Education

Rethinking Schools and Schooling

• School is Bad for Children, by John Holt
• Why Schools Don’t Educate, by John Taylor Gatto
• Stop Stealing Dreams (What is School For?), by Seth Godin
• Dear Public School: It’s Not Me, It’s You., by Kelly Meier
• School is still ruining your chances to learn, by Seth Godin
• Why Our Coercive System of Schooling Should Topple, by Peter Gray
• The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto
• The Right to Control One’s Learning, by John Holt
• Respectful Learning: The Education Our Children Deserve, by Sara
• Re-Building the K-12 Operating System, by Grant Lichtman
• Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find, by Alfie Kohn
• A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found, by Ted Dintersmith
• Beyond Meaningless Curriculum: An Email from a Student, by Marc Prensky
• I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems, by Sara Holbrook
• Confusing Goals and Processes – A Summer Reflection on Lawns and Education, by Susan Blum
• My Struggle With “Education”, by Scott Noelle
• Academic predictors of adult maturity and competence, by Douglas H. Heath
• A Brief History of Education, by Peter Gray
• Summer Slide? There’s No Such Thing, by Kerry McDonald
• Inverse Relationship Between GPA and Innovative Orientation, by Peter Gray
• Teaching Strategies That Work! (Just Don’t Ask “Work to Do What?”), by Alfie Kohn

About Teaching

• A Dozen Essential Guidelines for Educators, by Alfie Kohn
• To High School English Teachers (and All Teachers), by P.L. Thomas
• What’s the Real Purpose of Classroom Management?, by Alfie Kohn
• Challenging Students…And How to Have More of Them, by Alfie Kohn
• The Baby Is Not “Getting Ready”, by John Holt
• Another Example of Less Teaching Leading to More Learning, by Peter Gray
• The Joy and Sorrow of Rereading Holt’s “How Children Learn”, by Peter Gray
• Skills, Big Ideas, and Getting Grades Out of the Way, by Patrick Henry Winston

Teaching Reading

• The Reading Wars: Why Natural Learning Fails in Classrooms, by Peter Gray
• How to Create Nonreaders: Reflections on Motivation, Learning, and Sharing Power, by Alfie Kohn
• At a Loss for Words: How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to be Poor Readers, by Emily Hanford
• Children Teach Themselves to Read, by Peter Gray
• Teaching Literacy, Not Literacy Skills, by P.L. Thomas
• The Things Schools Ruin: Poetry Edition, by P.L. Thomas

Teaching Math

• Why Do Americans Stink at Math?, by Elizabeth Green
• And ‘Rithmetic, by Daniel Greenberg
• Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning, by Peter Gray
• Math Instruction versus Natural Math: Benezet’s Example, by Laura Grace Weldon
• What Works Better than Traditional Math Instruction: Why the Basics Just Don’t Add Up, by Alfie Kohn
• The Benefits of Natural Math, by Laura Grace Weldon
• Should we stop making kids memorize times tables?, by Jill Barshay
• Fluency Without Fear: Research Evidence on the Best Ways to Learn Math Facts, by Jo Boaler
• Learn math without fear, Stanford expert says, by Clifton B. Parker
• A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart
• Changing the Way we Teach Math – an Interview with Paul Lockhart of “A Mathematician’s Lament”, by Tracy Stevens
• When Less Is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in School, by Peter Gray
• “How old is the shepherd?” — The problem that shook school mathematics, by Junaid Mubeen
• Math in the Real World: Things That Don’t Look Like Math But Really Are, by Rebecca McClure
• Most Math Problems Do Not Have a Unique Right Answer, by Keith Devlin
• Natural Math: 100+ Activities & Resources, by Laura Grace Weldon
• 5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus, by Luba Vangelova

Early Education

• How Early Academic Training Retards Intellectual Development, by Peter Gray
• Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm, by Peter Gray
• Much Too Early, by David Elkind
• Head Start’s Value Lies in Care, Not Academic Training, by Peter Gray

Alternatives to Traditional Schools

• How do Unschoolers Turn Out?, by Luba Vangelova
• Harnessing Children’s Natural Ways of Learning, by Luba Vangelova
• The Six Optimizing Conditions: Self-Directed Education works best when the following conditions are present…, by The Alliance for Self-Directed Learning
• Everyone’s A Student, Everyone’s A Teacher, by Rachel Munzig
• School Is War, Prison, Factory, Machine, Business, Game, Life….And Other Metaphors: recommending Permaculture, by Susan Blum
• The Natural Environment for Children’s Self-Education, by Peter Gray

Rethinking the “Word Gap”

• Is the 30 Million Word Gap a stat we should be using?, by Lisa Nowlain
• Selling the Language Gap, by Susan D. Blum and Kathleen C. Riley
• ‘The Language Gap’ — Liberal Guilt Creates Another Not-So-Magic Bullet, by Susan D. Blum
• Invited Forum: Bridging the “Language Gap”, many authors through the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
• Back-and-forth exchanges boost children’s brain response to language, by Anne Trafton
• Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds, by Douglas Quenqua, The New York Times
• Stop blaming poor parents for their children’s vocabulary, by Paul Thomas
• Making Millions off of the 30-Million-Word Gap, by Educational Linguist
• Ten Best Ways To Encourage Toddlers To Talk, by Janet Lansbury
• Debunking the “language gap”, by Eric J. Johnson
• The “Word Gap”: A Reader, by P.L. Thomas
• This Is Not My Opinion, by P.L. Thomas

Social Class & Race Issues

• What These Children Are Like, by Ralph Ellison
• Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies, by William Deresiewicz
• The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life: William Deresiewicz explains how an elite education can lead to a cycle of grandiosity and depression, by Lauren Cassani Davis
• The Problem With Rich Kids, by Suniya S. Luthar Ph.D
• Sometimes ‘poor little rich kids’ really are poor little rich kids, by Suniya S. and Luthar Barry

Technology in Schools

• Beyond Ed-Tech: Making and Buying “Dedicated Educational Technology is a Needless Waste of Our Resources, Marc Prensky

Narcissism in Education

• When Narcissus Teaches: Teaching, Mentoring and the Danger of Narcissism, by Carol Lakey Hess
• Narcissistic Teaching (and how to change it), by Ian Byrd
• Observations of Narcissist Educators, by Dr. Gary Ackerman

Trauma, Abuse & Recovery

Child Abuse

• Spanking is counterproductive and dangerous, by Alice Miller
• Every Smack is a Humiliation – A Manifesto, by Alice Mille
• “It is Never Right to Hit a Child”: Interview by Noreen Taylor
• Alice Miller Interview: The Roots of Violence, by Alice Mille
• Adolf Hitler: How Could a Monster Succeed in Blinding a Nation?, by Alice Miller
• Preface to From Rage to Courage, by Alice Miller
• How Adults Can Survive A Childhood of Violence and Untruth, by Michael Pastore
• The Wellsprings of Horror in the Cradle, by Alice Miller
• Mary and Joseph – Parents to Emulate, by Alice Miller
  
• Brief Thoughts on Reading the Works of Alice Miller, by Lucien X. Lombardo
• How to Intervene:The Safety of Kids is Everybody’s Business, by Irene van der Zande 
• There is no debate about hitting children – it’s just wrong, by Paul Thomas
• Spare the Rod, Respect the Child: Abuse Is Not Discipline, by P. L. Thomas

Childhood Trauma

• Developmental Trauma Disorder: A new, rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD
• Developmental trauma disorder: the effects of child abuse and neglect
  by Maureen V. Kilrain, MS, PA-C

Diagnosing Children

• DSM-5 Diagnoses in Kids Should Always Be Written in Pencil, by Allan J. Frances

Autism & Abuse

• Autism and Behaviorism: New Research Adds to an Already Compelling Case Against ABA, by Alfie Kohn
• Autism as an Infantile Post-trauma Stress Disorder: A Hypothesis, by Yi C and Zhou T
• Autism and Behaviorism: New Research Adds to an Already Compelling Case Against ABA, by Alfie Kohn
• If Not ABA, Then What?, by Maxfield Sparrow
• Why I Left ABA, by Steph from Socially Anxious Advocate
• I Abused Children for a Living, by birdmadgrrl
• When Disabled Students Are Abused, by Amy Sequenzia
• My Thoughts on ABA, by Amy Sequenzia