Back in 1967 – the Observer newspaper in the UK organized an opportunity for children to write on the subject: “The school that I’d like”. The results became a Penguin book edited by Edward Blishen and a collection of opinions that provided a trenchant critique of school and school life. The students wrote with freshness, passion and insight and their…
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Regeneration
This July marks the ninetieth anniversary of the start of third Ypres – better known as the battle of Passchendaele . It was an offensive designed to break out of the stalemate of the salient – the bump in the line that bulged around the Flemish town of Ieper, known in French as Ypres and to the thousands of English…
The Truth About the Flying Cats and the Cartons of Stout
What struck me about Operation Cat Drop – the flying cats of Borneo story – was not the unintended chain of events but the detail about the cats. Fourteen thousand cats! Where on earth would they be able to round up 14.000 cats? Could it possibly be true? And how could I find out? In addition to the wide circulation…
Write a Novel, Change the World: Use your Laptop as a brick
Gary Stager came to Poughkeepsie Day School at the end of March and he began with a lively Vassar College/ PDS presentation Ten Things to do with a Laptop. His title is a deliberate nod to a groundbreaking 1971 article by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon “Twenty Things to Do with a Computer.” They had twenty on their list but…
What’s the matter with kids today?*
Why can’t they be like we were? Perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?* BYE BYE BIRDIE (The Musical) (Music by Charles Strouse / Lyrics by Lee Adams) Technology Literacy and the MySpace Generation That’s the title of an article by Susan Mclester in Technology and Education (March 15, 2007) It includes the following: Listening to the…
The Joy of Learning and the Expensive English Toy
The Indian National Curriculum Framework opens with this most telling childhood anecdote from the poet Rabindranath Tagore: When I was a child I had the freedom to make my own toys out of trifles and create my own games from imagination…One day in this paradise of our childhood, entered a temptation from the market world of the adult. A toy…
People, Planet, Purpose
“It is easier to change the course of history than to change a history course”. “Proposals for change in schools are often met with a thousand points of no“ Liz, Julie and I are at the NAIS annual conference in Denver. We were joined by Trace who gave a great presentation yesterday. (On that, more later). The theme of the…
The Paradox of Hedonism
The impulse toward pleasure can be self-defeating. We fail to attain pleasures if we deliberately seek them. This is the essence of what the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick in the The Methods of Ethics called the paradox of hedonism. This came to mind as I was considering the necessity for all of us to be resourceful, self-sustaining learners for life. Learning doesn’t…