I’m working towards my death. The constant demands on my time since 5th grade are just going to continue through graduation, into college, and then into my job. It’s like I’m on an endless treadmill with no time for living.”

“When we chose to support our daughter, she completely blossomed,” Michelle recalled. “To know that it was safe for her to be herself, she was able to really open up and embrace who she was.”

"A starting point for supporting the still-invisible trans kids is to stop dividing kids for activities based on sex and gender, Travers said. “You don’t know it, but it puts them in crisis.”

Another absolutely fantastic piece from Carol Black. A must read! And as usual with anything by her, there are so many terrific quotes from this piece I had a lot of trouble picking.

"There is something profoundly deadening to a curious, engaged child about the feeling of being watched and measured, or even, some studies suggest, the anticipation of being measured. Sure, some kids seem to dig it. They preen and pose for it, they compete with their friends for it, they want to be better than everybody else. But everybody can’t be better than everybody else, and this business of being constantly scrutinized and compared to others does something insidious to the life of a child. I've seen kids drop what they're doing in an instant when they realize they're being observed in an appraising way. A wall goes up. The lights go out."

"But the power of the gaze goes beyond the numbers and letters used to quantify it. It exists in looks and tones and body language, in words and in the spaces between words. It is a way of looking at another human being, of confronting another human life; it is a philosophical stance, an emotional stance, a political stance, an exercise of power. As philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, the stance of true relationship says to the other, "I–Thou;" the evaluative gaze says "I–It." It says, "I am the subject; you are the object. I know what you are, I know what you should be, I know what 'standards' you must meet." It is a god-like stance, which is actually a big deal even if you think you are a fair and friendly god."

"The evaluative gaze of school is so constant a presence, so all-pervasive an eye, that many people have come to believe that children would actually not grow and develop without it. They believe that without their "feedback," without their constant "assessment," a child's development would literally slow or even stop. They believe that children would not learn from the things they experience and do and see and hear and make and read and imagine unless they have an adult to "assess" them (or unless the adult teaches them to "self-assess," which generally means teaching them to internalize the adult gaze.) For people whose experience is with children inside the school system, it may seem self-evident that this is true. For people whose experience is with children outside the school system, it may seem like believing that an acorn would not grow into an oak tree unless you measure it and give it your opinion. Because an oak tree does not actually require your opinion, and believe it or not, 90% of the time, neither does a child.