IDEA Blog

Leave high school early to go to college?

What should you do if you’re a high school junior who feels that spending one more year in high school would be a waste of time?

A thread on College Confidential raises that question, and has generated a lot of interesting responses. Here’s an excerpt from the original post:

I am a junior in high school and because I seem like I am more mature and academically way ahead of my peers (especially in the math and sciences) at the moment, am considering an early leave from high school. But the thing is, I cannot get a graduation degree unless I complete four years of high school. Nevertheless, my desire for early admission into college has never ceased because (a) I know what I want to study and roughly what I want to do in life and (b) I feel like my senior year in high school will be somewhat a waste of my time since I would have practically exhausted all the resources available to me.

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For a thriving economy, educate creative thinkers

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables—to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies—will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college—more education—but we need more of them with the right education. ...

... Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now—not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

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The First Three Minutes of Unschooling

Even though we went to mediocre public schools and are the products of lovingly conventional parenting, my wife and I are trying to create our own family quite differently by embracing attachment parenting and, more recently, unschooling our children.

We want our two young boys to remain the wise, compassionate, and engaged souls they are today. We want them to avoid the coercive, limiting regime of schooling we experienced which might, as with us, render their learning passive and repress their will to freedom and self-expression.

At four years old, after weeks of talking over educational options, my oldest son Ezra decided he wanted to go to pre-school. After visiting several, we...

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Welcome to Op-Education

Hello, and welcome to Op-Education. I am delighted to have you as a reader. My name is Shawn Gaillard, and it seems like I will be blogging pretty regularly for IDEA. I must say that I am truly excited!

As this is my introductory post, I suppose offering some background information about myself might be nice. I am twenty-three years old and live in Tempe, Arizona where I attend Arizona State University as a student of Philosophy. I am a passionate musician, a good friend, a dedicated vegan, and an open-minded biped if I do say so myself. I enjoy thinking outside the box, as well as exploring many different methods for accomplishing goals that are usually pursued in routine ways. I...

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What are schools really teaching kids?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school.

Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

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If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived

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When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’

More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn’t enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said, for who they are, not for what they do.

As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. In effect, we’re given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they’re good, withhold affection when they’re not. ...

... In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci* and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.

* Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation

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What Is Uncharted Parenting?

For anyone dedicated to the ideals of democracy, peace, and equality in education, parenting can be just as complex as it is beautiful; just as frustrating as satisfying. That's because we're in new territory, endeavoring to respond to a failed schooling system and a troubled society in need of new solutions. We want to raise happy families that are resilient enough to find purpose and security despite our economic and educational systems showing ever greater signs of distress. We know that, to create the world we want, we must begin where we are. So we pour our hearts and souls into parenting our children in way that reflects our courage and hope for a better society.

The story of...

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Get It Wrong Before You Google to Learn It Better

We live in an era where the answer to almost any fact-based question is no further than a Google search away, but Scientific American highlights a study suggesting subjects forced to get something wrong before being told the answer learn it better.

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Teens’ 12-screen theater project premieres

Searchlights will mark the VIP opening for a new movie complex in Petaluma tonight, but it will really be a celebration of the tenacity of seven teenage girls who shared a dream and made it come true.

If not for the “Superb Seven,” as the girls have dubbed themselves, Petaluma’s 55,000 or so residents would still have to trek to Rohnert Park or Novato to catch a film.

Through sheer will and charm, the girls lobbied local politicians, negotiated with theater owners, won support from Lucasfilm executives and ultimately persuaded a developer to build a theater as the anchor of a $100 million downtown redevelopment project that otherwise might not have gotten off the ground.

“If they didn’t believe in us in the beginning, they sure as hell believe us now,” said one of the teens, 16-year-old Ashley Ditmer.

The girls—Noëlle Bisson, Elizabeth Comstock, Ditmer, Liza Hall, Sarah Marcia, Taylor Norman and Madison Webb—are all 16, except Comstock, who is 15.

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