Patricia Jennings, Guest Waking Times The national debate on how to improve our education system is very vibrant and visible these days. It focuses on salient issues like testing, teacher pay and job security in a difficult economy, and other mounting stresses on teachers and students. Half of new teachers to leave the profession in …
Julian Rose, Contributor Waking Times When you take a closer look at it, you see that the choices we make each day of our lives add up to the grand price that nature must pay in her role as the sustainer of life on this planet. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s simple …
Ida Lawrence, Contributor Waking Times Now, more than ever, it’s wise to encourage our children’s faculties of perception, some of which are called extra-sensory. They’re not really extra, as we know… they’re natural. Just in the course of accomplishing daily activities, we can create situations and games that affirm and strengthen a child’s natural abilities of …
Anna Hunt, Staff Writer Waking Times Image if your child came home from school excited as could be because they had been learning how to plant trees. Or what if your kindergartner started asking you to buy more organic tomatoes and kale at the store, instead of Goldfish, because that’s what her science class harvested from …
Marco Torres, Prevent Disease Waking Times The general definitions and terminology for illiteracy vary depending on their orientation to specific subject areas. Most people assume illiteracy pertains solely to those with the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language. However, those suffering from learning, cultural and scientific illiteracy are a different group …
Be aware of the insidious and unspoken lessons you learned as a child. To thrive in the world outside the classroom, you’re going to have to unlearn them.
If reading, writing and maths are not enough for young minds, some Wellington 6-year-olds are also tackling life’s great existential questions.
That’s if they are not busy meditating, of course.
With the foundational goals of happiness, confidence, safety, and encouraging children to seek out their own passion, I think it is time that we look at what we should remove from public school philosophy, so that we prepare our children better for the real world that awaits beyond the orchestrated schoolyard experience.
Very little about being confined in school resembles the “real world”. Why not get children out in it as soon as possible? Mechanics, plumbers, electricians, contractors, computer programmers, and even artists are all people that have a wealth of knowledge to offer, yet it seems as though what they do or what they have to offer counts for very little.
Myths about vaccines and infectious disease persist, despite voluminous information refuting them, probably because fear is more powerful than reason. As the above reveals, this is true even within the world of vaccine mainstream beliefs. One of the more common mistakes comes from trying to apply concepts to individuals that really only apply to groups—that is the flawed basis for discriminating against exempt children and their parents.
