"The Asbury Community School in Albuquerque, New Mexico existed from 1978-1985; during which time I attended as a young girl. It was a non-traditional school with an open campus, a diverse student body and curriculum that included yoga & self-directed learning. Asbury closed its doors in 1985, after which the school disappeared and its existence faded. I gathered the memories and traces of the students, teachers and parents of Asbury in order to reinstate the history of the school into its former buildings and the Sawmill neighborhood of Albuquerque. By engaging the ethereal nature of memories, the fuzzy and fractures fragrnents become a testimonial to a lost school and begin to fill a gap in the history of the buildings. The memories are placed back into the rooms and spaces in which they first occurred and a palimpsestual history emerges."

"My son checks online about a college out east he’s curious about. He picks up a few facts and data. And suddenly he’s panicking about his class schedule. We see natural disasters occur – many times live on our televisions or computers – and we become overcome with a desire to help. Again, some of these things are extraordinarily good. But they illustrate the demands placed on our shoulders by having easy access to information.

Technology makes it nearly impossible for many kids to get a break. When I was a 16-year-old who had a bad day, I’d go home, put some headphones on and listen to my favorite album until my dad called me down for dinner. Today, that same 16-year-old might toss on headphones and listen to music on their iPhone. But they also are checking Facebook and texting at the same time. They still are getting sucked into the drama of their life and their friends."

"I rarely hear anyone boast about photographic memory anymore. It's less impressive today as we can all supplement our own brains with an algorithmic search and the internet's seemingly infinite archival capacity. But this is still a period of transition…"

"We could accumulate hundreds of thousands of images throughout our lives but they will never taste like anything. An image represents and verifies a memory but the rest is left to imagination. Every essential moment of a child's life is documented if he was born in the West. With digital album after album for every birthday, every Christmas, he will never struggle to remember what his childhood home looked like. That reaching, that vague warm feeling for a place one remembers but cannot see; that is a sense now growing extinct.

A child today grows up in a never forgotten house."

"GRCC English professor Mursalata Muhummad interviews journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Presentend by the Bob and Aliecia Woodrick Diversity Learning Center at Grand Rapids Community College."

"The exhibit starts with works that JMW Turner painted when he was a teenager and ends with modern works commissioned just for the exhibit. Included with all this are some amazing insights into what it means to be young in a society where school dominates their time and choices and the real world is all too often off limits to youth. The curators capture some significant moments in both art and literature about what it means to be a teenager in the past and present. If you're in Britain I hope you'll be able to visit the exhibit. If not, here are some thought-provoking excerpts from essays in the catalog."

"…if you’re broke or have less education, your child’s more likely to go undiagnosed/misdiagnosed & be treated as slow or mentally retarded…even if you get the “right” diagnosis, the therapies offered & your ability to take advantage of them will vary wildly depending on your resources. Maybe especially time.

…just as autism stories overwhelmingly focus on children, not adults, they also overwhelmingly focus on the wealthy, not the poor…& the link between autism & poverty is extraordinary once a child becomes an adult — what “independence” means in that context is very different.

This is also to say that while all these additional considerations are important, fuck that shit. Because autism does cut across class, race, gender, sexual identity & physical ability, etc…because of that, it changes what we mean by diversity, what kinds of diversity count, what diversity we ought to care about, & how we think about all of these issues of identity & privilege taken all together."

"In the 1980s, Silicon Valley was populated by lefties and hippies who dreamed of a computer revolution. One of the pioneers recalls how the internet was born."<br />
<br />
"What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses rejected in the playing of social status games, but sterling alpha males. Legions of perfect specimens seem to have grown up in manicured childhoods, nothing scrappy about them. When children started to be raised perfectly in the 1990s, chauffeured from one play date to the next, I wondered what world they would want as adults. Socialism? Facebook and similar designs seem to me continuations of the artificial order we gave children during the boom years."<br />
<br />
[via: ªªhttp://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/9474103819/what-is-strangest-in-the-recent-waves-of-young ]ºº

"Our age tends to confuse boredom with seriousness, and to suspect anything that does not remind it that it is a grown-up, ashamed of amusing itself. This was summed up by the famous remark that Picasso and I heard from a spectator about outrage over Parade: ‘If I had known that it was so silly, I would have brought the children.’…

Alain Resnais writes to me ‘What a lesson in freedom you give all of us!’ – a remark of which I am proud. It is no doubt this freedom that our critics describe as childishness. Do they, our critics, know how to walk lightly on the surface of deep waters? Do they, in their passion for modernism, know that people will soon smile at the knights of space as they do at the first motorists, hidden behind their glasses and their fur coats? Do they know what is implied in being a judge? Do they know that the really fine science is to forget one’s learning?…"

"Some days you and I didn’t make it to school. Some days you and I would begin to walk and begin to think about school and begin to think about not being there that day. On those days you and I would cross the street to the left. We would not continue straight to Map Ball. We would go left to mother’s house. With luck mother would be at work by now.<br />
<br />
You and I would lie on the couch in the living room and thank god that you weren’t where you weren’t. Sun in a living room at 7:20 in the morning is a very wonderful thing. Few people get to see it (except babies etc). Most teenagers never get to see it. I suspect they are the ones that need to see it the most.<br />
<br />
You and I would be in that living room in that sun and we would turn on Turner Classic Movies…<br />
<br />
There were other things that were the same too.<br />
<br />
You and I decided that these mucho meloncholy mornings were no good. And so you and I bid adieu to high school Feb of Junior Year. It is was a mucho ducho great decision."

"It would be easy to say, that no one *needs* a piece of lemon loaf, and you might be correct, but maybe *this* boy *did*. Maybe he had a very real need for a piece of iced lemon loaf. Maybe he needed it for comfort. Maybe he needed it for power. Maybe he needed it for the Indian in his cupboard that would only eat iced lemon loaf and would starve to death if he didn’t get it for him. Maybe he had a whole wealth of emotional difficulties or mental challenges I didn’t know about. Who knows? Do you? I don’t…

…It was a panic that I remember having experienced sometimes. Perhaps you do too. The panic in realizing that you have no power at all. You are a child and you are powerless. There is nothing you can do.

I understand it may be extremely hard for many to have sympathy for a little white western boy deprived of a sweet as this is precisely what I would say if I had not observed the child in person, but the look  on his face is a universal one: “Life is not fair”."

"…As extremely white and male as The Tree of Life is, it is also very much a slap in the face of White American Masculinity.<br />
<br />
And since White Maledom is what we measure the worth of everything against, since it is our deeply ingrained default point of view, it is easy to dismiss that which strays as being pretentious…<br />
<br />
But like all his characters, Malick is a white man trying to escape the confines of white maledom because for all the earth-controlling privileges it awards, to be white and male is not only to be in a prison, but to be the prison itself. This could be eye-rolling inducing; the last person we need to have sympathy for is a White American Man, but through his films, particularly through The Tree of Life’s form, Malick encourages us to rebel against the confines of this deadly default. He knows what many have yet to realize: whiteness and maleness destroy us all."<br />
<br />
[Read all of it.]

"Young people should have the right to control and direct their own learning, that is, to decide what they want to learn, and when, where, how, how much, how fast, and with what help they want to learn it. To be still more specific, I want them to have the right to decide if, when, how much, and by whom they want to be taught and the right to decide whether they want to learn in a school and if so which one and for how much of the time.<br />
 <br />
No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than this…<br />
 <br />
We might call this the right of curiosity, the right to ask whatever questions are most important to us. As adults, we assume that we have the right to decide what does or does not interest us, what we will look into and what we will leave alone. We take this right largely for granted…"

"Every kid thinks he or she is different at some point. Every kid wishes he could have power -- the power to move objects with your mind, or travel through time, or whatever. Because when you're a kid, you have no power. You're physically small and weak, and adults are constantly telling you what to do. So it's incredibly compelling to imagine yourself not only as someone to whom exciting things happen but as someone who is more than those around you.<br />
<br />
The problem is that then you begin to grow up and realize you're just a lowly muggle."

"Konner…draws attention to fact that upright bipedal locomotion offered many advantages to our socially living, hunting-&-gathering ancestors, but notes these advantages came w/ price…narrowed pelvis that made it necessary for parturition to occur when offspring were still extremely immature…meant that “4th trimester” of fetal development took place outside womb, & increased child-care demands increased women’s needs for social protection & support, thereby promoting sociality, pair-bonding & nascent family…made even longer periods of dependent & protected development possible, perhaps explaining why species is characterized by extended period of brain growth & development…much greater proportion of life span in humans than in any other primates. Long, protected childhoods, group living, enduring social bonds, & big brains not only made extensive play possible but also ensured it paid benefits…intellectual sophistication & cognitive mastery…"

"There was at least one place, I would discover, where that “instant” of Borges persisted, a land where Borges lived on as both Borges and “I,” legend and life. That place is Texas. Starting in 1961, Borges made five visits to the state—first, to teach for a semester in Austin as a visiting professor; then to lecture on Cervantes and Whitman as a literary celebrity. When Borges died on June 14, 1986, the University of Texas’s main campus lowered its flags to half-mast, a rare tribute for a writer and a perplexing honor for one without deep Texas roots. Why had Texas so embraced Borges? And why had Borges continued to return there throughout the final twenty-five years of his life?<br />
<br />
In early January, I began to investigate what seemed a long-forgotten romance."

"In an explanation of Hobbes’s dual reality (a living, breathing, wiseass wild tiger to Calvin, and a stuffed animal to everyone else), Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson explains “I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.” We see the world through Calvin’s eyes. This perspective distinguishes the strip from Peanuts, in which kids talk like adults, or Cathy or Doonesbury, in which adults talk like adults. Watterson constantly fought with Universal Press Syndicate and newspapers to get more space, and to break the rigid rules of comic strip formats in order to formally explore Calvin’s imagination. As a result, no daily comic in wide circulation during the Nineties provided such regular and creative insights into a child’s interior life. In Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson takes us inside Calvin’s dreams, his fears, and the stories that he makes up for himself."

"Spitzer grew up to be a psychiatrist…his dislike of psychoanalysis remaining undimmed…then, in 1973, an opportunity to change everything presented itself. There was a job going editing the next edition of a little-known spiral-bound booklet called DSM - the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.<br />
<br />
DSM is simply a list of all the officially recognised mental illnesses & their symptoms. Back then it was a tiny book that reflected the Freudian thinking predominant in the 1960s. It had very few pages, & very few readers.<br />
<br />
What nobody knew when they offered Spitzer the job was that he had a plan: to try to remove human judgement from psychiatry. He would create a whole new DSM that would eradicate all that crass sleuthing around the unconscious; it hadn't helped his mother. Instead it would be all about checklists. Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual, & if the patient's symptoms tallied with the checklist for a particular disorder, that would be the diagnosis."

"He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, he had trouble with geometry, being unable to understand the abstraction necessary to imagine that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented a mathematical point, or that an imperfectly drawn line with an arrow on the end was meant to stretch off to infinity. He often made items from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats.<br />
<br />
Years later, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but also a habit of being familiar with and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade."

"My reading was my mirror, & my material; I saw no other part of myself…<br />
<br />
For though they had created me, & reared me, & lived w/ me day after day, I knew that I was a stranger to them, an American child…<br />
Even after I received the Pulitzer, my father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on…I listen to him, & at the same time I have learned not to listen, to wander to the edge of the precipice & to leap. & so, though a writer’s job is to look and listen, in order to become a writer I had to be deaf & blind.<br />
<br />
I see now that my father, for all his practicality, gravitated toward a precipice of his own, leaving his country and his family, stripping himself of the reassurance of belonging. In reaction, for much of my life, I wanted to belong to a place, either the one my parents came from or to America, spread out before us. When I became a writer my desk became home; there was no need for another…Born of my inability to belong, it is my refusal to let go."

"This little correspondence cracked like lightning in my head. I mean, it’s no big deal; it’s a small thing, it’s a letter, they were both in Michigan, it makes perfect sense. And yet, and yet: Clifton Wharton, president of Michigan State University, and Marguerite Hart, librarian of Troy—a tangible thread connected them. And as soon as you realize that, you can’t help but imagine the other threads, the other connections, that all together make a net, woven before you were born, before you were even dreamed of—a net to catch you, support you, lift you up. Libraries and universities, books and free spaces—all for us, all of us, the children of Troy everywhere.<br />
<br />
What fortune. Born at the right time."<br />
<br />
[…]<br />
<br />
"And it’s not the librarian laughing and crying at the same time here; it’s me. Every time I’ve read these letters, it’s me."

"Two new children's books explore the life of Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert and prominent conservationist. The Times spoke with Dr. Goodall about living out her childhood dream"

“By our use of words like ‘teaching’ & ‘schooling,’ we seem to accept idea that some people at top are doing things to other people farther down totem pole. Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in same way it takes earth’s resources for granted. That is no way to help children grow up into compassionate citizens who think independently & participate in life of their communities & countries.”<br />
<br />
Arguing against adultism is difficult. Giving up power can make people fearful and leave them feeling threatened. They think “unschooling” means unparenting, & life learning means uneducated. But life learners are at the leading edge of an important attempt to broaden the definition of childhood, to respect children as whole people who are functioning members of society…& to improve our education system along the way. So we must defeat adultism by leading with how we speak to (& about) children, & how we treat them."

1. Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten; 2. Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re smart; 3. Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting; 4. Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have some say; 5. Just because doing x raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean x should be done; 6. Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about; 7. We want children to develop in many ways, not just academically; 8. Just because a lesson (or book, or class, or test) is harder doesn't mean it's better; 9. Kids aren’t just short adults; 10. Substance matters more than labels"

"Above all 'what do people do all day?' strikes me as such an excellent & important question. If you’ve ever had to explain to a child what it is that you do, you’ll know it can be a rather sobering exercise… How do we occupy our time, & how valuable or fun or enriching is it? To attempt a proper answer that goes back to the first principles means having to reflect on what we mean when we use words like economy & ecology, & to frame these reflections imaginatively, as children’s literature requires, adds further value to that. Simplified, purified, prettified, the economy as depicted by Scarry seems so much more humane, so much less monstruous, yet also perplexing & strange, in that everything is de-naturalised & has to be re-learned, which is to say reimagined.

It would be far too grandiose to call it the beginning of an education in utopian thinking, wouldn’t it?"

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn."

"When asked in 1991 to describe an obstacle he had faced during his lifetime and the subsequent effect of his overcoming it, author Ray Bradbury replied to schoolteacher William Stanhope with the following letter. His inspiring response, along with those of a slew of other high-profile personalities, was then used to teach a class of Stanhope's.<br />
Transcript follows."<br />
"most important decision i ever made came at age 9...i was collecting BUCK ROGERS comic strips, 1929, when my 5th grade classmates made fun of me. I tore up the strips. A week later, broke into tears. Why was I crying? I wondered. Who die? Me, was the answer. I have torn up the future. What to do about it? Start collecting BUCK ROGERS again. Fall in love with the Future! I did just that. And after that never listened to one damnfool idiot classmate who doubted me! What did I learn? To be myself and never let others, prejudiced, interfer with my life. Kids, do the same. Be your own self. Love what YOU love."

Too much to choose, but here's one interesting bit: "Now as for the color yellow, there is a physical explanation of that. When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That's why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends . . . well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring."

"Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, “why is there good and evil?”, “how does nature work?”, “why am I me?” If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century plate. We start to care about a foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years’ War." — Alain de Botton “The art of travel”, 2002

"(365) days of childhood.  Do something childish everyday.  Do something bold.  Do something wonderful.  Do something that evokes emotion and color back into your life.  Children have this brilliant ability to perceive luminance amid noise and darkness.  There’s something healthy about that mindset—I am going to live life as a story to be written, something unbridled and free.<br />
<br />
There are good things about adulthood.  But oftentimes “adulthood” can blind us from the beauty in life.  This project is to help people remember what it is like to be a child.  What it is like to be human.  What it is like to experience life.<br />
<br />
I’m going to post a challenge daily for one whole year and blog about my experiences here.  It’s not going to be something challenging or expensive.  It’s going to be simple, bold moves—things we’ve forgotten and need to be reminded of. Like, “make up your own recipe with what you have in your fridge. “ Or “fingerpaint.” Or “play dress-up.” Fun and beautiful things."

"Such wistful desire to evade responsibility exposes childishness of adults now preaching the good news of emerging adulthood. They have decided that taking responsibility for other people — spouses, children, employees & subordinates, neighbors, friends, eventually even parents — & relying on them in turn is the heaviest burden that can befall a person. But what if this is instead the means to happiness? Advocates of emerging adulthood share in common with children a proclivity to see the future as nearly infinite & themselves as, for all practical purposes, immortal. In their view of themselves & their world, it is never too late & there is never any rush. But a few-year increase in the average life expectancy has bought us much less time than they think & has done nothing to mitigate our potential to make irreversible errors & experience gnawing regret. The indefinite extension of childhood doesn’t even approximate the immortality required to free us from these miseries…"

"I remember my first library card…excitement of the trips to the library, of choosing the four books I’d take back home. The habit of exploration has stayed with me. It was founded on the confidence that all those books on all those shelves belonged to me, were mine for the taking. If I was interested enough in any object in this large room, the librarian would stamp it and I would carry it out. That sense of entitlement was the foundation of everything I’ve done since in my life. I felt knowledge belonged to me & have carried on exploring libraries ever since…It’s a long time since I’ve borrowed a book from a local library. But I know that a public library is not the same as a book shop. It’s also not the same as the internet. The child choosing a book that, for a short time, will belong to him, is learning that knowledge is his, if he wants it. He’s learning that it’s a right. Libraries set people free. They’re not a luxury. They’re not a relic. We must fight to save them."

"El sitio de los que pasaron su niñez y adolescencia en el Chile de los ochenta."

"I was about 8 years old…drawing crucifixion…my brother [Bob] came home…11 years older than me…smart as anyone I knew, but too cheeky…Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God & my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.<br />
<br />
Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, & she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it & asking more questions, & w/in an hour, I was an atheist.<br />
<br />
…gifts of my new found atheism…truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world…evolution…imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live…<br />
<br />
But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation & dignity."

"mark allen…'machine project'. they work in a kind of nexus, a community that is bound by mutual interests. this could be an interest in cooking, or gardening, mathematics, ad so on. they do workshops on everything, like computational crochet to baking with a light bulb… it's an approach to art & life…<br />
<br />
advice to the young?<br />
…it's very important to not be constrained by categorization…categories that define people in a particular way can kill a lot of good, creative<br />
inspiration by trying to fit into a specific group…can be very limiting for people. I would always encourage everyone to be critical of categorical thinking…another thing that's going on is people are starting to disassociate their hands from their brain…there is no sense of meaning, materiality, or gravity in what they make…it's always important to balance those things out - but not entirely.<br />
you should be able to dream as well."

"Mark Twain:<br />
<br />
"As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling book has been a doubtful benevolence to us."<br />
<br />
He leads up to this conclusion with a curious theory of orthographico-genetic determinism, illustrated from personal experience:<br />
<br />
"The ability to spell is a natural gift. The person not born with it can never become perfect in it. I was always able to spell correctly. My wife, and her sister, Mrs. Crane, were always bad spellers. Once when Clara was a little chap, her mother was away from home for a few days, and Clara wrote her a small letter every day. When her mother returned, she praised Clara's letters. Then she said, "But in one of them, Clara, you spelled a word wrong.""

"Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games."

"The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation. In Hyrule, you may or may not get past the Deku Babas, and you can slay them with your own particular panache.

The French intellectual Roger Caillois, in a 1958 response to Huizinga entitled “Man, Play and Games,” called play “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money.” Therein lies its utility, as a simulation that exists outside regular life. Caillois divides play into four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). Super Mario has all four. You are competing against the game, trying to predict the seemingly random flurry of impediments it sets in your way, and pretending to be a bouncy Italian plumber in a realm of mushrooms and bricks. As for vertigo, what Caillois has in mind is the surrender of stability and the embrace of panic, such as you might experience while skiing. Mario’s dizzying rate of passage through whatever world he’s in—the onslaught of enemies and options—confers a kind of vertigo on the gaming experience. Like skiing, it requires a certain degree of mastery, a countervailing ability to contend with the panic and reassert a measure of stability. In short, the game requires participation, and so you can call it play.

Caillois also introduces the idea that games range along a continuum between two modes: ludus, “the taste for gratuitous difficulty,” and paidia, “the power of improvisation and joy.” A crossword puzzle is ludus. Kill the Carrier is paidia (unless you’re the carrier). Super Mario and Zelda seem to be perched right between the two."

"Parents need to know that being the smartest or most accomplished kid in class has never had any bearing on being the happiest. We are so caught up in trying to give our children “advantages” that we’re giving them lives as multi-tasked and stressful as ours. One of the biggest advantages we can give our children is a simple, carefree childhood." [via: http://kottke.org/10/12/childhood-isnt-a-race]

"Professor David Friedman talks about being raised by Milton Friedman, and how he unschooled his own children."

"Raised by independent-thinking bohemian parents, Taylor was unschooled until age 13. Join the filmmaker as she shares her personal experiences of growing up home-schooled without a curriculum or schedule, and how it has shaped her educational philosophy and development as an artist."

[Book list mentioned in the intro is here: http://blogs.walkerart.org/ecp/2009/10/14/astra-taylor-on-the-unschooled-life/ ] [Similar interview here: http://citizenshift.org/node/21634&term_tid=100004 ]

[Blogged here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/1567646430/make-some-time-to-watch-astra-taylor-on-the ]

"One day in 1988 while I was using MacPaint, the wonderful paint program that came with the Macintosh, my 3-year-old son Ben asked to try using the program. I was surprised at how quickly he got the knack of using the mouse and how easily he was able to select tools. The problem was that he didn't have total control of the mouse and would occasionally (like every five minutes or so) pull down a menu and bring up a dialog box that he couldn't dismiss without being able to read. Everything was fine as long as I was in the room, but if I stepped out for a few minutes I would come back and find Ben kicking on the floor in frustration. This was not what I had in mind for his introduction to the computer."

"Einstein could not make change…bus drivers of Princeton had to pick out his nickels & quarters for him. We dimmer bulbs love to seize on tales like this…comforted by the notion of the educated fool. It seems only right that some leveling principle should deprive the geniuses among us of common sense, street smarts, mother wit…<br />
<br />
Having myself grown up in Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen, I certainly know the syndrome: mismatched socks, spectacles repaired with duct tape, forgotten anniversaries & missed appointments, valise left absentmindedly on park bench. Yet hometown experience did not prepare me completely for Dyson. In my interviews…he would sometimes depart the conversation mid-sentence, his face vacant for a minute or two while he followed some intricate thought or polished an equation, & then he would return to complete the sentence as if he had never been away. I have observed similar departures in other deep thinkers, but never for nearly so long."

"Peter del Tredici, a senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, argues the wildlife that surrounds us every day often has an “image problem:” it goes unnoticed, unattended, and unvalued. “There is no denying the fact that many — if not most — of the plants … suffer from image problems associated with the label ‘weeds,’ or, to use a more recent term, ‘invasive species.’ From the plant’s perspective, ‘invasiveness’ is just another word for successful reproduction — the ultimate goal of all organisms, including humans…. The term is a value judgment that humans apply to plants we do not like, not a biological characteristic.”"

"rigid scripting of childhood & adolescence has made young Americans risk- & failure-averse. Shying away from endeavors at which they might not do well, they consider pointless anything w/out clear application or defined goal. Consequently, growing numbers of college students focus on higher ed’s vocational value at expense of meaningful personal, experiential, & intellectual exploration. Too many students arrive at college committed to pre-professional program or major they believe will lead directly to employment after graduation; often they are reluctant to investigate unfamiliar or “impractical”, a pejorative typically used to refer to liberal arts…Ironically, in rush to study fields w/ clear career applications, students may be shortchanging themselves. Change now occurs more rapidly than ever before & boundaries separating professional & academic disciplines constantly shift, making flexibility & creativity of thought that a lib arts education fosters a tremendous asset…"

"Climbing in the apricot tree wearing my pink dress.<br />
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Sitting on the back fence, stealing tangelos.<br />
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Wrapping my hand in tape and saying I broke it to the babysitter.<br />
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Wanting more than anything to break open the snowman pinata in the garage. When we finally did, it was disappointing.<br />
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Hearing soldiers marching down the street, looking for them and never seeing them.<br />
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Playing by myself and mom grabbing my arm, realizing finally that I actually could not hear a word she was saying.<br />
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Playing Mario with the neighbor boy and his aunt saying “you’re hurting mario’s head busting open those blocks.”<br />
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Flying off the top of the house like a Pterodactyl.<br />
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Watching the 1992 Olympics.<br />
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Mom hanging up the phone when dad said he bought a new car."

"smaller cities offer more opportunities for unstructured play…to hone general coordination, power, & athletic skills. These longer hours of play also allow kids to experience successes (& failures) in different settings…likely toughens their attitudes in general…important advantage of small towns…actually less competitive…allowing kids to sample & explore many different sports. (I grew up in big city,…sports career basically ended at 13. I could no longer compete w/ other kids my age.) While conventional wisdom assumes it’s best to focus on single sport ASAP, & compete in most rigorous arena…probably a mistake, both for psychological & physical reasons…While deliberate practice remains absolutely crucial, it’s important to remember that most important skills we develop at early age are not domain specific…real importance of early childhood has to do w/ development of general cognitive & non-cognitive traits, such as self-control, patience, grit, & willingness to practice"

"maybe we should be risky. Many designers waste an opportunity to make new, meaningful things by instead letting someone else pretend for them and making work that is overly referential. Instead of that, designers can use their skills to collaborate with others to create new things. We can pick up that dinosaur toy and play with it a bit instead of the He-Man toy.

Rather than spin our wheels because we’re left without content, we should partner with others who have a message but not the savvy to properly communicate it. It’s combustion through collaboration…

Designers are excellent producers. We do well to steer and hone other people’s creative impulses, we can fine-polish ideas, and craft successful ways to communicate and tell stories. So, I’d say the next time you’ve got the impulse to make something but don’t have a message or story of your own, consider collaboration."

"When I see my grand­mother, I don’t ask her about the names of plants or when the best time is to plant cer­tain flow­ers, even though I know that she (and not I) know this stuff cold. I don’t even (at least always) ask her to sew my split pants seat or loose jacket but­ton, even though she’s the one in the fam­ily who’s got the sewing machine and knows how to use it.

"My democratic leanings from childhood were strengthened as it became more & more obvious that 12+ years of schooling was such a poor preparation for democracy. The strong-willed, skepticism that is essential alongside of the habit of seeing & feeling the world from different perspectives (call it empathy?) is precisely what schooling dulls rather than nurtures, what is stronger at age 5 than 15.

"Playreport is a global research project on children, families and play, initiated by IKEA. We've conducted 11,000 interviews in 25 countries. We spoke to 8,000 parents and 3,000 children aged 7-12. Discover the results, share your thoughts and ideas."

"When I speak to the 20 and 30 some­things who are lead­ing the charge for trans­me­dia sto­ry­telling, many of them have sto­ries of child­hood spent immersed in Dun­geons and Drag­ons or Star Wars, play­ing with action fig­ures or other fran­chise related toys, and my own sus­pi­cion has always been that such expe­ri­ences shaped how they thought about stories.

"Watching the "Elite" episode of "Brits that made the modern world" in rolled-up waterproofs, diesel sweeties socks and a folding bicycle.

“I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old. At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.” [via: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2010/03/connected.html]

"Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools."

"Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, it began to assume the form with which we are familiar. In the twentieth century, childhood began to unravel, and by the twenty-first, may be lost altogether - unless there is some serious interest in retaining it." [see also: http://everything2.com/user/Tato/writeups/the+invention+of+childhood]

'"He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though--and loathed him." ~The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

"Our purpose is to broaden and refocus public conversation about early childhood and its long-term implications for a child’s life and for society; to restore imaginative play and hands-on, experiential learning as central activities in kindergartens and preschools; and to support stable, loving relationships with all adults in children’s lives."

"Where Do the Children Play? is a one-hour documentary for public television that examines how restrictive patterns of sprawl, congestion, and endless suburban development across America are impacting children's mental and physical health and development.

"We started looking at what were the most memorable, meaningful, learning experiences from our childhoods and noticed that kids don’t really get to do these things much any more. In many ways, the book is a deliberate effort to start a national (and global) dialogue about what we are really doing when we overprotect children, which is to keep them from having the kinds of experiences that lay the foundations for creative genius...I am almost completely self-taught, and everything I have learned has been because I tried to make something. Naturally, because my imagination is stirred by building things, that became the basis of Tinkering School, too...you can create a learning experience so compelling it holds the unwavering attention of a child for hours on end, that kids understand that failures are just another form of progress, and that getting someone to amaze themselves is better than amazing someone else"

"A landmark study from the University of British Columbia finds that the neighbourhoods in which children reside at kindergarten predict their reading comprehension skills seven years later.

"Put these two [articles from the NY Times] together, and you get a pic­ture that’s even more hope­ful. Our brains aren’t just plas­tic over the span of human evo­lu­tion or his­tor­i­cal epochs, but over indi­vid­ual lives. It might be eas­ier and feel more nat­ural for chil­dren, whose brains seem to us to be noth­ing but plas­tic­ity. But we don’t just have a long child­hood — to a cer­tain extent, our child­hood never ends.

"I had a number of revelatory experiences as a child. The earliest, and most profound, was at the age of 3. I was standing on the front porch and saw my reflection in the window, and I suddenly realized that I was alive. What happened next was the remarkable part, though–I looked around, and everything around me took on a kind of glow. I knew that the bushes were alive, the birds were alive, the sky was alive. I felt that I was the same as they were, that we were all part of one living thing. I felt a rising in my stomach, almost as if I were floating. I tried for days to speak to my mother about this, but she never understood what I was talking about.

"Helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, races & ethnicities...even...grandparents...Why do grownups have to take over everything?...What boredom does is take away the noise...leave them w/ space to think deeply, invent their own game, create their own distraction...useful trampoline for children to learn how to get by...Other studies reinforce importance of play as essential protein in child's emotional diet...persisted across species & millenniums, perhaps as way to practice for adulthood, build leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience...managers at JPL noticed younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though had top grades & test scores. Realizing older engineers had more play experience as kids...JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants' play backgrounds into interviews. "what produces learning & memory & well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect.''..."hurried lifestyle is source of stress & anxiety...depression.""

"There isn’t one right way, one mass answer. There are a million different ways & a mass of answers...I asked a friend, who teaches four-year-olds, how she defines “progressive” education. Progressive educators, she said, believe schools should be community-based. That means learning happens collaboratively, not competitively. When kids sit in individual desks all facing the teacher, the message is clear: it’s every man for himself. Progressive schools recognize the inherent wisdom of students. Kids have life experiences that have given them ideas & knowledge. That shouldn’t be ignored. Progressive schools use an emergent curriculum. They leave room for things that deviate from the script. To do this, of course, means letting go. It means giving up the command-&-control system we have now. It means trusting kids, which is just not something our society is comfortable doing."

"Reporter: "What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?"

"Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed # Childhood play is crucial for social, emotional and cognitive ­development.

"I bought a pile of the standard bricks and – as an experiment – this Star Wars kit to see how ridiculous the pieces were. On the box, it appears to be made of all-kinds of single-use bits. Building it told a different story. The feet of the walker turn out to be the same part as the bodies of the Droids. Some of the joints are re-purposed guns. There are dozens of little clever things so that as you follow the instructions, there is moment after moment of discovery. “Oh, I can do THAT with that part?”"

"Yeah, I guess I don't buy the Indiana Jones Legos = decline of childhood stuff.

"When I was a kid, we played outside with the other kids in the neighborhood with most of our free time. We also made the most of recess at school. We kept ourselves quite occupied without any of today’s modern technologies. Listed below are some no-tech games that you may have enjoyed as a kid. I sure did. Some can be done indoors. Some can be done by yourself or with just one friend. But most of them are best when done outside with a group of people. Also, most of these games can be changed or improved by making up your own rules. Use your imagination!"

"Childhood is a branch of cartography... Most great stories of adventure ... come furnished with a map... traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city ... is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, ... become as lost as one possibly can. ... our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it. What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? ... Should I send my children out to play? ... Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with? Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?"

"Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists & scholars...polymaths...the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop & pursue his own interests no matter how unusual or bizzare. Because of the strong pressures for social conformity both by the government & by peer groups in US - & even more so in USSR, Japan & China - I think that such countries are producing proportionately fewer polymaths...Particularly today, when so many difficult & complex problems face the human species, the development of broad & powerful thinking is desperately needed. There should be a way...to encourage, in a humane & caring context, the intellectual development of especially promising youngsters. Instead we find, in the instructional & examination systems of most of these countries, an almost reptilian ritualization of the educational process"

"Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane. And children know it, too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this. Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania."

"Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek? ... [long list of examples here] ... Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?"

"Britain has the unhappiest kids in the western world, and 80% of children spend their free time in doors.This film will spend time with the parents too scared to give their children a childhood."

"I’m a designer that mainly works with digital materials, and while the pleasure of tinkering with a machine is something that I get quite a lot in software, to tinker in hardware and software (especially Meccano) is a rarer thing. It seems to activate a way of thinking with the eye, the mind and the hand that is entirely natural, and the playful problem-solving instincts of childhood come rushing back. Kevin Kelly writes in an essay about Artificial Intelligence that problem-solving is not just an abstract process of the mind, but something that happens in the world, and brands those who don’t believe this as indulging in ‘thinkism’. The intelligence of the hand, and the eye, and the body, working with material things in the world, instead of abstract symbols in a computer you might call ‘Do-ism’."

"No Fear joins the increasingly vigorous debate about the role and nature of childhood in the UK. Over the past 30 years activities that previous generations of children enjoyed without a second thought have been relabelled as troubling or dangerous, and the adults who permit them branded as irresponsible. No Fear argues that childhood is being undermined by the growth of risk aversion and its intrusion into every aspect of children’s lives. This restricts children’s play, limits their freedom of movement, corrodes their relationships with adults and constrains their exploration of physical, social and virtual worlds."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7861762.stm : "aggressive pursuit of personal success by adults is now the greatest threat to British children, a major independent report on childhood says. ... "more young people are anxious & troubled" ... The inquiry has a long list of recommendations including: • abolishing SATs tests & league tables in English schools • a ban on all advertising aimed at the under 12s & no TV commercials for alcohol or unhealthy food before the 9pm watershed • stopping building on any open space where children play • a high-quality youth centre for every 5,000 young people. "Individual freedom & self-determination bring many blessings," writes the report's principal author, Labour peer Lord Richard Layard. "But in Britain... the balance has tilted too far" ... Rowan Williams suggests society has become "tone-deaf to the real requirements of children… in a climate where the mixture of sentimentalism & panic makes discussion of children's issues so difficult""

"We parent on the theory of lowered expectations: if they don't know what they're missing, they won't get upset about it until they're already old enough to resent us for a whole host of other reasons. Disneyworld is, I'm sure, a totally magical pain in the ass. But when your kid has never seen a Disney movie and doesn't know Florida even exists, places like Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati will do in a pinch."

"travelling from Vancouver to Victoria...Prevented from sprinting on deck (because the ferry is not a fun ride), I was obliged to entertain myself another way...see if I could calculate how much water was under the ferry. I didn't have any device for measuring, and because I was 7, I didn't have a metric. No, I just decided to see if I could "think about" all the water that was under the ferry. That would be my first "measure." Having done that, I then decided to "think about" all the water that was around the ferry. My second measure. I then began casting the net of calculation across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. My conclusion: there was a lot, really a lot, of water here...I miss the sublime, the old fashioned kind. I loved having my "power of judgement" outstripped, my imagination outraged. It was exciting. This is anthropologist's idea of a "fun ride." Almost as much fun as running on a ferry and probably much less dangerous."

"And I wanted to howl like a wolf and grow and smash everything up, and I wanted not to be there, stuck in this Now, and what I did was curl up and lie on the sofa and not speak and not cry until mother said "Are you alright?"